146
Microsoft stole my Chrome tabs, and it wants yours, too
(www.theverge.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
146 points (92.9% liked)
Technology
59467 readers
3679 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Imagine using Chrome in 2024.
I have found a lot of websites over the last few months acting up if I'm using Firefox.
I have chrome for work and if I switch they work flawlessly. It's small things like menus not expanding or elements not loading.
There's a push on unifying browsers.
I've been Firefox and duckduckgo for years and it's getting a bit annoying. Obviously the trade off is worth it I do not want the big tech products but finding good alternatives is getting hard.
DDG has gone downhill in recent years.
Everyone says “problems with websites in Firefox!”
Nobody has examples
I was about to say this. I never find any websites that doesnt work with Firefox so I'm genuinely curious.
I bet it's their ad blocker, or they have set their Firefox settings to the privacy level that says "this will break some web sites".
I use Firefox on Linux and FreeBSD for my daily driver.
I was not able to book flights on Thai airways website 6 months ago until I loaded it in chrome/chromium instead.
It's really really rare imo but that's one example in recent history.
That sounds more like an issue with them using some proprietary browser bullshit than a problem with Firefox.
But what, practically, is the difference? If more and more websites use shit that only works in Chrome or Chromium based browsers, the effect is the same. The web doesn't work as well for Firefox users.
One is a browser following web standards and the other is a shitty company adding non-standards based development features intended to lock users into there browsers.
It was shitty when Microsoft did the non-standard features to lock in with Internet Exporer and it is shitty that Chrome does it now.
100% this. People loose the wood for the trees with these kinds of things. If something doesn't work in one browser but does in another then 99% of people are not technical enough to understand or care why not. They just know it doesn't work. That makes it a problem for Firefox. Whether it's by their own making or not.
Can you prove that right now? I can’t test that without a link
I couldn't submit a support ticket for id.me (the IRS' stupid commercial partner for Identity verification) when using Firefox, the submit button literally did not work. Worked fine when switching to edge (blegh).
It happens rarely to me, and when it does 99/100 its the adblocker blocking something it shouldnt.
I can think of 2 websites that didn't work right over the past 10 Yeats. Both were credit card payment sites and just had weird issues like couldn't hit the submit button. I figured it out and just used edge for them. I never found any site that I use often that has issues yet.
Not a very big website, but the service my therapist uses for teletherapy doesn't support anything outside of chromium.
try switching your user agent. it'll likely work fine.
red medical will act up if you don't use a chromium browser.
MS Teams. Works for chat, but not for receiving audio/video calls/meetings.
Oh, and I can't seem to get tiktok videos to play on Firefox on Android? Not a major issue, but my sister keeps sending them to me in particular for some reason, so...
Wow, that random news article I hit 16 days ago where the page kept flickering and reloading, but didn't do that when I copied the URL into Brave... I really should've recorded that domain so I could defend myself against some stranger online!
Sarcasm aside, I don't think it's generally the major websites that you bump into this with, however, there are many edge cases that occur for plenty of folks, whether they're in college and have to use that "secure browser" extension that only supports Chrome, or the fact that some websites, especially in business, that simply refuse to support browser and will prevent access otherwise.
I'm a Firefox user, so this isn't to say that Chromium is the way by any means, but hopefully to shine a little light on the fact that we're all on different parts of the web with different experiences, questioning their experiences so that you can hopefully find an extension or something to pin the blame them does not absolve them of their experience, just a show of elitism.
Firefox HAS gotten much better, but unfortunately, Capitalism's gonna Capitalism
I just gave you an example of menus not expanding.
I'm not dogging Firefox I'm saying there is a consorted effort made to reduce it's usefulness.
Sometimes those websites lied that they don't support Firefox. For example, google meet didn't support background blur on Firefox? Change the user agent to chrome and it suddenly worked!
As for simple stuff such as menu or elements not loading, it's usually the dev copy pasted outdated code/css that uses WebKit/Bink-specific prefix even though Firefox already support them if they removed the prefix. Nothing we can do about that except pestering the dev to fix it or overriding it yourself using some css overrides extension.
Not as much as Google though, so I've been feeling like it's been getting better and better, but it's just a comparative feeling.
To me it's worrying because it is where Google was when I jumped ship for DDG.
I am getting tailored results that I do not want. Everything I search even with location off gives me local to very local responses.
If I open a link and then go back to the results page all the results have changed order.
Makes sense. I can't blame you for taking that position. I think we need a paid search engine: if you're not paying you're the product, after all.
Firefox + uBlock Origin and I have no issues with any websites.
Which ones are you having issues with and what is happening?
https://webcompat.com/
You have to complain if your work does chrome specific stuff.
I use brave search, and it works great!
Saying that you use Brave seems to result in instant downvotes in lemmy. Kinda makes sense given the fediverse demographic simply don't align with Brave's CEO.
Also, mentioning Kagi often results in replies accusing ads and shilling because Kagi is a paid search engine (with free trial), but it worth checking nonetheless. They reached 20k paying users recently, not bad for a new paid search engine. The fact they're able to convince 20,000 people to pay for search engine means the search result is pretty good.
Oh, I also dislike the CEO, but the search engine is good enough that I can't find a privacy-friendly alternative Edit: I am also broke as fuck so I can't afford to pay for a search engine
Brave may be persona non Grata around here, but props to them for actually crawling the web. Just about every other private search engine uses APIs from Google/Bing or scrapes/proxies results from other search engines.
Yeah exactly, and its the only private search engine that actually gives me good results for tech troubleshooting, although if another private browser gets equivalent results I'm jumping ship immediately
I haven't noticed this at all.
I've been a frequent DDG g! bang user over the years, but now almost never have to go it. Granted I use kagi for most searches now, but my phone still defaults to DDG, and I've noticed that it works just fine.
Google and therefore kagi are still better for stackoverflow indexing I believe, at least that's how I remember it
Honestly, I've tried switching but can't find a browser that works as well. I found Kiwi Browser on Android which is still chromium based but at least it's something, but still need to use Chrome from time to time as websites won't work on Kiwi.
Firefox just doesn't perform as well comparatively, lacks features and then as you go down the list of alternatives it gets worse and worse.
So not from lack of trying, but at least for me it is the best browser particularly if you can install enough extensions to remove a lot of garbage.
Not to sound snarky, but what are you missing from Firefox that chrome does?
For some reason, my Firefox with ublock removes all of the mobile ads from pages I visit. I miss finding it about all of the hot singles in my area.
They won't answer, because they can't answer.
For me, I've noticed a few websites that complain that firefox "is an out of date browser, you should use something more modern". My bank's website does that, but still works fine as far as I've been able to tell.
I have a couple of websites that I go to that do not like working in Firefox but work just fine in Chromium browsers.
The worst offender is Microsoft admin 365. It will open, and it will work, but if you edit a user and save your edits you can't click on the back button inside of the window that has popped up for editing and instead you have to close the entire section and reopen it to go back to the main screen.
Aside from that, for netdocs you have to open the local host port of your netdocs app in firefox (https://localhost:(port number)) and approve to bypass the security restrictions in order for netdocs to work.
There are a handful of another apps with similar issues and most of them are from software vendors that I have to use for work.
There's one that I can't mention because it would dox me that if you don't use it in Chrome it simply does not work because the JavaScript that they use for generating the app checks to see if you are in a Chrome browser and straight up fails if the user agent does not return Chrome.
I can work around that for myself but I can't work around that for all 17,000 of our employees, and since the entire business runs on this application then we are locked in.
On PC, Group tabs for me. I find it extremely useful for efficiency. There's nothing equivalent on Firefox even with extensions.
I could just give up on them admittedly but once you get used to something it's hard to change and I fucking hate having too many tabs open.
On Android, the performance was just worse than chromium based browsers. Not sure if it was something wrong with my settings, but I'm talking like at least 1-2 second lag differences in loading a basic Web page. Makes it unusable for me.
Have you tried Simple Tab Groups? It adds a drop-down menu that allows you to create separate environments for different uses. This was one of those things that I also couldn't live without, and somebody turned me onto this extension. It's even Firefox recommended.
Yeah it doesn't do what I want unfortunately. I tried a few extensions but they couldn't replicate it well enough.
Thanks though!