Visit about:compat in your firefox. I find it insane that these exist.
Edit: I’ve learned that this is part of the webcompat system addon developed by Mozilla and other contributors. I see why this is beneficial default behavior, since FF has no chance of getting enough market share to matter more if things are broken.
However, this behavior is too intrusive for my taste. For example this injection: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/8a4afb4d34f8/browser/extensions/webcompat/injections/js/bug1472075-bankofamerica.com-ua-change.js is basically just to silence annoying user reports.
Also, Every site FF pretends to be a different UA on is artificially reducing FF market share data.
- Why is this trash? It’s making websites that are hostile work properly?
- The example you linked literally doesn’t reduce FFs marketshare. It’s a fix for a website that’s hostile towards macOS and Linux users, by pretending to be FF on Windows…
- I believe including specific site fixes in the main browser release is a bad idea. It seems like many disagree with that belief, and that’s fine.
- For that example I take issue with the justification in the comment above the code that the problem solved is a high volume of reported issues. That injection solves a problem for webcompat, not Firefox.
What I mean by market share is for each individual site that Firefox pretends to be another browser on, that site’s statistics will show very few or no Firefox users. Sites that are already broken probably don’t care, but they may see that as justification to disregard Firefox users i During future changes.
… Uh… This doesn’t seem that objectionable. It’s a bunch of targeted fixes to websites, I imagine every browser does it in some form. Firefox at least allows you to turn it off if for some reason you wanted to.
BTW, I think Proton (for playing games) does this as well.
Also, Every site FF pretends to be a different UA on is artificially reducing FF market share data.
Ehhh… I think a bigger effect on FF market share statistics is probably all those privacy addons and settings everyone is using.
There are so many legitimate things to complain about with Mozilla, why do people go out of their way to complain about the most innocuous shit.
This isn’t even an issue though, its just to fix bugs with certain websites that block Firefox for no reason or have other weird compatibility issues. Which I would think is a good thing?
You’re right, for a browser meant for the masses it is probably a net benefit. I posted because I was surprised by this hidden behavior that seems better suited for a browser extension. Sneaky behavior like this is what I’m paranoid about in closed software like windows.
To your point, Linux itself is probably the #1 example of hacky patches to work around other people’s problems.
Don’t even get me started with about:config
