Ha ha ha Apple still thinks 'the web' is Apple or Microsoft
(https://support.apple.com/en-us/120585) and Firefox is not supported at all.
It's time to shake the last rotten apple from the tree.
What's especially odd is that Apple acknowledges Firefox's existence in their WWDC videos about web features, when they mention browser compatibility or who they're working with.
I’m a disappointed Firefox user but I also know what Beta means.
Same for native application ports, ship them as early as possible. Just mark them beta or alpha. At least you collect bugs. Bonus, you filter which are generic issues and which are platform dependent issues.
If it doesn’t work at all in a web-browser which handles HTML5 and modern CS it is probably not a website - but a proprietary protocol which needs a special client-application.
This is indeed how many bad/junior engineers approach this issue but it's backward - anyone with any experience doing launch QA knows well that browser compat needs to be built in from Day 1 - retrofitting it is disastrously expensive from a launch-delays perspective.
It's extremely hard to retrofit compatibility onto products. Case in point: all the "we only work in Chrome" sites that use Chrome-only APIs.
H.265 is what they don't support. I'm not an avid enough user to know where Apple Maps makes use of media, but the source code contains media player controls, so it must somewhere. Retrofitting compatibility by launch may be as simple as re-encoding the H.265 content. Not at all worth the effort for beta 1, but with an obvious path forward.
Do codecs need to be supported by the browser itself? I thought this was unloaded to some media decoding framework. Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.
Not necessarily. The browser could defer to licensing established by the operating system vendor, but Firefox places the expectation upon itself to have parity across platforms and to not support encumbered technologies.
> Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.
And if you've negotiated the licensing fees you can even use it, but chances are... Microsoft and Apple have dealt with the licensing for you on their platforms, so the ballgame is different there.
> To start, Maps on the web is available only in English. Maps on the web will be available for additional browsers, platforms, and languages soon. Published Date: July 24, 2024
Not all Apple users are clueless.
A user can easily enable the developer tools if needed, same way I'm not a mechanic but can open the hood of my car.
Point is, this is not a binary choice. Between user and developer there are many people with varying skills that will use a user-agent switcher if needed.
Most people could do a bit under the hood of a car, but they simply don’t care.
It’s the same thing with computers. Most users are savvy. They just don’t care.
Its dwilling 3% market share means it no longer makes into project delivery acceptance browser matrices.
It is the good will of some that keeps it around.
It sucks when companies restrict normal access to a website when it's uncalled for. It's not the first time I've gotten "Use Google Chrome" for no reason.
So you cannot view maps from Safari browser on iPhone.
I am curious what they use that Firefox is not supported…
Not surprising it got to this point, Mozilla has been stagnant on features most users care about and catered exclusively to the privacy crowd for years - which isn't a large group and competes with Chromium offshoots (giving it a smaller niche, privacy but demanding an alternative rendering engine).
Not even that. Firefox on iOS doesn’t have an integrated adblocker. It’s been requested for years at this point, and browsers like Brave do have one. Pure unwillingness. It’s why I got all my non-techie family and friends to switch to Brave.
* Epiphany with WebKit2-Renderengine. The literally block their own engine.
* Firefox with Gecko.
No web developer should be allowed to “block” webbrowser. Test for features and say “this thing doesn’t work because of and I don’t care about another solution”. Same shitty experience with Microsoft Teams which blocked - at least some months ago - the call buttons for Firefox, despite everything works fine. And Confluence which claims they don’t block but started, Epipany is now hiding as Safari and…surprise…everything works.
> Support for additional languages, browsers, and platforms will be expanded over time.
This is a beta. You have to start somewhere.
You don’t want broken screenshots shared. Also, people will click through and still open support tickets.