Imagine using Chrome in 2024.
I have found a lot of websites over the last few months acting up if I’m using Firefox.
I have chrome for work and if I switch they work flawlessly. It’s small things like menus not expanding or elements not loading.
There’s a push on unifying browsers.
I’ve been Firefox and duckduckgo for years and it’s getting a bit annoying. Obviously the trade off is worth it I do not want the big tech products but finding good alternatives is getting hard.
DDG has gone downhill in recent years.
I use Firefox on Linux and FreeBSD for my daily driver.
I was not able to book flights on Thai airways website 6 months ago until I loaded it in chrome/chromium instead.
It’s really really rare imo but that’s one example in recent history.
Not a very big website, but the service my therapist uses for teletherapy doesn’t support anything outside of chromium.
Wow, that random news article I hit 16 days ago where the page kept flickering and reloading, but didn’t do that when I copied the URL into Brave… I really should’ve recorded that domain so I could defend myself against some stranger online!
Sarcasm aside, I don’t think it’s generally the major websites that you bump into this with, however, there are many edge cases that occur for plenty of folks, whether they’re in college and have to use that “secure browser” extension that only supports Chrome, or the fact that some websites, especially in business, that simply refuse to support browser and will prevent access otherwise.
I’m a Firefox user, so this isn’t to say that Chromium is the way by any means, but hopefully to shine a little light on the fact that we’re all on different parts of the web with different experiences, questioning their experiences so that you can hopefully find an extension or something to pin the blame them does not absolve them of their experience, just a show of elitism.
Firefox HAS gotten much better, but unfortunately, Capitalism’s gonna Capitalism
I couldn’t submit a support ticket for id.me (the IRS’ stupid commercial partner for Identity verification) when using Firefox, the submit button literally did not work. Worked fine when switching to edge (blegh).
Oh, and I can’t seem to get tiktok videos to play on Firefox on Android? Not a major issue, but my sister keeps sending them to me in particular for some reason, so…
Example: The meeting webservice my bank uses is for whatever reason blocked for Firefox. Not sure if they just User-Agent check but they consciously block out Firefox users. I alerted my bank person about that but I doubt that’s going to be any different next time I have a meeting with them.
I just gave you an example of menus not expanding.
I’m not dogging Firefox I’m saying there is a consorted effort made to reduce it’s usefulness.
The search in the Walmart site has only been working on and off (mostly off) in Firefox, but consistently in Chrome. There’s also some webpages for my university that only work in Chrome
Edit: looks like the Walmart search is working now though for me. The only reason I even have duckduckgo browser is because walmart.com was giving me issues on Firefox
I remember whipping out Vivaldi (which is Chrome-based) for booking a ticket on the Interrail website: https://www.interrail.eu/en
I haven’t fiddled much with weaker privacy/ad-blocking settings though, because I didn’t have the patience for that.
I can think of 2 websites that didn’t work right over the past 10 Yeats. Both were credit card payment sites and just had weird issues like couldn’t hit the submit button. I figured it out and just used edge for them. I never found any site that I use often that has issues yet.
DDG has gone downhill in recent years.
Not as much as Google though, so I’ve been feeling like it’s been getting better and better, but it’s just a comparative feeling.
To me it’s worrying because it is where Google was when I jumped ship for DDG.
I am getting tailored results that I do not want. Everything I search even with location off gives me local to very local responses.
If I open a link and then go back to the results page all the results have changed order.
Firefox + uBlock Origin and I have no issues with any websites.
Which ones are you having issues with and what is happening?
Sometimes those websites lied that they don’t support Firefox. For example, google meet didn’t support background blur on Firefox? Change the user agent to chrome and it suddenly worked!
As for simple stuff such as menu or elements not loading, it’s usually the dev copy pasted outdated code/css that uses WebKit/Bink-specific prefix even though Firefox already support them if they removed the prefix. Nothing we can do about that except pestering the dev to fix it or overriding it yourself using some css overrides extension.
DDG has gone downhill in recent years.
I haven’t noticed this at all.
I’ve been a frequent DDG g! bang user over the years, but now almost never have to go it. Granted I use kagi for most searches now, but my phone still defaults to DDG, and I’ve noticed that it works just fine.
Google and therefore kagi are still better for stackoverflow indexing I believe, at least that’s how I remember it
What is DDG g! Bang?
Yeah it is really odd I can’t understand why it does it because the initial reason I moved to DDG was because of their big marketing push on not putting results or users into bubbles.
Brave may be persona non Grata around here, but props to them for actually crawling the web. Just about every other private search engine uses APIs from Google/Bing or scrapes/proxies results from other search engines.
Saying that you use Brave seems to result in instant downvotes in lemmy. Kinda makes sense given the fediverse demographic simply don’t align with Brave’s CEO.
Also, mentioning Kagi often results in replies accusing ads and shilling because Kagi is a paid search engine (with free trial), but it worth checking nonetheless. They reached 20k paying users recently, not bad for a new paid search engine. The fact they’re able to convince 20,000 people to pay for search engine means the search result is pretty good.
Honestly, I’ve tried switching but can’t find a browser that works as well. I found Kiwi Browser on Android which is still chromium based but at least it’s something, but still need to use Chrome from time to time as websites won’t work on Kiwi.
Firefox just doesn’t perform as well comparatively, lacks features and then as you go down the list of alternatives it gets worse and worse.
So not from lack of trying, but at least for me it is the best browser particularly if you can install enough extensions to remove a lot of garbage.
Not to sound snarky, but what are you missing from Firefox that chrome does?
On PC, Group tabs for me. I find it extremely useful for efficiency. There’s nothing equivalent on Firefox even with extensions.
I could just give up on them admittedly but once you get used to something it’s hard to change and I fucking hate having too many tabs open.
On Android, the performance was just worse than chromium based browsers. Not sure if it was something wrong with my settings, but I’m talking like at least 1-2 second lag differences in loading a basic Web page. Makes it unusable for me.
They won’t answer, because they can’t answer.
For me, I’ve noticed a few websites that complain that firefox “is an out of date browser, you should use something more modern”. My bank’s website does that, but still works fine as far as I’ve been able to tell.
There’s a word for software that does actions without the user’s permission or knowledge.
That word is MALWARE
Every piece of software does things without your permission or knowledge.
If it does what you wanted it to when you installed it, it’s doing things with your permission. If what it was going to do was clearly and correctly explained during the download or install process, it’s doing things with your knowledge.
It’s like a motor vehicle. You don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works to be able to give informed consent about driving it, but if it starts rolling away after you park it, you’re going to either get it fixed or get a new car.
You understand and give explicit permission for every piece of the kernel?
This is beyond pedantic. You and everybody else knows exactly what they meant.
If we’re going to call something malware we better be damn sure we understand the definitions of it.
Microsoft Edge is actually good, so I sure hope the team building it isn’t about to resort to more tricks to get Chrome users to use it.
Edge is good compared to IE which was a dumpster fire, and arguably about as bad as Chrome. Both are privacy nightmares and desire nothing more than to harvest your data for ad companies. I trust Google a hair more than I do Microsoft. I don’t use Chrome. That should tell you something.
Nonsense, Edge is a top tier Chromium browser. Vivaldi is another good Chromium option although I no longer use it. Chrome while a decent browser however is irrelevant in my eyes on any W10/W11 since Edge is part of OS.
Every day I use both Edge (only at work) and Firefox (home and work), both have pros and cons. I tried to switch from Firefox to Vivaldi less than 1 year ago, but there are some thing in Chromium based browsers that I did not like when compared to Firefox. Bookmark management was a big one (no tags).
I disagree. Chrome is a simple well designed browser that happens to be run by a company that tries to push things we don’t like, such as FLoC.
Edge is full of bloatware and dark patterns. You’re probably thinking of the early versions of Edge when none of that crap had been added yet… but trust me it’s a very different browser now. In fact it’s worse than IE ever was.
Meh. My work gives me the choice of Chrome and Edge. I decided to try edge to get access to bing chat last year, and I’ve found it to be a pleasant experience compared to chrome. It’s got some neat features, and the built in copilot AI can be handy. I haven’t missed chrome (or Google for that matter) in the year I’ve been using edge. It’s fine. Still use Firefox on my personal laptop and phone though.
worse than IE ever was
This argument can be made for spying/telemetry, but I don’t think anything will compare to how bad the IE user experience was for years. It ran so slowly, and took forever to get features like tabbed internet browsing. It started to get more functional towards the end once it started losing market share, but that was after years of it being complete garbage while having absolute market dominance.
Sell your soul to Microsoft!
YES, please
not now
Linux and Firefox gang rise up.
I only use it in a VM and only for Visual Studio which is only for one class. It does nothing outside of that class
My main OS is Linux Mint
I used to se in camp firefox, but ungoogled chromium just feels so much better now
There is a net effect in browsers and in rendering engines especially.
The more people use chrome engine (that is pretty much everyone except Firefox) the more web developers support only Chrome because… Cost/layoffs.
For this reason i make a point in using only FF (except for websites that already don’t work with Geko).
Monopolies are not good for anyone (especially with current Google attitude)
Google chrome ads have been getting really obnoxious lately even though I only see them when visiting friends who don’t have an adblocker. Needless to say I use Firefox exclusively and only fire up chromium for work once in a while to see how stuff behaves in different browsers.
Edit: makes me wonder why chrome is marketing so aggressively even while their userbase is by far the biggest.
Saying “everyone except Firefox” is not accurate. Iceweasel, Pale Moon, Librewolf, etc, they all use the Gecko rendering engine. Are they a fraction of a blip in the ecosystem? Unfortunately, yes.
Ungoogled chromium is worse than Firefox in term of features, no? Why use it instead of Firefox?
Because it has all the features I actually want and none of the ones I don’t need. Firefox also isn’t anywhere near as privacy respecting as people think. And lacks features that even ungoogled chromium has (like websql). I’m kind of surprised about the downvotes tbh. Hive mind much?
Microsoft is the fucking worst with their trick questions and constant nagging.
They do this because they want you to use Edge which steals search results from other search engines.
