Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites. However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers", "uBlock Origin", and a few more. These are amazing for privacy and productivity, but will occasionally cause broken websites.

Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.




> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.

Firefox doesn't cause broken websites. Websites developers that target only Chrome cause websites to inadvertently become broken in Firefox.



Firefox doesn't. But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does. I keep Chrome up for VirusTotal to scan PortableApps.com releases. In Firefox, it'll throw broken ReCaptcha prompts over and over and over after a certain number of scans per day (pick the thing, next, pick the thing, next x10, etc). And that's with all extensions disabled. Possibly related: VirusTotal and ReCaptcha are owned by Google.


When these sites break I prefer to spam their support or just not use them. If they won't support firefox then they don't deserve my patronage.


It's not patronage if you don't pay. Google would rather not have you as a user if it costs them any amount of time to support you. The relationship here is adversarial on both sides and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.


if firefox users keep flooding their support line with problems then that means firefox users are costing them money. eventually it will be cheaper to build software that actually works.


Google chooses to provide those services for "free" which means thez actually do benefit from the users.


For those that don't know, Virustotal saves all samples and provides them to researchers.


> But publishers de-prioritizing or being hostile to Firefox does.

Honestly, we should take the same stand against them. Those who are hostile towards Firefox should be publicly named and shamed for sheer incompetence and/or malice.


> Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites.

There are definitely websites that don't work with Firefox out of the box. Just one example that annoys me is https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com. "Firefox users: Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection may interfere with Sign In. Temporarily disable it in Firefox Privacy Settings to load the sign in screen."


Alternatively read as: “We are actively hostile to user-chosen browser privacy settings such that we develop our application to coach our users to turn these settings off as a necessary means of accessing their account”. I guess that’s what they call a death spiral given that the behavior discourages me from attending any would-have-been-DCI events.


Are you sure that your tracking protection is set to "Standard"? You'd have to change it manually to stricter protection.

I know of several sites that break if you go beyond Standard, but none if you don't.


It's probably third party cookies but not for long, Chrome will also remove them next year so they will have to do something about it.


Yeah, I find more broken websites out of the box with Firefox than Chrome (even disabling extensions/ad blockers)

I use Chrome at work (corporate provisioned device) and Firefox at home so both get a good amount of usage


There is a filter list for ublock origin that bypasses such things (and cookie consent popups).

That’s not “working out of the box”, but leads to a much less broken experience than chrome (especially with the manifest v3 BS).


I have had sites that are definitely broken in Firefox even after a stock install with every last toggle/extension/script blocker turned off. It's fairly rare, but there are a slowly growing list of sites that don't behave properly under Firefox but work in Chromium.


The question is if the problem is Firefox or the webpage.

Remember when Google killed the Edge render engine per YouTube problems?


I always read that some sites don't work with Firefox but the writers never mentions which sites are broken.

So I'm curious, which sites are broken in vanilla FF?


I use a home video appliance called camect which is accessed through a web interface which explicitly only works in chromium browsers. Oddly, I often find that the bbc news page doesn't load images on the first attempt in Firefox, but always does in Chrome.


One of them happens to be the educational site https://www.deltamath.com/


OK so what is broken? The homepage comes up fine and a few clicks seem fine. Do I have to sign up to see issues?


I only use Firefox, and I very rarely notice any kind of broken sites. I remember one bank site last year had a minor issue.


Multi-account-containers doesn't really break websites in my opinion. It's just like running a separate browser (in fact it's simply a firefox profile under the hood).

What can go wrong is if you've set a certain site to always open in a certain container and another site redirects you to this site. This can happen with Identity Providers like Okta, ADFS etc. They will then open in a different container (the assigned one) and lose context. Especially microsoft services have an annoying habit of redirecting through 25 different URLs on every sign-in. But if configured correctly it's a godsend, you can use this tool to sign into multiple MS tenants at the same time, something with chrome and not even Edge can do right now (switching teams between multiple tenants is a nightmare).

But I don't think it's the multi accounts containers at fault here, it's the user. Just don't do that :P


I have chrome installed. In the rare occasion that Firefox does not do a good job I just switch to chrome for that website and then go back.

This is usually the case if there might be forms or something like that. It's minor enough that it doesn't bother me.

Now, on the other hand, tab management is so much better with chrome and I've considered using Chrome for that reason alone. At work I do use chrome because I usually have 10-15 websites open at a time (for example I like to keep one tab group per ticket and every related item to it there).

I do use simple tab groups on Firefox but it's not good enough at least to replace my workflow at work.



Hey! So I finally felt inspire and made a demo of my Firefox userchrome.css and Tree Style Tabs customization and CSS on my Github here [1]. It makes it so that the Tree style tabs expand and contract over the page, showing just the favicon and number of sub-tabs when contracted, along with a few other things, like reducing border sizes and adding better indication for sound in a tab. It's pretty nifty I think; I hope someone finds it to their liking. :)

https://github.com/jessebeard/firefox_settings


I wish tab groups to be implemented natively. Or that extensions can manage the tab bar instead of using a sidebar. That’s the best experience we can get so far, but it does not feel right to me.


This extension alone is sufficient justification to shift to Firefox.


In general, browsers do not cause broken websites

This, again, can be restated as incompetent developers cause broken websites (!)

("... do not attribute to bad faith that which can be explained by stupidity")


I don't mind breaking websites, if I can fix them on my own terms.


I have two profiles for firefox dorkily called "hax0r mode" and "normie mode", each with different theming so I can tell the diff. I try to do as much as I can in hax0r mode, which has uBlock O, NoScript, auto cookie delete and a few other privacy settings like no 3rd party cookies. Sites usually start pretty broken before I tweak NoScript for them, which I'm OK with.

Occasionally, sites are obstinate and I need to use Normie mode (e.g. for Maps)

Normie mode just has uBlock O, containers. I really have zero problems with sites breaking here.


Nah, there's plenty of examples of sites breaking on Firefox. For example, the recent degraded performance on Youtube linked to Firefox User Agent strings.


Yeah but that's not on Mozilla in any way. That's just Google's anti-competitive practices. Firefox refuses to jump on Google's attempts to ban adblockers with Manifest V3 so Google wants to punish them


I feel like it doesn't matter how many examples of Firefox not working properly you are faced with, you will simply respond "well that's not Mozilla's fault, that on the website developer" for each and every one. At the end of the day it's the Firefox user who is faced with the problem.


I do feel that there’s a difference in kind between: “a website was built with Chrome in mind, and has problems rendering in Firefox”, and “a website was built specifically to degrade in Firefox”.

If no engineering time was spent on Firefox, and it’s broken in Firefox, that’s a Firefox problem.

If active engineering time was spent on _deliberately breaking_ Firefox, then yes, I don’t think that’s a Firefox problem. I think it’s a website problem at that point.


which means other than a small handful of power users most people will continue using chrome, and websites will continue prefering to put it first, continuing the cycle

im curious to see what effect ublock not working as well on chrome as it will on firefox will have to the demographics, if there's no shift then that's a hurdle that has to be overcome by either firefox by some sort of engineering, google, or via legislation


Nowadays there's very few websites that work on Chrome but not Firefox. Hell I'd even throw modern Safari in that. Interop 2021-2023 has made a huge difference

Besides specific Google products, most everything works across all 3 major engines.

In addition, Mozilla adds specific code to Firefox to counteract anti-competitive practices on specific websites


What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?

Do people honestly believe that if they keep recommending FF, people will magically switch to FF and Google will be forced to stop its anti-competitive practices?


> What matters for the end user is the experience. If using FF will lead to a poor experience on certain websites, then why recommend it?

Because holding that against Firefox is exactly what Google is counting on. And the more you recommend it the harder it is for Google to continue its anti-competitive practices.

The more you fall a fool for Google's (or Microsoft a decade ago) practices, the worse the experience for everyone is in the future.

Anyways, there's simple extensions that will sidestep Chrome's bs. In addition, you'll soon to be able to get an adblocked experience that you can only get on Firefox. That means less network traffic, faster loading websites, and better user privacy


Speaking of adblock experience with Firefox (and uBlock origin), Google has managed to slip ads into my Youtube experience. So far I can skip them after watching the first 5 seconds so it's not too bad.

Before that they had a popup that would timeout after 15s (?). At that point I tried disabling uBlock on Youtube but found the ads stacked up to much longer, so the 15s delay was more acceptable.

As expected, this will probably continue to be a cat and mouse game.


My adblock on Firefox works seamlessly (0s downtime) and I dread the idea of having to navigate YouTube on any other browser.


Immediately giving every bully whatever they want with no resistance is certainly one way to navigate life.


Yea - because Google is just outright acting evil in a number of ways. A good example is the fact that background blur isn't supported in google meet in FF and that audio translation is similarly blocked in FF. These are just arbitrary ways that Google is degrading the FF experience because of their commanding market share.


I use Google meet with Firefox on Ubuntu. Background blur works for me, as well as auto-caption. Haven’t tried auto-translation though.


Well, there's also the fact that Google is currently being prosecuted for antitrust violations on both sides of the Atlantic...

Do you honestly believe that it's OK for Google to just keep being anti-competitive? Or that this is a completely inevitable and unfixable state of affairs?

We can, should, and will hold Google accountable for its monopolistic conduct, and this is absolutely part of that.


If you want an experience that includes privacy violations, knock yourself out. Personally, as an end user, that is exactly what I don’t want, which is why I use Firefox


What good does not recommending it achieve? Maintaining the status quo which as well discussed elsewhere in these threads is hardly generally desirable?

My move back to FF has been slow (as mentioned already too) but I've been recommending it to others, who don't have my self-inflicted blocker, for some time. Maybe some will stop listening if I keep mentioning it, but people online I'll never meet in person are hardly a great loss in my life. The sort of people who are going to take such issue in RealLife™ are likely those just paying me attention in exchange largely for free tech support (the matter isn't likely to come up in other contexts) and they can do one anyway too.


Manifest v3 does not ban adblockers, nor does the Chrome web store


It doesn't ban a blockers outright but does severely hamper them. It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin, and also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves and forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store.

Both of those will seriously hamper a more advanced adblock like UBlock Origin


>It severely limits how many filters that can exist within the plugin

The limits are 30,000 static rules and 30,000 dynamic rules. Running tens of thousands of regexs for each request can lead to a performance impact. Allowing for even higher limits may result in people having a worse experience from the browser becoming slower. The API was designed such that these limits can be increased in the future as available computation and user needs change over time. Getting extension developers to design their extensions in a way where they have to think about not slowing down the browser too much I think is a good thing and I would not call these current limits severe.

>also prevents plugins from updating block lists themselves

declarativeNetRequest lets rules be added and removed dynamically by the extension.

>forces those updated lists to go through the plugin store

The Chrome team has said that configuration can be updated outside of a store update. What the Chrome web store does not want are extensions that download and run code. This policy does not related to mv3.


It bans the ability for them to block or reroute network requests. Some adblockers might still work on some sites, but it'd mostly be an aesthetic feature. Your browser is still receiving the data, your network is still clogged, and websites are still slower.


And Netflix STILL refusing to play above 720p on Firefox if you’re running Linux, which I’m sure many here are.


I'll just keep pirating personally, I don't see why I should be treated worse if I'm paying.


To be fair, this is not a Firefox issue.

Unless you use Edge on Windows you still have the same limitation (or the windows store Netflix app).


One solution is not to use poorly coded websites.

It is unfortunate that Firefox doesn’t do more to help us avoid sites programmed by devs who are too incompetent to follow standards, really.


There's some more you should do to increase privacy: Disable Firefox sending each keystroke into the address bar to all the numerous search engines (includes google). Best to just enable the separate bar for search and disable search suggestions entirely.


"Firefox out of the box indeed does not cause broken websites" .. for you.

I regulary ran across something that does not work or has a broken style. And I know how to turn UO off.

And why should that be a surprise? FF has way less manpower than Chrome. (And even fired lots of engineers, to raise the CEO bonus)

Chrome leads the way and probably the vast majority developes for chrome and with chrome dev tools. So most of the time FF works, but not always. And performance is just worse, but not noticable on a desktop and on mobile it is offset by the working adblock. Meaning perceived performance is usually better, because ads are blocked, unlike in chrome mobile.


This has absolutely not been my experience. Must be a different extension you installed.


Or I just visit different websites?


Not the worst idea to avoid a website for breaking in FF (or take a chance to touch grass), but unfortunately when you can't pay your credit card bill or need something for your work and it only works in Chromium it can't be avoided.


Then we can compare brave and firefox in terms of speed. I don’t see any noticeable performance difference (I use both on linux and macos)


Then ... maybe have a look at some numbers:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-Chrome-109-Benchmarks

And sadly it can be worse, with my quite complex app, that I absolutely did not tailor for chrome, but gone out of my way to also support FF - the result is that chrome is just 3x faster.


Thank you, never looked at these. The benchmarks show a big margin, but still, I use both daily and do not notice such a gap


I also had problems recently with an online notary service... they forced me to use Chrome...

Not the same problem, but I wonder when faxes will disappear... For example, Progressive Insurance wanted me fax, mail pictures or bring them in person... email didn't work... Of course they didn't have a safe way to transfer them digitally but I would not care if everyone in the world saw those emails.

The useless requirements that they set just proves that they don't understand technology.


> Source: I am a Firefox-first user who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome because the aforementioned plugins (and "ClearURLs", "Consent-o-matic", and a few others) occasionally break websites.

I have good luck just using a private window, since that has no extensions by default. Bonus: It's really fast; ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-c enter


> ctrl-l ctrl-c ctrl-shift-p ctrl-v enter

FTFY

EDIT: Mine was wrong too. Thanks to ipython for the correction.


Wouldn’t it be Ctrl-v not ctrl-p? To paste instead of print a blank page?


Yep! My mistake, nice catch.


Shouldn't we say "Some sites break user browsing experience"?


Zero broken websites here, and I use those and more extensions. I also use FF on Android and iPadOS (although that's a Safari reskin, it provides some niceties on top like send tab to device).


I use Firefox with uBlock Origin. I don't use containers but I do use profiles.

Yes some sites are "broken" with uBlock Origin. I don't find it to be many, however. I run into paywalls much more often than I do problems with my browser settings.


Temporary and Multi-Account containers do not break websites.


Not sure about the others but uBlock Origin allows you to disable it for specific websites and remember the setting.


It’s probably the ublock origin breaking websites and not the multi-account containers, right?


i also use ublock matrix so i get to play "which third party hosts are needed to make this page work" for every new website


consent-o-matic lets a lot of them through.... I need to find an alternative that works better


you might want to try

    about:profiles
create a new profile and use that for testing


> ”who occasionally uses plugin-less Chrome”

Exactly, simply use a second “plugin-less” FireFox profile.

And if you really need a Chromium browser, Brave is a better choice than Google Chrome (for privacy reasons…)


Yeah im still a bit surprised that Github doesnt work in firefox for me. It wont load a repository page, its just blank with nothing but the navigation on the page. This happens after turning off all plugins. dont know if github has made it so only chrome works but thats a pretty major site for firefox to not work with.


That’s something weird with your setup, GitHub works just fine on Firefox for everyone else.


GitHub works with Firefox. I use that combination every day.


Might have something stuck in your profile that's causing that. Wiping your profile can usually fix that, even if you re-sync your preferences.


> However, the demographic of this forum probably will use Firefox with "Multi-Account Containers", "Temporary Containers"

Never even heard of these... hmm




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: