Who cares? I use Firefox but why do I care if the US government does? I thought they were still using Netscape on Windows ME
Did you read the article? This is about how the government’s web developers could stop writing websites that support Firefox. You might have to switch to Chromium to use government websites.
Web dev here. Unless they explicitly block other browsers or somehow adopt bleeding-edge tech that other browsers have and Firefox doesn’t (has Firefox ever not been the first to support new standards?) I don’t know how this would even be a problem.
When I worked for the USDA in 2010 we had several web applications that depended on Internet Explorer 6.
I worked in an office in 2009 with a Windows 95 PC (a Packard Bell that barely ran the OS).
I got them to upgrade it in 2012.
Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.
Some sites that don’t work on FF will work if the site thinks you’re using a Chromium-based browser.
Huh. I can’t remember the last time a site didn’t work in firefox, but worked with a chromium-based browser.
I say we just set our UAs to “Firefox”, plain and simple. None of that “Chrome KHTML like Gecko” shit.
Typical Firefox UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0
Chrome: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
See browsers started calling themselves “Mozilla” to say “Hey I can do what Firefox can!” (or back then still navigator, doesn’t matter. So then sites started checking for “Gecko” (which is Mozilla’s browser engine), and browsers (in this case Konqueror, I think) started adding “Hey, I’m like Gecko” to it. Then… it just goes on and on.
The only things not Mozilla in that Firefox UA are X11, Linux, and x86_64. It never stepped so low as to call itself “Mozilla (like Mosaic)”.
Iirc there’s a “per site” spoofer that people could use instead, for those sites that require specific browsers. I don’t actually know what it’s called, and my cursory Google search didn’t bring up much of anything, but I do believe I’ve seen them before.
The FF extension is just called “User-Agent Switcher” I believe?
And yes, you can set it blacklist mode or whitelist mode (in other words, “use the extension on every domain but:” vs. “Only use the extension with these domains:”).
I’ll only switch away from FF if a site is completely broken. I’ll try it before resorting to chromium
Horrific but strategically inevitable, switch to chromium engine, and do your own privacy related fork . Like all the other browsers.
fork
what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation…
firefox is the only way for a free web…
Then they’d be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn’t be able to lock down the code that’s already been released under the more permissive BSD license.
Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It’s huge, which makes me think it’s the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.
EDIT: turns out it’s Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.
2% is huge. Many companies still have their website support ie6, and the US gov wants to abandon 2% of their users???
Governments agencies usually obtain software through contracts with vendors. Microsoft is one of those vendors so I’m not surprised to hear about this.
Also, Firefox is the pretty much the browser of freedom and independence so I’m surprised it’s not illegal or “against family values” at this point. 😔
