[ajorgensen]

I have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.

[jstanley]

People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.

[rprospero]

Concrete examples:

The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.

imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.

These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.

[tmottabr]

I just tested both sites from my default firefox profile.

zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video..

imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect.

It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..

[gitaarik]

Never had problems with Zoom and Jitsi in Firefox. Should work fine. I don't think the problem is because Firefox renders sites differently.

On imascientist.org.uk I don't see a sign up button, only login.

[MasterYoda]

If I record correctly, Mozilla has said that like 97% of all problems people has is with problems is due to extensions, not Firefox. '

When you have a site not working as expected, start Firefox in "Troubleshoot Mode" (alt-key then in the menu at the top Help > Troubleshot mode) that starts Firefox with addons turn off. If the site works, restart and turn of addons one by one to you see which one creates the problem.

[Forgeties79]

Very strange. I run Zoom constantly in FF - my company does several events a week that I edit, so i’m thick in the weeds on zoom’s site doing admin/recording management stuff. Almost 3 years on zoom’s site almost every single day, never had to swap browsers. Mac Studio if that matters.

[ajorgensen]

I unfortunately do not have a running list. The one that made me drop Firefox last time was the mermaid.js docs site. None of the sidebar navigation was clickable but only on Firefox, the same issue did not appear on Safari or Chrome. It appears they have since fixed that issue as I retested and it appears fine.

The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.

[jstanley]

Is it this site? https://mermaid.js.org/intro/

It works fine for me.

[gitaarik]

Often people forgot they have installed an obscure exstension in Firefox and that is breaking the site, trying another browser it works, concluding that Firefox must be the problem, while it was the extension. That is also why people usually cannot reproduce the problem later or give concrete examples.

[talim]

I've been using Firefox as a daily driver for four years and have not run into a single site that was truly "unusably" broken except perhaps some Google-published tech demo for a new webgpu feature.

I've occasionally run into relatively minor visual issues (I think from before the :has pseudo-class was made generally available in FF) but I cannot think of a single instance where a site was unusable and then worked when I tried it in Chrome.

[smhenderson]

I, similar to the parent, have very few issues on either my computers or phones. I run Firefox on several different OS's and I just don't have the issues you mention.

Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using?

Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!

[ajorgensen]

The most recent ones that I ran into seem to have been fixed based on a quick check. mermaid.js docs site was one of them where nothing on the page was clickable (I think Firefox was rendering an invisible div over the entire page) but this issue wasn't present in Chrome or Safari. That appears to have been fixed. Examples are hard to provide since they almost always get fixed but in the moment its enough pain to always get me to drop Firefox.

[Forgeties79]

If it always getting fixed shortly after, it probably means something is going on in your settings or in the background that is interfering at the time you are trying to access them. Just my two cents. I know when I run proton vpn, little snitch, my various extensions, etc. one of them is always the culprit no matter what browser I use.

[gitaarik]

If it gets fixed quickly, it was probably an issue with the particular website or a plugin of yours rather than Firefox's issue. People are fast to "conclude" it must be Firefox. You should also test in a private tab with no plugins enabled. That might very well also fix the issue.

[cubefox]

Google Images has problems with Firefox. If previewing several related pictures, the back button of the browser doesn't bring you back to the last image, but to somewhere else.

[gitaarik]

You know Google is known for deliberately making their sites underperform or break in Firefox? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

[illiac786]

* Recording in web client of Duolingo does not work on Firefox, only in chrome. * Webserial for flashing esp for example is not supported * Webauth took forever to be supported (still not sure it's fully supported)

But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.

[illiac786]

Just found another one that doesn’t work on FF, the list is now:

* duolingo.com (mic does not work) * mediatest.webex.com * webserial in general

[mostlysimilar]

Often claimed, never backed up with links.

[coryfklein]

I use Firefox as my daily driver. There are in fact some websites that don't work on it, but it is rarely anything mainstream. My example is the website 3M provides for doing medical code grouping. Probably less than 0.01% of the internet uses it, but it only works on Chrome and then just barely.

[layer8]

There is the occasional site, but you can restrict your use of Chromium to that (and don’t need to use Chrome at all).

[Twirrim]

Honestly? No. If I do it's on the order of "once in a year", and usually only sites that are doing something specifically quirky, like particular types of webgpu demos or somesuch.

[ajorgensen]

Oh interesting. I actually find custom docs sites (mermaid.js was the most recent one for me) seem to be the ones that break most commonly for me in Firefox but work in Chrome and Safari.

[shrimp_emoji]

The only reason websites break on Firefox for me is that I break them myself with uBlock Origin and NoScript. >:D I'd rather have them broken than put up with their repugnant bullshit. The rare time I need a site to work pristinely for some reason, I begrudgingly pull out my (mostly) vanilla Chrome though.