Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

You can run Gnome Web for free. It's the open source version of WebKit so you won't be able to see all the tweaks Apple adds to their proprietary build, but it's close enough that obvious differences are visible, at least on desktop.

Safari on iOS cannot be tested without paying Apple so I generally don't for my personal stuff either.

All of that said, American developers often can't even be bothered to support characters like ñ or é, so I think it's quite reasonable to expect an EU browser to be a second class citizen for American developers. We can work around that pretty easily by simply not buying products and services that don't work well in the EU.

View on HN

Right, but approximately zero people have ever said "this website doesn't work on Firefox, so I won't use this website". They say "this website doesn't work on Firefox, so I won't use Firefox".

Zero percent maybe. I personally changed banks when they broke Firefox support and said to use chrome.

I welcome the Safari walled garden because if Apple have to allow chrome on ios, that's the end of any cross browser testing (and the end of Firefox)

I think that is true when you initially switch and are still comparing browsers, but I certainly no longer check if something broken happens to work in Chrome. Stuff may equally be broken by my adblocker. Too lazy to debug someone else's work.

Too often the only sites I find are broken in Firefox are "necessary" things like financial and medical things. I rarely see any issue with hobby and nonsense sites where "laziness" might be excusable.

It's the perverse incentives where companies with a captive audience that can't easily churn will be the ones that ship broken half-arsed sites and not care.

One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...

> One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox

This is driven by enhanced tracking prevention. If you turn that off for the respective site, then it goes away.

Good to know.

Pretty sure I try disabling protections in such situations but maybe not. I returned to the last site that did it to me to try this out (on a different machine) and it didn't captcha me at all with protections on! Ugh.

That's so weird. I've ended up just disabling ATP whenever I get a captcha. Super annoying but less annoying than the captchas.

> One phenomena I am seeing more that makes me boil with fury is infinite captchas in Firefox. If Firefox increasingly gets excluded "for security" then...

I can't figure out if this is true. I certainly get constant captchas, but everybody else I know who uses firefox is also ad-blocking, dropping cookies, resisting fingerprinting, forging referers, downloading embedded videos, etc. etc... A lot of us look like anonymous bot traffic because we are trying to look like anonymous bot traffic. I don't know what the solution would be.

I can't remember the last time I encountered a site that didn't work in Firefox. Very rarely I need to disable uBlock for a site, but not for anything mainstream such as my bank, utilities, online shopping.

I did exactly that with Mailgun and Ramp.com

It's almost every day I encounter a website that I choose not to use or choose to use in a degraded form because the intended experience would require me to install or configure my user agent in a way I do not desire.

That’s very different from the website not working on the default settings of Firefox, which is what most users are expected to be running.

Is it? 42% of internet users used ad blockers last year. That's an upwards trend and is surely going to be much higher on a niche browser compared to browsers that are installed by default. Firefox does not come with an ad blocker by default.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com