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Companies like chrome because it’s the most used browser. So if they develop for it, and only for it without caring of compatibility on others, then it’s cheaper. And since they don’t want you to use another browser and complain that their site is broken, the just block you.
I think the most annoying thing here is the decision to blanket ban other browsers. Why not just have a little drop-down bar at the top that says ‘You may encounter issues, we recommend browsing this site with Google Chrome’, instead of completely blocking access? The cynic in me suspects it’s linked to advertising.
If one changes the user agent in Firefox so that it announces itself as Chrome, most of these sites work just fine. Adobe Express is the last example I tried.
Because that would reveal that their site is flawed, instead of blaming the customer for not using the right browser.
Doesn’t have to be, some features are only available in certain browsers (usually Chromium). For example AFAIK Chromium is the only browser that allows you to connect in the browser to Bluetooth devices, its the only browser that can access for example a phone’s NFC chip or that can interact with USB devices.
That’s my point. Example, meet Sarah. Sarah goes to www.megacorp.com to pair her new MegaDevice via NFC. She gets to the pairing page and there’s only a small banner that tells her her browser may not work. She doesn’t see it and starts the syncing. It fails repeatedly. Her first thought will be “O… Mygod! mergacorp’s website is like, so. Broken!” Now example B: Sarah goes to the website and sees “WRONG BROWSER, use chrome instead” on the screen in big. Now Sarah thinks “Oh, I’m stupid, it’s my bad, I should use Chrome instead instead of Firefox. Firefox is the worst”. Then end.
Which is kind of dumb, because if you target Firefox you are writing to a standards compliant browser that means your code should work on all other browsers. Chrome came when IE still owned the internet and their goal was to offer a faster browser that still worked, so now chrome has a bunch of hacks coded into it.
Sometimes the president or CEO just doesn’t give a shit even when devs tell them otherwise.
Devs don’t always get a lot of choice when the upper management thinks chrome is better
It’s why baracuda only really advertised in airport terminals everywhere.
Devs don’t always get a lot of choice when the upper management thinks chrome is better
The devs can tell management they’ll make it work on Chrome while really making it work cross-browser. It’s not too hard to make a site cross-browser these days, except for Safari sometimes having weird bugs.
Pfft, who would do that? As a Firefox user myself I never would. Carve out a bit of time on the down-low to enhance cross-browser support on a website after management shortsightedly told me to just block anything other than Chrome? No no no! Not me!
Of course as others here (including you) have pointed out, it’s much less of an issue these days. Though it does still happen, it’s nowhere near as bad as the IE days (that browser can burn in hell for all eternity!).
Shouldn’t they just commit to follow the web standards? Most modern browsers strive to follow those standards.
Well chrome should, yes. But they don’t.
Then some JavaScript framework developers think “well this non-standard feature is neat, let’s use that everywhere” and then companies who use their framework (or a framwork dependent on it) can’t support all browsers.It’s a multilayered problem (as always) with lots of individually decisions that make sense, but don’t work out in the end (as always).
I found a bug once in our content that only affected Firefox. Old versions of articulate whouldnt start properly. Not somthing I could fix on my own as i meeded anyoher department. I brought it to the attention of the managers. They didn’t want to fox it as apprently Google analytics showed only .4% of our user base was using Firefox. I manged to convince them its part of our user commitment to ensure that we work consistently across all browsers, but it was a pain.
Google analytics showed only .4% of our user base was using Firefox.
Maybe it was that low because the site didn’t work properly on Firefox…
Exactly. When the planes come back from battle, you put armor on all the places where the bullet holes aren’t, because that’s where the planes that didn’t make it back were shot.
That’s the main issue of using analytics and telemetry on something that’s used by power users: most of them disable/block them, so the real reported usage is much lower
If only being part of the .4% was like being part of “the 1%”.
Well good thing my employer runs a script every 15 min to set the default browser to Edge.
They probably get better metrics off of you running corporate logins and edge. Edge is equivalent to Chrome It supports all the same plugins.
It’s probably just secops picking the low hanging fruit dissuade you subverting network security.
Edge is built upon chromium
When I say that Edge is equivalent to Chrome, I don’t mean that Edge is exactly Chrome It’s not what I said and it’s not what I meant. I mean that for all intents and purposes you can use edge for anything you want to use Chrome for. Major differentiation is that you’re giving all of your data to Microsoft in lieu of Google. And you could look at all the other chromium base browsers and say yeah you could do the same thing with those but in this case we have a business user. There’s businesses are probably already running Microsoft networks. They might very well already have Microsoft SSO. Edge is going to have all kinds of great tie-ins to active directory policy. So secops/it is going to try to force you to use Edge, instead of say Firefox with a barely have any control over or maybe brave where you’re going to try TOR or IPFS and just basically be a stain on their HIDS board.
Edge is equivalent to Chrome It supports all the same plugins.
What’s this then?
Jesus man I just explained it to you. Welcome to my block list
Ah I see Mr I’m never wrong
run a script to set the default browser back to chrome just after it changes, using some timer estimation magic also… try taskkill
Jeez, imagine.
Time for some user agent spoofing
Google pays them…
Said the same thing. Was downvoted for it. Lemmy is weird
64.7% of all web traffic was from Google Chrome in 12/23. Companies like it because you can develop for one browser and support most people.
If they develop for only Firefix it will work with all browsers because Firefox is standards compatible.
Not really, unfortunately. Firefox has only like 85% of the spec implemented, iirc. It is the browser I develop in most, personally, though, fwiw.
But does it mean the 15% is non-standard or just not implemented at all? If it’s not implemented then all of the implementation is 100% standard compliant and if everyone stopped relying on the 15% part then developing for Firefox should make it compatible for rest of the browsers.
You know the answer b
The answer to most questions is money.
Ads = money
As if they needed to check for ““compatibility”” at all - just let the users try their makeshift coded-in-a-weekend browsers, or their 2008 version of IE.
The better question is why some websites even bother checking for the browser when the vast majority of people uses mainstream options that follow web standards and self-update.
The problem is that there are still features missing from certain browsers. For example, Mozilla does not like restrictive licenses, which is why many media codecs are not available in Firefox. Google does not care, pays the fees and provides the media codecs for free. As soon as we get rid of shit like h265 and switch to av1, the world will be a better (and more open) place where everyone can use any browser.
Yeah, then just try to load the website.
If something fails, blame the user. But don’t just block them based solely on brand of browser.
That‘s the problem. If you show a damaged or non working website, the user assumes it is a problem of the website, then thinking negatively about it. Unfortunately the world is not as easy as you see it :)
For example, Mozilla does not like restrictive licenses, which is why many media codecs are not available in Firefox.
Telling you that is the job of the browser, not of the webpage. Job of the webpage is, to provide a fallback if feature is not avalaible.
Kinda agree, but from a software developer perspective, there is no reason to maintain multiple code bases or exceptions just because 2% of the users might profit from it. The same thing happened in the past, when everyone had to have special CSS exceptions for IE6. But in that case it was worth it, as the marked share of IE6 was huge.
Yeah, but for media it’s as easy as specyfying a second format in html.
I had a client once who used to be obsessed with this. By his logic, if a potential customer visited the website and had a bad experience because the site didn’t work properly in their browser, they’d think the company was unprofessional and wouldn’t come into the store and we’d lose them as a customer forever. Analytics showed that 99+% of people would visit in one of the big three, and he wouldn’t pay for someone to test the site on the less popular browsers, instead he insisted on fingerprinting logic that broke all the time and probably caused more bounces than any possible rendering quirks from niche mobile browsers would have caused
It’s ridiculous some people even consider blocking a browser completely and having a near 100% chance of turning away the customer that uses it instead of just letting the user browse and have a significant chance of nothing bad happening.
People are not going to change browsers to visit this website unless they absolutely have to - in which case they’ll hate this company for it.
Oh my god, you get it. Thank you for your continued existence. Keep going!
Time for OP to install a User Agent Switcher plugin
Yep, that’s always worth a try
Checking the browser almost never makes sense these days.
Sites should be using feature detection instead. Rather than checking the browser version, instead check if the browser supports the features they require.
It’s more practical though, from a more general UX perspective where the U is often a non technical person. If you throw a “ur browser doesn’t support webserial(or whatever)” message up on the screen, you’re just gonna confuse tons of users who won’t even know what the hell you’re talking about. Easier (for everyone) to tell them to just use what you know works.
The message doesn’t have to be technical and can still mention browsers - just say “your browser isn’t compatible with this site. Try updating it or switch to Chrome or Edge”. The idea is just that if someone with a non-Chrome and non-Edge browser tries to load the page and it supports the feature, they won’t see the message.
Don’t use that website if you can
I would thank them for letting me know their site isn’t worth the visit.
Chrome implements features that aren’t standards track into their browser, and lazy/oblivious devs use these features to build their products - only to realize wayyy too late it won’t work in Safari/Firefox because it uses APIs that are chrome only
Firefox still has no month or week inputs. These things have been standardized 10 years ago and implemented in Chrome as of version 20.
That input sucks, ui design and its not intuitive at all. Its more frustrating that I can’t just type dates in
That input sucks, ui design
I have no clue what you’re trying to tell me with that.
Probably the reason it was never implemented is that it’s barely an inconvenience. The input just fallback into a text field.
According to MDN, Firefox does support week inputs… on Android. Firefox isn’t really relevant, though. Safari is, and Safari doesn’t have a week input either.
I don’t know many use cases for these input types, but it’s interesting to know about them for the future.
It used to be the same way with Internet Explorer.
Would you prefer they go back to mandating that you use Internet explorer?
Progress is slow little steps forward, with a step back here and there.
Chrome was better that ie. It was also available for use on all of the big operating systems.
The fewer Internet browsers a page has to support the faster it is to build and the more people will have a uniform experience there.
I’d rather they not give a damn what browser you use as long as it complies with current web standards. That’s kinda the whole point of there being open standards.
Standardization is nice for people who make sites and people who use them.
That’s not what a web site is though. That’s just an application with a network api.
Which is why we have HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, supported by all major browsers.
Unless you’re doing something outrageously non-standard, there is no reason to block specific browsers.
These terms are absolutely meaningless. Browsers like all Chromium forks and Firefox add new CSS, HTML and JS features on a almost monthly basis. Safari then usually is takes a year more to implement them. And for the past few years Chrome has usually been adding new stuff the fastest, then Firefox a bit later and then Apple adds them after a year, but only if they don’t threaten the native Apps on iOS because of AppStore money.
Web standards keep evolving, this is normal. Otherwise you would be still running Adobe Flash.
Except for politics.
Why you are getting downvotes? Actually Mozilla standardizes things on web
To avoid testing on other platforms. Money is limited.
This could be a ‘works better on chrome popup’. Instead it’s a hard block
Yeah, that was the case in one of the companies I worked for. They only tested on Chrome and Edge.
I’ve been at companies that did that too, historically, but it seems like a solved problem. My current company does UI testing only through headless browsers and it seems to work
Because they hire cheap developers who don’t know what the fuck they are doing?
Is very possible to know exactly what should be done, but not have the time available to achieve it.
This is the correct answer
I would sooner blame the management, that would even think of excluding “untested” or “unsupported” browsers, like some kind of technofacist dictator, instead of choosing a helpful “if you’re having problems with our shit site, use chrome” message… or even literally doing nothing… everything is broken these days, and a half-functional site is better than an intentionally-broken one.
