[Aachen]

I mean, with that market share, popularity among open source fans... it's an easy group to target and filter oddballs.

I'm a Firefox user and I'm used to this treatment at every step of the way, no matter if it's about software, airports, opening a bank account so I can receive a salary, etc. Fundamental things everyone wants to do are being made hard to do the right way. It's always anti privacy, anti self repair, anti longevity/sustainability, anti user freedoms, anti whatever we ideally want in this world. Of course using Firefox is now suspicious.

[detritus]

Really? I'm a firefox user too and whilst I occasionally bump into some situation as you describe where I need to hop onto Chrome, I genuinely can't remember the last time this happened. Nope, actually - sometime last year, with some poorly-coded gig ticket purchase thing, if I remember right. I was able to check the code and amend some stupid niggle in WebDev tools to get around it.

Not saying I should have to accept that, but that's what it was.

Certainly not 'regularly'.

[marcosdumay]

I certainly do not see it on the frequency the GP is talking about. But it's there. Every once in a while there is a site that insists on throwing you into infinite captchas, on requiring some extra information, or just refusing to work just because Firefox won't spy on me for their benefit.

I also do really not experience it "regularly", but different people visit different sites.

That said, the one problem I get most often is this Cloudfare one.

[coffeefirst]

Yeah, I find 99% of the web is fine but the exceptions are jarring. Fedex tracking is totally broken in Firefox. Quite a few sites still struggle without 3p cookies, which also affects Safari. Slack has some issues. It's also come up a few times while looking for a Google Docs replacement—several options are effectively Chromium only, which is ironic when you're only looking at them so you can avoid Google products.

[SoftTalker]

Often, just changing the user agent string so that Firefox appears to be Chrome will let those sites work. I.e. they work fine in Firefox, but are restricted by user agent string checks to reject that browser and/or OS.

There are several plugins for Firefox that make this easy.

[ntoskrnl]

I wonder if those plugins are causing Firefox's marketshare to appear worse than it actually is.

[adra]

I've used Firefox and Mozilla for what, 20 years? And I've never bumped into a situation like this. Some very clearly shit internal IT systems had pathetic IE requirements, but never one that said sorry go get chrome

[SoftTalker]

They don't always say "go get chrome" but one example that still happens to me is logging in to Outlook email at work, if I use Firefox I get a hobbled "basic HTML" interface, if I masquerade as Chrome on Windows I get the full UI and it all works perfectly.

Google drive is another one, where some things stop working depending on the user agent I'm presenting.

[EdwardDiego]

My health insurer won't let me login using Opera, a Chromium based browser, and suggests I install Firefox or... Chrome.

UA sniffing is soooo 2008.

[ben-schaaf]

Microsoft Teams also does this. Google meet used to do it too.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I have a randomized user agent and I occasionally see sites refuse to deliver a page because they think a particular browser won't work.

[lwthiker]

For a while now I can't even access WhatsApp Web [1] through Firefox. It gets stuck on the loading page and keeps refreshing itself forever. I have to resort to Chrome whenever I need WhatsApp on my laptop.

[1] https://web.whatsapp.com

[cpeterso]

If you time, please file a bug report on Mozilla’s webcompat.com with the steps you took and a screenshot. Mozilla’s webcompat developers will try to debug the website, reach out to the website’s web developers with a proposed fix, and until the website is fixed, add a site-specific intervention or UA override in Firefox itself, if possible.

Looks like there are already a couple bug reports about whatsapp.com, but not the forever-refreshing page you see:

https://webcompat.com/issues?page=1&per_page=50&state=open&s...

[pmontra]

I don't think I can be of much help but WhatsApp web has been working for me on Ubuntu with all Firefox versions since WhatsApp web has been a thing. Did you try to start Firefox in safe mode, no addons and/or a fresh profile?

[creatonez]

If anyone finds a solution it would be greatly appreciated. I have been cut off from a huge number of sites due to infinitely refreshing cloudflare.

It's absurd that this is even possible. They should at least provide troubleshooting advice for end users.

[OJFord]

I don't even have another browser installed.

[detritus]

I'm an ex-webnik who still occasionally dabbles in web design, so have all of them installed.

Unused, mostly, but installed :)

[OJFord]

I probably should, for the same reason - I did recentlyish use Array.sort in a way that turned out to work only in Firefox...

[Silhouette]

I'm a firefox user too and whilst I occasionally bump into some situation as you describe where I need to hop onto Chrome, I genuinely can't remember the last time this happened.

Sadly I find it happens more and more often, even with important things like financial services.

What I haven't figured out yet is whether it's really the Firefox engine that is the problem or just that Firefox also provides better tools for blocking obnoxious trackers and the like. Maybe because I have those tools turned on by default more sites using obnoxious trackers break in Firefox than other browsers. In most cases that is a feature not a bug but it's frustrating when essential functionality on sites providing essential services gets broken as collateral damage.

[ben-schaaf]

What I find most common is that the website has arbitrarily blocked firefox based on the user agent. The site works fine if you tell it you're using Chrome, so it's neither an engine nor a tracking issue.

[Hedepig]

At work I have to reject a call on slack and ask they make a "huddle" instead.

[Barrin92]

Just in the last month Firefox didn't work for me on my health insurer's site, my bank's site as well as when trying to request a mail-in ballot for a regional election. Obviously not Mozilla's fault, but for me at this point the browser isn't that usable any more because that's important services I need to have access to.

On large international sites the likelihood that Firefox works flawlessly is pretty high. But a lot of regional service providers appear to kind of have given up on it.

[bencollier49]

About once or twice a month I come across a site which hasn't been tested properly on Firefox and a flow of some sort doesn't work. The most recent was accessing scientific papers via a journal and academic society login. The redirect was broken on FF. Oh, and Facebook. Although that seems broken in various ways on all the browsers. Pretty remarkable.

[pmontra]

Google Cloud Console works only in Chrome for me. I've been accessing it with Vivaldi for years, then I got the you broke my internet sad robot icon since a few months ago. Firefox loads the page but most of it is blank. I played with the controls of my privacy plugin with no benefit. It could be my configuration.

[jtuente]

It's common enough that you recognize that you need to use a chromium browser, that's entirely too common. As a recent example, UPS tracking was/is broken on Firefox.

[davidhay]

Same, firefox works as it should for me.

[deknos]

i do not experience as much as your pre-poster, but i also experience it. "just use chrome"

[cleandreams]

Firefox use, same.

[GekkePrutser]

I don't even have chrome installed and never need it to be honest.

Except for some boneheaded sites that refuse FF entirely ( https://business.apple.com is such an offender) I don't have issues with sites not working.

Edit: it looks like even Apple has got their act together now, it seems to support Firefox now too. Finally

[CamperBob2]

I just followed your link and it says, "Your browser is not supported. We recommend using the latest version of Safari, Microsoft Edge, or Chrome."

So apparently Firefox is subversive and scary enough to make Apple refer me to Microsoft or Google to avoid it. I guess that's what passes for "Think Different" at Apple these days.

[cpeterso]

I tried spoofing Safari's and Chrome's User-Agent string in Firefox and business.apple.com still blocks me because I'm not using a real Safari or Chrome. So they appear to be using feature detection of some API that's not available in Firefox. I see that the site also blocks Apple's own Safari browser on iOS.

Looks like this site was been blocking Firefox users since at least 2018, according to the bug report on Mozilla's webcompat.com issue tracker:

https://webcompat.com/issues/18964

[zhfliz]

UA spofing used to work some time ago, as I was definitely using it that way.

it seems they recently changed something, because now I can't even load the login page properly anymore due to X-Frame-Options disallowing the embed of the auth iframe.

[throwlllllllll]

Don't get me started on banks and accounts! It's like they WANT me to take the simple, easy, forbidden paths.

[phh]

My personal experience is that I do fallback some sites to testing in Chrome quite often, maybe once a week. But the number of times where using Chrome actually fixed the issue is maybe once a year? Really, it's just that I stumble on quite a number of broken websites.

[kordlessagain]

Firefox is fast, so maybe it's getting flagged because people are using it with webdriver to crawl sites. Just a hypothesis.

[lfkdev]

Cool Username

[Aachen]

Appreciated :). I see you're from nearby, might you happen to be looking for dev or security work? (For anyone else reading this, remote is also possible. Contact in profile, to not spam the thread.)

I'm not actually from Aachen myself, but nearby in NL and I work in Aachen nowadays and wasn't sure what username to choose.

If someone else would want it, I'm also fine passing it on. Dunno if there are guidelines on that actually but I'd consider an HN username like a domain name: finite, first-come-first-serve in principle, and hoarding is not cool.