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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.
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
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).
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.
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.
User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.
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.
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.
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 use lynx btw.
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in ages.
Who’s Jocker Black and why do you recognise him?
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.
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 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.
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.
Is that the logo for Amarok?
No librewolf, but I totally do see the Amarok confusion lol
Amarok is what converted me to Linux Desktop, especially the iPod support in 2008. For me that was the year of the Linux Desktop.
KHTML
