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by AsyncAwait 2699 days ago
It's the same for Gmail, but this isn't Firefox at fault. It's Google doing this on purpose by using the old, experimental, non-standard ShadowDOM V0 API, which only Chrome supports, and then using that across its products to break non-Chrome based browsers. Please don't reward them by using Chrome just because of this. That only shows them that such abusive behavior works.
2 comments
BuckRogers 2699 days ago
That is very interesting, thanks for sharing that information. I never did use Chrome other than testing it out for less than a day, finding issues with various sites and uninstalling it. Firefox instead since it was in beta (Phoenix) and never left. Never had a real problem with it.

I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.

Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.

Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.

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criddell 2699 days ago
Enough people use Gmail and YouTube that maybe it would make sense for Firefox to add support for ShadowDOM V0 API? It might not be a W3C standard, but if Google uses it heavily then it's a defacto standard.
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AsyncAwait 2699 days ago
They could, except that would effectively show Google that it can dictate what other browsers implement, alter its products on rapid basis to regularly break them etc. and at that point there's almost no point to an alternative, since we'd we're fully back in the IE era again, which is why I don't think it's a good idea.

If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.

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criddell 2699 days ago
Firefox doesn't have the market share to push back on Google. The best way for Firefox to grow is to make the best browser from the user's perspective.
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AsyncAwait 2699 days ago
I get that, but this seems like controlled opposition.

Moreover, once you give in on this, what's Google going to do next? Use APIs only in Chrome that Mozilla needs to implement only after they're made public in Chrome by literally looking at the source code? There's always going to be a lag if that's the dynamic, so there's always going to be the perception that Firefox is behind.

Moreover if Firefox adopts it, it makes it more likely to be adopted by Apple too, since Google's now not the only kid on the block to support it and now you turned it into a de-facto standard.

Mozilla already partially caved to Google in pursuit of the "best browser" as perceived by the average user. That was on DRM. Now I say partially because at least they made it opt-in, but so they caved and next Google came up with this thing.

If you going to keep paying ransom, you're going to have a lot of hostages.

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