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It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.
99% of sites only need to know your screen aspect ratio and maybe available input devices, can’t think of a good reason to share anything else
Knowing OS is useful for download links.
I’d be down for an ask to allow that info. Sort of like how sites request access to cam and mic.
Before Windows 10, NVidia and others had this button Detect what thing suits me best on their websites. Now many of them just look it up in one’s fingerprint without asking.
Oh no, they’d have to list more than one link,the horror!
The vast majority of people would have no clue what to download.
Let them be confused. They’ll learn eventually. Or they won’t. Computers are too user friendly today anyway.
Fuckin oath. If we cater to the stupid too much the folks who are middling just get lazy. Make people think. It’s important that we know how to use our brains.
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It’s like undefined behavior - most people usually do one thing, but it’s perfectly acceptable for me to make my website as hard-to-use as I want. Ctrl-click the website logo to submit the form.
Microsoft hides their links if they see you run linux. So you need to manually set your OS in the browser settings to see the download link. Very convenient.
having 3 different ones solves that issue though? the user can figure out whic OS they’re running pretty well imo.
I can tell you’ve never had to do T1 tech support before.
It’s kind of staggering just how illiterate users can be.
I doubt the fix is to make them need less literacy
When you are competing for customers not providing the illiterate morons of the world a simple UI leads to them going to your competitor which does.
And unfortunately those illiterate morons outnumber every one else by a significant chunk.
That’s a fair perspective, but most people strive for as few clicks between users and their targets as possible. Forcing a user to become semi-tech-competent by sending them on a fetch quest to figure out their os, while not an inherently bad thing, does work against this overall goal…
Idk, it’s like education vs service industry goal setting, that’s all I’m trying to get at here lol
Edit: plus, there’s no guarantee that it will remain just the big 3 for forever. There was a time before Linux, maybe we’ll see a time after windows… Unlikely, but one can dream lol
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Since we have CSS what would be the purpose of the server knowing the aspect ratio?
Ideally, to save bandwidth on both sides, the server would only want to serve you the JS and CSS you need. I’m not sure how frequently that optimization is made, however.
I’m a bit rusty on this, but I think you’d need to split your Sass/SCSS/etc before Webpack will perform tree-shaking or allow lazy-loading. I don’t think many devs wrote it that way: personally, I like my mobile rules beside my desktop ones, since my styling is component-wise.
I haven’t done UI work in years so I’m not sure how they do it these days.
Fair point, there could be reasons, and I’d say there’s no privacy concerns if that’s all they get, but I know it’s part of fingerprinting. I said 99% so they don’t even need to know that
that’s how css gets its media queries, user agents
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as a front end web developer, I’ve found it useful to know what user agent is requesting a page in order to load conditional styling. For example, to compensate for Safari’s god-awful outlines support (pre-version 16).
If I was a Firefox dev I’d start looking into building in user agent spoofing right into the browser.
It already opens Facebook pages in a special isolated tab. They could have apple.com open in it’s own special “safari” tab. I wonder if there’s anything preventing them from doing that. I guess it could be bad because it would make their market share appear even smaller.
The irony of Firerfox officially agent spoofing while everyone else uses some variant of “Mozilla” as their UAS is too much.
I think user agent scrambling is part of privacy.resistFingerprinting, but it’s a controversial feature and breaks a lot of webpages
Broken webpages might be a good thing. There are too many browsers that aren’t adhering to standards. Stop coding around it and start publicly shaming these megacorps.
That article is great! I have it linked on my website next to the text that displays the user agent of the user.
That’s was interesting to read.
The biggest offender is, surprisingly, cloudflare. They will straight up refuse to serve you any site if your user agent is not one of the mainstream ones. It’s not even “find the traffic light to prove you’re human”, but a page basically saying “fuck you, go away”.
Well their job is to block weird bot-looking traffic…
what is more likely to be a bot? a unique and trackable useragent for a semi-niche browser engine, or a vanilla Chromium+Windows which half of everyone uses ?
Most semi and fully legitimate bots use a custom user agent.
what about malicious/unwanted bots? if cloudflare is trying to block bots, the bots will want to not look like bots. the easiest way to do that is to use a common user agent.
User agent identifier is not useful to block bots. You can literally set it to whatever you like.
User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.
JavaScript as it is today also need to be thrown in a trash of history. Website should not contain additional code. If someone wants to send me an app hacked on top of website rendering, it should be a popup asking me first if I want to run this.
No, dynamic content should absolutely be able to be delivered through the open Web, not just through walled gardens. Apps are almost universally shit.
No problem with sending some JavaScript module extending browser’s capability. But the problem I see is sending whole sites this way, sometimes even rendering HTML on the visitor’s browser, yack…
That’s a terrible idea. Every single thing other than a block of text requires js.
This is absolutely not true and just a myth. Images, video playback, “show more”, forms, tabbing, animations, custom icons, hover effects, popups, background images and videos, light/dark mode, hamburger menus…
It’s hard to count things you can do with advanced format that is HTML+CSS. Saying JavaScript is nessesary for anything other than block of text is like saying that in Minecraft command blocks are nessesary for anything other than making voxel art.
For basic things like interacting with your bank or goverment, running any additional code should be unnessesary. And I believe this needs to be a law targeting accessibility and compatibility.
For maps, dynamic updating, OK. But look at the web now, most sites are apps requiring 99% of web standards implemented to work. No wonder it’s now impossible to actually make a new browser.
HTML was made to last. If browser do not support some tag it would try and render it anyway. Meanwhile with today’s webapps browsers in 2033 will be required to have so much technical debt that for now was exclusive to operating systems.
i don’t want them knowing desktop or mobile either. we all have good enough phones now to handle a proper website on mobile – mobile sites are fucking garbage.
steve jobs during the original iphone keynote did a whole segment on how you could load the full rich widescreen NYT website and zoom in and out and look at that rich text rendering. apps are ass, mobile sites are ass.
especially when they don’t even have all of the features of the desktop site
The number of sites that aggressively disable the force pinch to zoom accessibility feature is too damn high
Actually, the top one is the logo of the chromium browser engine, but the bottom one is not the logo of the Gecko browser engine. That’s the logo of SpiderMonkey, Firefox’s Javascript engine (Chromium uses V8).
This is the logo for Gecko:
Firefox doesn’t even use Gecko anymore, it uses Quantum. I think it still uses spidermonkey though.
This is not correct.
Firefox still uses Gecko for its HTML engine. Quantum was a project to incorporate some learnings from Servo, and other larger performance projects, into Firefox components, including Gecko.
Just an aside, but Servo was never intended to replace Gecko, and was only intended to be a R&D project for improving some Firefox components. This was due to the long-tail of web compatibility that would be required to make Servo a suitable replacement for Gecko.
It’s especially moronic that Cloudflare thinks everyone using Tor is trying to DDOS every site.
Do you know how fucking slow Tor is? You couldn’t DDOS an Arduino with it.
Probably because there are A LOT of people using that tor exit node that have visited that site recently. So, cloudflare sees it as a potential DDOS
Onion sites get DDOS attacks constantly. That’s why Dread has so many backup links.
afaik, cloudflare has an option to disallow tor traffic. so the website owner decided they don’t want tor
Not only tor. Any user agent string that has no valid info is marked as not trusted/bot/gtfo
Do we, as an industry, have such short attention span, that we forgot how Microsoft abused their monopoly in the 1990s to force everyone to use Internet Explorer? Now that Google is doing the exact same thing, nobody seems to mind.
Because the tech gigacorporations have literally spent the last three decades brainwashing us into accepting shit like that and even convincing us that it’s better this way.
Not better. No one thinks anything is better, just that we don’t have a choice but to take what they serve.
I remember using Netscape (my Google keyboard didn’t know that word) before Firefox and SeaMonkey. I mostly used SeaMonkey to edit HTML and Firefox for my casual browsing.
Those of us who had to develop websites and make them even vaguely functional in IE6 haven’t forgotten.
Dark times, those were.
I get the joke but I don’t have any problems visiting websites. Neither with firefox nor with mull
Go to https://business.apple.com/#/main/users
Reset your user agent string. It will tell you that your browser is unsupported. Switch your user string to chrome and everything will function as expected.
IT people probably run into more problems with non-chromium browsers.
Edit: it has to be visited on a desktop regardless. ABM does not like mobile browsers.
IT person here, Firefox works fine for everything that matters.
That’s highly subjective. At our org there’s a reason our baseline deployment for workstation images comes with both Chrome and Firefox. We have thousands of users across dozens of specialties (HR, logistics, scientists, engineers, etc) and they all have a multitude of web apps they use day to day. Some of those don’t like Chrome or Firefox. Hell, we even had to support god damn IE11 for way too long before Microsoft thankfully forced its death by discontinuing security support (our cybersecurity people ban anything that doesn’t have active vendor support with very few exceptions).
Unfortunately, I have to manage Apple devices. Also unfortunately, Verizon has yet to answer my automated enrollment requests.
Well you should have easy access to Safari at least. But that’s stupid for them to exclude Firefox on that Apple Business site that I’ve never looked at before today.
I’m on a windows machine. I have to use this for iPhones until Verizon approves my requests. But yeah that one in particular doesn’t make sense to me. Its not even a product its a management tool for schools and businesses.
What the hell is wrong with apple?
That’s not firefox’ fault
Btw: what’s abm?
Apple business management? Just guessing from context.
You have approximate knowledge of many things.
Here is the problem with changing the user agent (IMO). It just re-enforces the idea that Chrome/Chromium browsers are the only browsers and therefore sites should just be coded for them. Which they are currently the most common for people to be using since even Microsoft gave up on IE and the original Edge. But the fact that Microsoft and Google are still the most dominate OS’es means that we are just seeing IE all over again. With sites being coded to only expect Chromium, then they are just set to not even allow them to be loaded by anything else.
The fact that so many of the sites do in fact work with Firefox/Safari when the user agent is set to falsely report that it is Chrome/Chromium should be kind of concerning. Just leads to false narratives that other options are not worth using due to being bad products. Kind of like how in the US we are conditioned to believe that there are only two parties to choose from and all other options shouldn’t be allowed or are never okay to support.
It is concerning. I make sure to reset my string when I’m done so that my computer reports it is using firefox. Something should be done. But I am so exhausted and overworked that I don’t have time for much else.
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My wife was recently in school. Almost all the services she used decline to render unless you’re using Chrome.
I 100% expect websites to soon start breaking their interface on Firefox. With Chromium blocking the best adblockers, they will be incentivized to nudge people to Chromium browsers.
Didn’t we already see Youtube sneaking in a 5 second delay for Firefox users?
Come on, don’t you people read what other people write?
There was a reddit post that claimed that, and it was debunked in that same reddit post. Some website made a “news” article about it, citing said reddit post. Bigger news orgs made articles about it citing that website.
There are so many “news” websites that basically don’t do any fact checking and use social media as their sources.
My other pet peeve around social media “journalism” is when someone writes an article about a hot take on a political topic and their source is some tweet with like 2 likes and retweet. Like, that’s not a radical opinion many people share, stop making it seem like this is a common sentiment amongst the left/right.
But I did have issues with some Web SDRs on http://www.websdr.org/ when using Chromium-based browsers
And I wasn’t the only one, looking at F.A.Q.:
Q: I’m using Chrome and don’t hear audio (on some sites)!
A: Since version 71, Chrome does not allow every website to start playing audio, in order to stop annoying advertisements. Chrome tries to guess whether you want audio or not, but doesn’t always get it right. On some WebSDR sites, you’ll get an “audio start” button, on some you don’t.
If you don’t get audio, try the following:
- At the top right, click the 4 vertical dots, and then Settings.
- At the bottom, click Advanced.
- Under “Privacy and security,” click Site settings.
- Select “Sound”
- Select “Add” and enter “http://*”
(thanks to K9GL for these instructions)
Note that the above effectively disables Chrome’s “autoplay” policy for all http sites.
Although stopping automatic sound from advertisements is a noble idea, I think Chrome’s autoplay policy is fundamentally wrong. Instead of trying to guess what the user wants, the browser should simply ask the user whether he/she wants to allow the page to play sound (and remember that for later visits, of course).
😅😂
The only think I can’t do in FF is flash an esp32. It’s the only reason I have chrome installed.
There are multiple dedicated ESP32 flashing programs available for most operating systems, there should be no reason to use any web browser to flash a microcontroller.
The fact this even needs to be said says a lot about modern web browsers, and software development in general.
I believe ESPHome has a web flasher that only works on Chrome or Edge. It’s a simple way to prepare your devices.
WebUSB is handy for things like factory resetting a pixel, where it’s one of many options available… what I don’t like is when manufacturers decide to only allow their device to be configured over webusb (looking at you various mech keyboard companies 🤬)
I never learned how to use that, just used the CLI tools like fastboot and adb for all that
How do you factory reset a Pixel through web?
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Probably so. I’ve been having trouble with getting my boards to work with the esphome site, so I’ve just been using the flashing utility from esp.
redmedical will force me to open the rotting corpse of edge everytime i try to enter a meeting.
Would MSEdgeRedirect help with that?
not really. i can open it in another browser, but anything else is “unsupported”
The site claims it’s unsupported? That usually means nothing. Every site I’ve encountered like that will work fine in Firefox if I switch the user agent header to Edge.
i will try that next time, might just work. do you need an extension, or is that a native feature?
Afaik you need an extension. The best one I’ve found is called User-Agent Switcher.
It even works for me on Android, for the Firefox builds that support sideloading addons.
I use lynx btw.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in ages.
Who’s Jocker Black and why do you recognise him?
Brave isn’t doing much better with captchas lately due to having adblocking built in, google is just on a crusade against anyone blocking stuff.
It’s “how it feels” or “what it feels like”, not “how it feels like”
Thank you! Also “how it looks” and “what it looks like”. I see people messing those up all the time
🥸🥸🥸🥸
my company give choice to use Firefox and Chrome and it is mandatory to install those browsers on those computers. But, 95% use Chrome.
My company has basically forced us to use Chrome. It’s mentioned repeatedly throughout our training period.
I haven’t tried Firefox at work yet though but I’m sure it’ll work just fine.
It’s so absurd. It feels like half of the websites out there actively don’t want me to visit them.
I don’t have any problems using Firefox every day on every website that I need. I use it on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.
The only browser that I actually have problems with websites regularly on is Safari on my Mac.
within the last couple days my Firefox browser has stopped working. It used to be my default, but now whenever I call on Firefox the screen just comes up black. But guess what? Chrome works fine. they’re forcing me to use Chrome now 😡
Is that on Android? It happens every once in a while for me. I just fully close the app and relaunch it and it works fine.
Yes Android, thank you for the tip. I will try that.
What is the second browser from the bottom on the right?
Librewolf
As the other two said, Librewolf. It’s basically a very privacy-focused fork of Firefox, where just about all privacy settings are on by default.
Now that is driving me crazy, it looks so familiar, but I just can’t place it.👿
Found it!
It’s Librewolf, a Firefox fork.
Haha now that you mention it, they do have similar logos.
I don’t know which websites do that browser discrimination.
Youtube
I don’t have any problem with YouTube, and I don’t even see any ad. Can you send links? Because the last rumor was just a 5 timeout delay for ad blockers users, not specially for Firefox users.
Appearantly people only read headlines
Apparently just non-chromium users, not adblock users
I’ve read several comments from chromium browser users that they also experienced this. I’m using Firefox and have not. It’s just A/B testing for all adblock users.
I don’t have any slow-down time, and Chromium users will have bigger issues with ad blockers with ManifestV3.
Pornhub
I suppose you are just trolling. If not, send any links with evidences please.
For science.
Hahaha, I feel stupid taking his response seriously… I should have assumed it was joke.
Sunroom
Duck duck go?
Their browser on Android relies on Chromium, on Windows it uses Edge’s webview thingy and on macOS Safari afaik
I see
What’s the problem with Firefox? Certainly can’t be the speed or ram usage.
YouTube intentionally slows down on non-chrome browsers
The image says “visiting websites”, not “YouTube”. And Google does this for several years already, not just since 2023. The new 5 second delay is also happening in Chromium based browsers if you use an adblocker, it just isn’t immediately rolling out to everyone yet. See A/B testing methodology.
Are they doing this for everyone? I’ve seen all the posts about it but haven’t had any issues myself. I’m using Firefox and uBlock
A/B testing rn
I did some testing last night and again this morning. Still no difference between Chrome and Firefox for me.
There’s no problem with Firefox. The problem is with managers of websites. Because Chromium-based browsers combined account for something like over 90% of global browser market share currently (source: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share), many sites decide to just throw any non-Chromium browser users overboard. The whole thing is quite ridiculous. It makes no sense that Firefox has such a low market share either.
Firefox is better, but it’s no surprise it isn’t mainstream.
1- A lot of businesses default to Chrome or Edge on their machines. Even if individual employees want to change it’s not like they have the ability to do it. Thats a huge amount of locked in Chromium traffic.
2- The vast majority of personal users are not tech conscious. Consider that only about 1/4 of people use ad-blockers. If the majority of people don’t bother installing ad-blockers why would people think they would install a new browser that has fewer immediately obvious benefits?
Online tech discussions have a tendency to vastly over estimate the tech savvy, and the expectations of most users. Just because you or I configure our computer experience, and think it’s a simple exercise doesn’t reflect most people who leave everything on default settings and simply live with whatever is thrown at them. This is just like the discussion on Netflix cracking down on account sharing, techies predicted a massive wave of piracy without understanding that most people don’t know how to, and are unwilling to learn how to pirate.
it’s too privacy focused, independent, and earnest at the moment
I find some sites just don’t work properly with Firefox. Drives me bonkers.
