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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977

Firefox only has a marginal market share, so I can understand it's not a high priority target platform.

Everything works if you use User-Agent switcher extension. So they went through the trouble of making an "unsupported" page and redirecting you to that page instead of doing nothing

This is Apple. They don't expect their users to know what a User-Agent is (and even less how to install a User-Agent switcher extension).

Yep, and this philosophy has been a significant factor in Apple's widespread success

To be fair, Safari has a user-agent switcher built-in. Just enable the developer tools.

Not all Apple users are clueless.

It’s called Developer Tools and not User Tools for a reason

What do you think Firefox calls it?

The same, for the same reason

Isn't it just a name?

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.

You can open the hood of your car, but there’s probably not much you can do there.

Of course I can. Add cleaning water, check oil levels, replace a light bulb. No much else I can do, but others may, and other won't even do any of this.

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.

It’s not about capability, it’s about interest.

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.

In my experience (systems engineer/devops for both Windows and Linux for more than 25 years), very few users are actually savvy. Even those working in tech.

Our definition of savvy probably differs.

That is possible. Mine would be more or less "someone who knows what they're doing"

there is a good reason that most of the people prefer apple for its simplicity, its because apple only shows you what is required. i agree with you there.

Extremely frustrating. If a user is smart enough to use Firefox, they're probably also smart enough to open another browser if a site does not happen to work on Firefox. (Which I haven't experienced for a while, except when using ESPHome which requires WebSerial)

“We’re not sure if this will work or not, and we don’t want to deal with you if it doesn’t, so we’re not even going to let you try.”

The point of "standards" is that you don't need to target platforms.

That's still around 200 million people using Firefox.

I guess the interesting metric for Apple is how many of those are current or potential customers.

Google maps works fine.

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