I remember that in the very early days of Firefox, some websites would refuse to serve pages to anything that wasn't Internet Explorer. I did not see the point to that and I was not amused.
Firefox didn't have a problem displaying those pages, so I had to install a plugin so that Firefox could pretend to be Internet Explorer so that I could just see the web page.
Google Earth says "Google Chrome is required to run the new Google Earth" or "Oh no! Google Earth isn't supported by your browser yet" if you try to use another browser:
Google does not just do this for Maps. Observe how different a Google Search results page looks on Chrome vs Firefox on Android: https://imgur.com/a/A8TYQ
I'm sure some will say they're more happy with the simpler interface, but the fact still remains that they're serving a lower quality version of the site (with no access to things like Search Tools to filter by date, for example) to non-Chrome users.
At the time, asm.js was the standard for high-performance web applications, and Google decided to go with a format only they used, with no backwards compatibility to any other browser, ignoring the back then WIP WebAssembly.
And despite using a simple compiler backend to compile their native code to NaCl that also allows support for asm.js and WASM in a matter of a few days (entire game engines have been ported that way), Google has been going for months and still kept it Chrome-only.
Did you read the article I linked? It explains why they went with NaCL over ASM, and why, despite them having a WASM prototype for months now, it's not ready for production yet.
This isn’t the first time Google has released a product exclusively for Chrome, trying to pull more users to their own platform. Even if this is not directly intended, the result is a massive anticompetitive effect.
Switching the user agent isn't enough because it's not blindly relying on the user agent. It's actually doing feature detection so if your browser doesn't support whatever features used for remote desktop it'll give you an error message without relying on whitelisting a particular browser. This is exactly how web applications that need to use non-universal features should work, sure, look at the user agent for blacklisted browsers but use feature detection for what you can so that a new web browser that supports it will work without needing to modify the whitelisted user agents.
Google has been doing that for a long time. For example, many years ago it showed a warning about an unsupported browser if you tried to visit Google Docs using Opera. Now it is using user-agent to choose Youtube UI version (if you are unlucky to use a modern browser, you will get that bright whitened UI with huge margins).
Sadly I do something similar for Amazon Music. I don't have the bundled flash player in Chrome enabled and it won't use web based drm on Linux browsers, so I use a user agent extension that tells their site I'm on Windows and it works fine.
I hate Facebook so much for this. Their apps are beyond bloated and track far more than I'm interested in sharing. It used to be no issue at all to send messages.
But suddenly it's not possible to send a message without going to a clunky version of Facebook.
My objections are not with Facebook really. I'm willing to make the tradeoffs that are required to participate in Facebook. I wish it were better, but Facebook is responding to incentives and is rewarded for its actions, so it's hard for me to hate them, or expect moral virtuousness.
Facebook is just doing what capitalism tells it is ok. Hate for Facebook is wasted energy. We have to stop rewarding the behaviors that we don't wish to see repeated.
One of the issues was that companies that targeted IE often developed their sites using vbscript rather than jscript, therefore they would not be compatible without a re-write.
> One of the issues was that companies that targeted IE often developed their sites using vbscript rather than jscript, therefore they would not be compatible without a re-write.
Based on:
>> Firefox didn't have a problem displaying those pages
You can see what resolution you're getting with the Ctrl+Alt+Shift+D shortcut to bring up Netflix's debugging information (and press again to dismiss it). You can also verify your resolution with the Test Patterns video.
The sad thing is 1080p video works just fine in Firefox. There's a Firefox add-on available which enables the 1080p stream:
But that's also the restriction for Chrome. Only edge, IE and Safari get 1080p support for browsers. Which proves to me that I don't need 1080p really since I hadn't noticed.
Some people call that "responding to user feedback". It sucks that you don't agree with their decision, but trying to paint Mozilla in a bad light for listening to their users' demands is preposterous.
Yes. And I am saying that it's preposterous because they did what any organization (and I mean any, this applies to companies, nonprofits, governments, etc) should be doing -- listening to their users.
Their beliefs are great and all, but at the end of the day they are providing a product for the end user, so if their users are "bitching" that they want Netflix and other EME services available on Firefox, then the right choice is to make the user happy if possible.
What about former users... because that who the most vocal people where, Chrome Traitors that do not value freedom, privacy or security.
Their actual users were demanding they not do it, they not Embrace Web Extensions, they not Force install Adware on every system, they Not make Privacy Invading features opt-out instead of Opt-In. They not Embrace the destruction of the Open Web....
We, the actual Firefox user base, were given a big middle finger by Mozilla and instead they went on a sorry excuse for a begging marketing ploy to beg user to return to their new Chrome Clone
Any organization cares about their userbase as a whole. There's no distinctions. No "former users", "traitors", or "actual Firefox user base". Just "users". Because once you get past a certain number of users, you need to start looking at decisions statistically.
If 70% of users want Netflix, and the other 30% want privacy, then Mozilla is going to look at the 70%. Because that's what makes sense from any sort of organizational planning. You're not going to try to appease a tiny minority (and yes, privacy-conscious individuals are very much in the minority in the world. We may be in a bubble here on HN, but the common person is not going to give two shits about the privacy concerns we may have) when you can appease far more users by doing the opposite.
You've made it clear you are biased in this argument. Maybe try taking a step back and looking at the issue more objectively, or from the other perspective.
I am being very objective, The Mozilla Foundation is a Non profit tax free organization that gets that tax free status because they are suppose to be following their stated goal of the organization not to be popular
Mozilla Foundation has a Tax Free Status in order to promote the Open Web
They are no longer honoring that goal, as such they should lose their Tax Free status, the should stop calling themselves a Foundation, they should stop fraudulently holding themselves out as being For Privacy and the Open web
if they want to make a Insecure, Privacy Invading Browser, that is perfectly fine. Google and MS already do that
They need to be honest about it and not hold themselves out to be something they are not
They do not fight for the open web, they do not fight for user privacy, they do not support the goals stated in the the Mozilla Manifesto. Thus it should be removed and Mozilla Foundation should be dissolved into the Mozilla Corporation a for profit software vendor making a Commercial Web Browser
You taking the stance that Mozilla is no different than Google, MS or other Commercial Software Vendors. That they are a software company looking to make the best software for their customers..
Mozilla does not have customers, Mozilla is not and should not be a commercial entity, Mozilla is a Charitable Foundation with a set of goals they are violating
In those days each browser had their own quirky idea of how to render a website (even Firefox). None of which was really "right" but how IE did it was the de facto standard because IE had 90+% marketshare. If you had a site that could potentially be "broken" if the layout didn't render correctly the the easiest thing to do was to test that it worked how you wanted it to in IE and then add a note telling people it might be broken in other browsers (or not serve to them).
It wasn't until after people really started focusing on standards compliance and cross-browser compatible frameworks that things got better. The "acid tests" for html/css/js standards compliance helped establish how far along the various browsers were at the time. Most browsers were absolutely terrible in that era, it wasn't until Chrome hit the scene and webkit started taking off that standards compliance started to become a big deal. Eventually most major browsers had decent or good standards compliance in their rendering and things like jQuery helped smooth over the rough spots of differences in browser behavior.
Just tried this with latest versions of Chrome and FF on Android. The Firefox one loads what looks like the desktop site from 2013 but with bigger font; the chrome one loads a regular modern UI.
Faking the user agent header (yay, FF on Android supports all the desktop extensions) makes everything normal on Firefox.
Those days are nowhere close to over. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636674 for a short list of examples that Mozilla's web compat team has hit just in the recent past.
I remember there being some activeX plugin/module/whatchamacallit that'd run your website in a google chrome frame inside IE. Awful hack but it did work great.
And in the newest installment, https://github.com/google/closure-library/issues/883 is UA-sniffing that is now preventing Firefox from aligning with all other browsers on whether arrow keys fire keypress events, which causes _other_ Google things, which assume they don't, to break.
Also Closure assumes that only things with "WebKit" in their UA might be running on a mobile device and that all browsers fall into the WebKit/IE/Edge/Gecko buckets (and will fail badly if a browser does not).
Firefox didn't have a problem displaying those pages, so I had to install a plugin so that Firefox could pretend to be Internet Explorer so that I could just see the web page.
I'm glad those days are over.