Imagine using Chrome in 2024.
They talk about it doing this for Firefox too.
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.
DDG has gone downhill in recent years.
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.
Everyone says “problems with websites in Firefox!”
Nobody has examples
Not a very big website, but the service my therapist uses for teletherapy doesn’t support anything outside of chromium.
I don’t want you to post personal stuff but that’s still just “it doesn’t work” with no proof
Well, it’s a specific example, even if I didn’t give any way to test it. Better than just saying “some websites don’t work” since I’m actually indicating the particular one that doesn’t.
I guess your two options are to trust that I’m acting in good faith when I say it or to assume I might not be and disregard the example. Either way doesn’t affect me much; I’ve already submitted tickets to the service asking for Firefox support, so with any luck it won’t even be an issue for too long.
After a ton of “Firefox sucks because a website doesn’t work but I won’t tell you which one”
I don’t care to think anyone saying they is saying it in good faith
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I mean I did tell you which one. I just didn’t tell you how to find it.
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
Oh noooo a random shit news site doesn’t load good cuz they don’t do web design good
Still no examples
why are you being so abrasive?
Of course web sites not working on firefox is an error on the web sites part, was that even in question?
Because I’ve seen this over and over again and it’s always the same. Nobody has replied with a single URL, just vague anecdotes.
Example: The meeting webservice my bank uses is for whatever reason blocked for Firefox. Not sure if they just User-Agent check but they consciously block out Firefox users. I alerted my bank person about that but I doubt that’s going to be any different next time I have a meeting with them.
Are you sure that’s not an ad/tracker-blocking issue?
I’ve seen this on twitch, for example. Trying to log in with trackers blocked will throw up a dialog saying “your browser is not supported,” but if you allow tracking, it works fine. And once logged in, you can block trackers again and the site continues to work normally.
Nope they explicitly state in their support forums that they do not support Firefox and the Error Message you get recommends using Edge or Chrome. This is not an Ad-Block problem
I just gave you an example of menus not expanding.
I’m not digging Firefox I’m saying there is a consorted effort made to reduce it’s usefulness.
Okay where
That’s not proof
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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).
I can’t test that but that’s the closest thing to proof so far!
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.
It’s shitty for sure, and I definitely think Chrome needs to die, or at least have better competition. Sadly, not enough users are using non-chromium browsers, that they don’t see a problem with using chrome only features. It sucks, and it’s going to lead (is leading) to the further enshitification of the web. I’m doing my part by using Firefox, and any web application I develop is guaranteed to work in Firefox.
Can you prove that right now? I can’t test that without a link
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…
I’ve always had TikTok blocked so I maybe o idea about that
Also a privacy browser not allowing the least private thing ever? Colour me shocked
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.
“I can think of”
no proof
No personal stuff obviously but nobody actually has proof
Like which sites specifically? I have yet to see one.
DDG has gone downhill in recent years.
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
What is DDG g! Bang?
Yeah it is really odd I can’t understand why it does it because the initial reason I moved to DDG was because of their big marketing push on not putting results or users into bubbles.
Bangs is a cool DDG feature that redirects your query to another search engine in this case !g is Google
Does it filter out the shite?
There is no modification, it just redirects you to the site
Does it prevent Google from getting your info or something so or what is the benefit in this over using Google?
I use brave search, and it works great!
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
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?
Also curious about this
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.
Microsoft Edge is actually good, so I sure hope the team building it isn’t about to resort to more tricks to get Chrome users to use it.
Edge is good compared to IE which was a dumpster fire, and arguably about as bad as Chrome. Both are privacy nightmares and desire nothing more than to harvest your data for ad companies. I trust Google a hair more than I do Microsoft. I don’t use Chrome. That should tell you something.
I disagree. Chrome is a simple well designed browser that happens to be run by a company that tries to push things we don’t like, such as FLoC.
Edge is full of bloatware and dark patterns. You’re probably thinking of the early versions of Edge when none of that crap had been added yet… but trust me it’s a very different browser now. In fact it’s worse than IE ever was.
worse than IE ever was
This argument can be made for spying/telemetry, but I don’t think anything will compare to how bad the IE user experience was for years. It ran so slowly, and took forever to get features like tabbed internet browsing. It started to get more functional towards the end once it started losing market share, but that was after years of it being complete garbage while having absolute market dominance.
Meh. My work gives me the choice of Chrome and Edge. I decided to try edge to get access to bing chat last year, and I’ve found it to be a pleasant experience compared to chrome. It’s got some neat features, and the built in copilot AI can be handy. I haven’t missed chrome (or Google for that matter) in the year I’ve been using edge. It’s fine. Still use Firefox on my personal laptop and phone though.
There’s a word for software that does actions without the user’s permission or knowledge.
That word is MALWARE
Every piece of software does things without your permission or knowledge.
If it does what you wanted it to when you installed it, it’s doing things with your permission. If what it was going to do was clearly and correctly explained during the download or install process, it’s doing things with your knowledge.
It’s like a motor vehicle. You don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works to be able to give informed consent about driving it, but if it starts rolling away after you park it, you’re going to either get it fixed or get a new car.
This is beyond pedantic. You and everybody else knows exactly what they meant.
If we’re going to call something malware we better be damn sure we understand the definitions of it.
You understand and give explicit permission for every piece of the kernel?
Do you trust Microsoft? If you do I might suggest we find you a nice quiet padded room.
Imagine someone attempted to (or even succeeded in) pushing malicious (or even just poor, “bad” code into the kernel. What do you suppose would happen? Oh wait we don’t have to imagine. Some people tried, and got admonished publicly.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-university-of-minnesota-banned-open-source
Sell your soul to Microsoft!
YES, please
not now
Linux and Firefox gang rise up.
I only use it in a VM and only for Visual Studio which is only for one class. It does nothing outside of that class
My main OS is Linux Mint
Why not just use vscodium?
I used to se in camp firefox, but ungoogled chromium just feels so much better now
There is a net effect in browsers and in rendering engines especially.
The more people use chrome engine (that is pretty much everyone except Firefox) the more web developers support only Chrome because… Cost/layoffs.
For this reason i make a point in using only FF (except for websites that already don’t work with Geko).
Monopolies are not good for anyone (especially with current Google attitude)
Google chrome ads have been getting really obnoxious lately even though I only see them when visiting friends who don’t have an adblocker. Needless to say I use Firefox exclusively and only fire up chromium for work once in a while to see how stuff behaves in different browsers.
Saying “everyone except Firefox” is not accurate. Iceweasel, Pale Moon, Librewolf, etc, they all use the Gecko rendering engine. Are they a fraction of a blip in the ecosystem? Unfortunately, yes.
I kind of want to checkout Iceweasel off name alone.
A lot of us could just stop using that garbage OS.
Problem is there’s too much professional software that simply won’t run on Linux, things you spend all day in and even if you can get it to run in a sandbox the experience sucks (because it’s too resource intensive, otherwise it would get all SaaSy and force you into the cloud), like CAD software, 3D modeling tools, editing…
Monopolistic behavior is monopolistic behavior. MSFT needs a beatdown.
Sometimes the switch is surprisingly seamless, though. Autodesk Maya has an official Linux version, Blender is more than competitive now. For photo and video editing, Krita has become the better Photoshop for me and DaVinci Resolve has a native Linux version as well, with the additional benefit of letting me completely avoid Adobe. The ex-Allegorithmic tools also have Linux support and can be bought on Steam even.
On the other side, I haven’t had much success running Clip Studio Paint or Daz 3D and a VM is rather frustrating to use (the lag between pen and screen just feels weird).
99% of people don’t need this kind of software.
99%? Based on what data?
I made it up.
But realistically, how many people use something other than MS Office, Outlook and a browser?
Most.
(Also a made up statistic)
plus many USB devices need drivers, and god knows the OEM isn’t gonna make them. i.e. steering wheels, stream decks, some audio interfaces. i know there is a software for streamdecks, but i imagine it’s not even half of what it could do on windows.
Microsoft is the fucking worst with their trick questions and constant nagging.
They do this because they want you to use Edge which steals search results from other search engines.
Edge re-installing itself after I’ve manually taken ownership of its files and purged them from the system 6 fucking times is what’s going to finally drive me to abandon windows and go full linux.
I just haven’t had the time or energy to rebuild my software stack on a still pretty new to me OS. (emby, the Arrs, Ombi, nginx, and more)
I setup a debian machine a while ago and have been slowly trying to get used to it while migrating a few things, but It’s hard when windows is so engrained in most of what I’ve done on pc.
Edge re-installing itself after I’ve manually taken ownership of its files and purged them from the system 6 fucking times is what’s going to finally drive me to abandon windows and go full linux.
This sort of thing is why I finally switched my gaming PC - I was spending a bunch of time fighting to get Windows to do what I wanted that I figured I might as well be doing all that work on Linux.
At least Linux doesn’t deliberately fight me. When I have to spend time getting Linux to do something it’s because developers haven’t gotten to it yet, not because corporate are enforcing their vision of how I’ll use my system.
I was spending a bunch of time fighting to get Windows to do what I wanted that I figured I might as well be doing all that work on Linux.
A damn good point.
I really got to get around to telling Microsoft to fornicate themselves with the wide end of a rake…
I moved to Fedora (KDE Plasma) about a year ago. I had researched alternatives for all I needed.
I installed it on a new machine and kept an old windows machine running.
It took a month or so to get things how I liked.
I miss some things in Windows but found some real time saving features in linux, on the whole I am better off.
And I feel a whole lot safer.
When Linux spoons me in bed and whispers in my ear that it loves me, that’s when I feel really safe.
Side question:
Know a good place I can learn linux user/group/permission management?
I don’t understand it well enough so I do a stupid amount of things as root…
A good start is using something like sudo rather than logging in as root.
sudo gives your command root permission when it runs. That way you can delete the password from the root account and it can’t be logged in with. sudo will ask for YOUR password and then check if you have permissions to elevate your command to root level.
In a simple setup, you can just use for anything you would normally do as root.
This can protect you from mistakes too, when running commands that you’ve mistyped. For example, if you want to do “rm -rf ./*” to delete all files in the current directory, but you forget the dot (period); if you’re at a root prompt, you just deleted your entire filesystem. If you’re not, then you get a permission error.
How do I manage what users can use sudo?
One issue is trying to create a user to run services under, but not knowing how to give it permission to access what it needs (while also not entirely sure what it should/shouldn’t have permissions for).
Or just generally managing file permissions. I understand using chmod in a very basic capacity with a few letter arguments like +r, but then you toss in numbers (chmod 777, wut?) and I get lost.
The
sudoersfile is what you’d need to edit, and you’d use thevisudocommand to edit it.chmodis indeed used for file permissions, but you can also use SELinux or AppArmor for more access/role/action based permissions (aka Mandatory Access Controls) instead of just limiting yourself to file permissions (aka Discretionary Access Control). There’s also udev rules (for device access) and PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules). Then there’s cgroups and namespaces for process limits and sandboxing. Really depends on what you’re trying to achieve.But is there any reason why you’re looking into micromanaging service permissions? Most users, or even power users wouldn’t need to touch that stuff at all.
If it’s in a corporate environment, you’d already be running something like SELinux or similar and you’d apply a baseline security profile that meets various compliance specs.
If this is for personal stuff, you’d just make use of multiple user accounts (if it’s a multi-user system), or just sandboxing (containers, flatpak etc) to run untrustworthy stuff like web browsers. None of this stuff would require you to touch chmod.
To play devil’s advocate, that’s because Edge is the system web view used for system components. Removing it means certain UI for system components won’t be able to be rendered. It’s the same reason why uninstalling Chrome from Android breaks a bunch of stuff. They should decouple the web view from the browser but here we are.
I don’t care. None of the stuff that breaks is even remotely important to me.
If I’ve made a point of removing a piece of software; reinstalling it, re-adding shortcuts in 3 different places, and changing my default back to edge with every system update (and now automatically harvesting all the data from every other installed browser) makes me want to personally lynch Satya Nadella. (Microsoft’s CEO)
Actually, Edge WebView2 is a separate system component pushed out via Windows Update (can also be bundled with individual apps), and is independent of Edge the browser.
So you can actually uninstall Edge the browser completely if you wanted to, and still keep using Webview.
Of course, it’s a different story that Microsoft like to sneak it back in as part of an update or something.
Were you on a Windows Pro license and did you tried using group policy settings?
I keep hearing people being frustrated that low level solutions don’t work, but I’ve not heard of anyone having these issues who has used the official tools Microsoft provides for Windows sysadmins (and power users) to actually manage this sort of thing.
I get that logically, it shouldn’t matter whether you put a sign up telling Edge to fuck off when you’ve bulldozed it down six times, but Windows sees that it’s gone and your settings (by default with no group policy config) indicate it shouldn’t be gone, so it “helpfully” rebuilds it.
Power users are not their market for normal home licenses. Those are for the people who don’t know the difference between Edge and Chrome and need protection from making dumb mistakes like deleting Edge and ending up without any web browser. Unfortunately, those are the grand majority of computer users, and it makes good business sense to take advantage of “just helping” to provide a locked down ecosystem and push your software on power users who don’t know the management options available.
Windows doesn’t do a good job advertising these features, and has made them harder to find by getting rid of a lot of their old non-cloud sysadmin training courses, because it doesn’t help them make money. But by no means are these options non-existent.
They offer a Windows version for power users. It’s the Pro license, and it doesn’t cost significantly more if you’re buying a cheap “OEM” key.
If you want to make Windows work for you, look at the tools they have for on premises (non-cloud) Windows system administration in small companies.
KMS (key media server) is one way to manage Windows license keys for multiple machines in a domain. KMSpico emulates that setup on a single machine (no server needed), allowing safe spoofing of whatever level Windows license you want, using the same systems and technique meant for actual sysadmins. Last I knew, that was the safest way to spoof a license if you don’t have the ~$15 for one.
Group policy is one of a few ways to push consistent Windows configuration and settings to multiple machines in a domain. It is also an option for managing settings on individual Pro licensed Windows machines. Most of the time when you find weird registry key changes online to enable/disable Windows features, those are part of what Group Policy changes when you use it to disable a feature the proper way. Windows respects group policy options through updates, and releases update to group policy templates as needed. They don’t want to fuck with their big business clients that can actually hurt their bottom line, so they keep those working.
I do have a pro license (for RDP), but I’m not familiar with the group policy editor. Wasn’t aware it could disable Edge. I’ll have to explore that more. It’s rather absurd a user has to go to those lengths to keep data they’ve deleted, deleted.
Still gonna move to linux. Been a long time coming.
Who cares? Stop using Chrome.
I seem to recall a federal lawsuit about this kind of behavior with Internet Explorer. Does changing the name of the browser magically nullify the original legal settlement?
The difference is IE was the dominant web browser. Despite having a terrible user experience it had the vast majority of the market share due to being the bundled web browser.
Microsoft is absolutely abusing windows market share to push edge, but it hasn’t worked (yet) so they’re not getting in trouble for it.
There was nothing that came of that because they were let off the hook with a slap on the wrist when Republicans took over the government.
The fact they have 4% marketshare also protects them.
guess what, i’m using neither. checkmate.
/lh
I’d be shocked if Edge installed itself and take over Firefox data in my linux install. Impressed, but also very shocked.
The sad part is, knowing the average Windows user, they can probably gain 10 to 20% market share just from people literally not noticing the switch…
From the article: ‘So I went to install the same Windows update on a laptop, which actually resulted in it failing and me having to do a system restore. Once the system restore…’
Who needs to continue reading the article before realizing the malware is Windows itself?
So either Linux has effortless, painless updates that never breaks, or Linux is malware.
Which one is it?
The difference may be Windows forces to update, while i.e. Ubuntu has several older versions still working.
Laughs in Firefox.
How to prevent this: don’t use Chrome.
Or Windows.
In this case the problem is MS, they could (or already) do the same thing with Firefox.
So the real fix is not using Windows.
