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Firefox is on the brink of being dropped by the US Government (www.brycewray.com)

submitted 11 months ago by morrowind@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[-] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 359 points 11 months ago

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.

Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.

[-] yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml 138 points 11 months ago

Thank you for the excerpt. I initially interpreted the title as US government agencies will stop using Firefox, not US government agencies will stop requiring their web masters to test in Firefox.

[-] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 43 points 11 months ago

I’d imagine that effectively means agencies would stop using Firefox, if they can’t use it on their own sites.

[-] _s10e@feddit.de 28 points 11 months ago

Websites built for Chrome do work in Firefox.

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[-] akilou@sh.itjust.works 47 points 11 months ago

Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting all websites.

^except the ones that only work in chrome

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[-] ripcord@kbin.social 22 points 11 months ago

Or just in general

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[-] veniasilente@lemm.ee 114 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I took the liberty of reading the article but I'm gonna say the title is quite... tendentious. Makes it sound like it's yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as "The CIA will stop funding Signal" (never has been) or "FBI wants to sell Wikipedia" (never has been).

What is going on?

EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of "tendentious", which I have linked.

[-] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 56 points 11 months ago

tendentious

ten·den·tious /tenˈdenSHəs/ adjective expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one. "a tendentious reading of history"

[-] trackindakraken@lemmy.whynotdrs.org 27 points 11 months ago

Thank you. I'm not too proud to say I didn't know this word. And, you saved me looking it up. When I was a kid, my dad got tired of defining words for me when I was reading a book, so he taught me to use a dictionary. From then on, I've read with a dictionary next to me.

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[-] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 41 points 11 months ago

Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.

[-] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 32 points 11 months ago

Someone call 911, I think I'm having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.

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[-] dwokimmortalus@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago

Much of it has to do with Firefox's decisions in the past 5-7 years that have made it very unfriendly to enterprise environments. The provisioning tools have gotten progressively more hostile to IT departments.

The US government is also finally moving to more modern systems for authentication and Mozilla has incorporated some particularly poor changes to how the stack is handled that are very unfriendly to IT environments that need to manage credentials for multiple authoritative sources. We had to switch to Chrome a couple years ago because our support cases with Mozilla would on many occasions come back with a response of 'we've made our decision and will not be considering changes'.

Unfortunately, as Firefox kicks itself out of the enterprise market; that's going to cascade to the personal market even further as well.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 98 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.

Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.

[-] starbreaker@kbin.social 85 points 11 months ago

Here are a few names you can blame in addition to the USWDS:

Deloitte
Accenture
Ernst & Young
KPMG
PwC

The four corporations other Accenture constitute the US' "Big 4 accounting firms", and they get a shitload of money from local, state, and the Federal government to develop software for them at taxpayer expense -- and none of this publicly-funded code is FOSS.

[-] netchami@sh.itjust.works 51 points 11 months ago

The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.

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[-] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 91 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Really sad. In Germany, Firefox sits comfortably at 10% market share, and actually is having a slight uptick in the last month.

[-] silencioso@lemmy.world 51 points 11 months ago

Wait until Google implements manifest V3 and "kills" adblockers. Firefox will become cool again for the normies.

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[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 83 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm pretty convinced that a country with an annual military spend of almost three quarters of a trillion dollars can afford to QA their web services in at least the latest versions of the five major browsers(1). Anything less might be seen as corporate favouritism.

(1) Chrome, Firefox, Edge (so Chrome), Safari, and Opera (so also fucking Chrome, apparently) were the five I'm thinking of but I'm open to persuasion if anyone's got a better list

[-] computergeek125@lemmy.world 32 points 11 months ago

Even Opera is now Chrome....

[-] Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 24 points 11 months ago

Opera, chrome, but with CCP data theft and monitoring

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[-] tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.

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[-] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 72 points 11 months ago

Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.

[-] burliman@lemm.ee 29 points 11 months ago

Do you think the number of people spoofing user agents are going to even dent those numbers?

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[-] mightyfoolish@lemmy.world 69 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Governments agencies usually obtain software through contracts with vendors. Microsoft is one of those vendors so I'm not surprised to hear about this.

Also, Firefox is the pretty much the browser of freedom and independence so I'm surprised it's not illegal or "against family values" at this point. 😔

[-] Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug@lemmy.world 60 points 11 months ago

So changing the user agent to chrome to fool websites that work shittier on non chromium stuff will ruin this metric?

[-] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

No, what this means is sites might start adopting features like PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox and one where you just might not be able to access the service, at all, unless your browser has support.

(Passkeys are a replacement for passwords - essentially the idea is to take the technology commonly used for second factor authentication and use it as your "first factor" instead)

[-] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 40 points 11 months ago

PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox

So... Chrome and Safari? Because the rest of browsers are just rebranded Chrome.

I'm not particularly a fan of passkeys, because I'm fairly happy with my password manager, but personal opinions apart, just because Google and Apple decided to implement a feature, that doesn't make it an standard.

This is why Chrome having the web engine monopoly is such a big problem. They can implement whatever they want and because it will also be adopted by Edge, Opera and others, it seems to automatically be considered a web standard and websites will start using it even when the other major independent browser (Firefox) hasn't implemented it.

[-] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 26 points 11 months ago

a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox

Funny cause it works fine in my browser with a bitwarden plugin. I don't need and actually REALLY don't want my browser handling my passwords... or passkeys... or whatever the fuck authenticates me.

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[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 59 points 11 months ago

All you people too young to remember the late 1990s, enjoy the internet as we used to know it before adblockers, because it sounds like you're going to be out of options a lot of times soon.

I plan to use Firefox as long as I can, but I hate that I already have to have a backup browser for some sites, including the back end of the website where I used to work. And that will only get worse.

[-] LastYearsPumpkin@feddit.ch 25 points 11 months ago

Yup, just like the days where sites would just display a "this site is designed for internet explorer 6" and nothing else unless you were using IE.

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[-] nutsack@lemmy.world 58 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

holy shit I didn't realize the market share for firefox was so low. i remember when chrome was launched and figured they both had about the same

[-] Chobbes@lemmy.world 40 points 11 months ago

Firefox usage has plummeted. To be fair, 2% isn’t a huge slice of the pie, but it’s still a pretty large number of users in absolute terms.

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[-] crimroy@sopuli.xyz 40 points 11 months ago

Who cares? I use Firefox but why do I care if the US government does? I thought they were still using Netscape on Windows ME

[-] great_site_not@lemmy.world 23 points 11 months ago

Did you read the article? This is about how the government's web developers could stop writing websites that support Firefox. You might have to switch to Chromium to use government websites.

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[-] scytale@lemm.ee 40 points 11 months ago

I tried doing my annual vehicle registration online on FF yesterday and the dmv site kept throwing an error and bringing me back to step 1 when I submit my payment information. Tried turning off all my extensions and still wouldn’t budge. Finally tried it in Chrome and it worked instantly. You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.

[-] shotgun_crab@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

Government websites don't care at all about support, most of them were made 15-20 years ago and haven't been updated at all

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[-] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 40 points 11 months ago

The government IT shops part feels like a real issue. If the government gets it's self in a tech debt to two of the largest IT orgs because they didn't want to invest the time to get Firefox enterprise installed and configured on at least their own machines I'll be pissed. Like why are we spending so much but getting so little from our IT?

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[-] red@sopuli.xyz 37 points 11 months ago

I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon.

Yeah about that. Manifest V3 will infuse Firefox userbase nicely come next summer.

[-] Firipu@startrek.website 56 points 11 months ago

Get out of the lemmy Foss bubble and ask again. I don't know anybody that actually gives a fuck about manifest v3 tbh.

[-] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 55 points 11 months ago

They will care about their adblocker no longer working

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[-] PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 31 points 11 months ago

2% is huge. Many companies still have their website support ie6, and the US gov wants to abandon 2% of their users???

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[-] burliman@lemm.ee 26 points 11 months ago

Pretty sure those Edge numbers are from using it under duress…

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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023

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