Yet another Hacker News

49 points gurjeet 3 hours ago 39 comments

I found 2 instances within the last 2 days. Are there other companies doing this?

Apple Business says: There’s an error; You’re either on an unsupported browser or viewing this site on a mobile device. Switch to a supported browser.

https://business.apple.com

https://business.apple.com/abm_unsupported_browser?reason=Browser%20Type

https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager/program-requirements-axm6d9dc7acf/web/

An Immigration Attorneys' company says: Unsupported Browser; Our platform is designed to work exclusively with Google Chrome and does not support other browsers at this time. Please set up /log into your Alma account through Chrome.

https://app.tryalma.com/sign_up

RJ000 2 hours ago | parent

Who benefits from terminating service like this?

add-sub-mul-div 1 hour ago | parent

In one of these cases Apple, who has a competing browser that they make tens of billions of dollars with by selling the traffic to Google. It's the top of the surveillance capitalism funnel.

gonzalohm 1 hour ago | parent

Surely they are not benefiting if people don't use their website because their browser is not supported

bawolff 37 minutes ago | parent

The company that would have to hire devs to make sure it worked correctly on firefox.

The business case for things like this is pretty obvious when firefox usage is so low.

Bender 2 hours ago | parent

When companies or government offices tell me to use another browser I tell them I can not, dont have administrative access and make them input all the data for me.

itake 1 hour ago | parent

what should cost you about 15s of your time ends up costing you 1+ hour of your time.

stavros 1 hour ago | parent

It's the principle of the thing.

dugite-code 1 hour ago | parent

Put your money where your mouth is

Be the change you want to see

Vote with your wallet

These are all sayings emphasizing going out of your way for a social good. This is just more of the same.

seba_dos1 48 minutes ago | parent

Yes, and?

readthenotes1 46 minutes ago | parent

It's a gift to a bureaucrat

p_ing 2 hours ago | parent

This is nothing new for any browser, unless you believe in the mid-late 2000s Chrome was being "slowly deprecated by the industry" for sites that refused to work with Chrome.

These are just lazy developers, or developers who don't want to bother testing against FF. It happens. Move on. This is not some industry trend.

gurjeet 2 hours ago | parent

Oh, but AI has made the cost of development so low! It doesn't cost much to do cross-browser tests anymore. /s :-)

MattGaiser 37 minutes ago | parent

Well, it never cost much. For the most part you just need to install it into your test framework.

The problem is that the value of doing it is essentially none.

coffeefirst 24 minutes ago | parent

This isn’t true. Firefox users get really salty about this. They really will drop your product.

ggm 2 hours ago | parent

What happens if you configure your browser string to lie about your software origins and compatibility?

gurjeet 2 hours ago | parent

That's a great suggestion! I used the 'User-Agent Switcher' add-on [1] and that seems to have done the trick for both the websites I reported above. (edit: I chose the option 'Windows / Chrome 146' in the add-on's UI).

As someone else said here, we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part; maybe there's more to it, but I'll take that explanation and move on :-)

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

zdragnar 47 minutes ago | parent

> we should probably chalk it up to laziness on developers' part

Also, developers at many companies don't own their time. They're given a certain amount per feature that they didn't estimate themselves, and the company doesn't give them time to fix Firefox specific bugs because it would cost them more than the user's monetary value is worth compared to other features or bugs.

batisteo 19 minutes ago | parent

Please use it only for lazy dev website, as it hides the global usage of Firefox

rationalist 1 hour ago | parent

The websites magically start working and I run into zero issues.

The developers are lying and trying to force people to switch browsers.

cozzyd 2 hours ago | parent

You would think AlmaLinux would be a supported distribution (and that obviously defaults to Firefox).

I only use Chrome for Microsoft Teams there NASA insists on using (Teams doesn't seem to detect my camera in Firefox... And the teams for Linux app was total trash when I tried it, maybe it's better now if it still exists.). Is there a way to stop it's obnoxious trying to be the default browser every time?

batisteo 16 minutes ago | parent

I use the app on Gnome and it works fine, at least for the replacement of Skype (non pro)

UltraSane 1 hour ago | parent

Firefox + uBlock Origin is the only way the modern web is still usable.

rationalist 1 hour ago | parent

I run into this problem when using Firefox + uBlock Origin. The solution is spoofing the user agent in this case.

big_toast 46 minutes ago | parent

I think the poster is referencing that uBlock Origin does not work with browsers other than Firefox. And that while some sites work poorly (deliberately deprecating Firefox), other sites work very poorly (without uBlock Origin). Presumably spoofing user agents works for now but has its limits.

rationalist 14 minutes ago | parent

What!? This thread is about "unsupported browser(s)", not anything that uBlock Origin fixes.

For what it's worth. I agree with OP which is why Firefox with uBlock Origin is my primary browser.

8cvor6j844qw_d6 1 hour ago | parent

Not surprised. A QA team I worked with only tested against Chrome-based browsers and Safari. If users hit issues on Firefox or anything else, support was just told to have them switch browsers.

Animats 1 hour ago | parent

The immigration attorney company works from Firefox at

   https://www.tryalma.com/

or https://www.tryalma.ai

but not from https://app.tryalma.com

Nothing reachable from https://www.apple.com/ seems to fail on Firefox.

rgbrenner 32 minutes ago | parent

app.tryalma.com doesn't work on safari either.. says its chrome only.

So the story isn't really about firefox.. it's about Chrome's marketshare being high enough that some companies are happy to ignore every other browser.

herpdyderp 30 minutes ago | parent

Chrome is the new IE!

paxys 1 hour ago | parent

Spoof the user agent. I'd bet the vast majority of "only works on XYZ browser" websites will still work.

batisteo 22 minutes ago | parent

I do agree, but at scale it shrink the percieved usage of Firefox (and derivatves) even more

karlshea 55 minutes ago | parent

Not saying I like the situation, but Firefox usage is about ~2-3%.

That's about where IE 6 and then IE 11 were when everyone was excited they could finally drop them. Why should anyone treat Firefox differently?

minitech 38 minutes ago | parent

People are using Firefox intentionally, vs. using IE because it was preinstalled. Firefox is a maintained browser. IE was hard to support, and Firefox is not. There are a lot of differences.

wfleming 3 minutes ago | parent

I'm with you, but I do think the situation can be characterized differently in a couple important ways:

1. IE was the default browser for many users (i.e. anybody using Windows who didn't know better).

2. IE had a lot of bugs and and was often non-compliant with standards.

Those two things combined meant that supporting IE required additional work, and if you didn't put in that work you were going to get users from IE anyway they'd just get frustrated and confused when things broke. So "detect IE and tell them use something else" was at least a reasonable fixed-cost approach to not having users get totally stuck. (And IE went down to 2-3% at least in part because devs revolted against IE earlier and started serving those "don't use IE" messages when its usage was still higher.)

Neither factor is really true of FF. It's not the default for any major platform, its user-base at this point is largely power users who won't be easily confused, and outside of some non-standard APIs most sites don't need and some fairly edge-casey stuff, most sites that work on Chrome will work fine on FF as well without alteration. If anything, IME Safari is more likely to need special attention than FF (but of course Safari has much higher market share so it merits that effort).

So I totally get not wanting to spend QA budget on FF, and I could understand showing a small banner suggesting you use a different browser, but erroring/completely blocking usage of the site does feel excessive to me, and even a bit mean-spirited since it takes extra effort to detect FF to show the message and prevent using the site! I don't think these sites are going out of their way to block usage of other low-usage browsers (some of which can alter behavior that could break some sites even if they are Chromium-based).

_HMCB_ 48 minutes ago | parent

I get the unsupported warning even on iOS Safari.

MattGaiser 43 minutes ago | parent

Every company I have worked for has passed on fixing things that just impact Firefox.

In my first job back in 2019, a support ticket came back about a dropdown bug in Firefox. It didn’t even make it to engineering before they told them to switch to Chrome.

bawolff 39 minutes ago | parent

This is what happens when your usage share is basically a rounding error.

I love firefox, i've been using it since version 1.0 to today.

However mozilla really has been directionless, its no surprise that nobody cares when the browser has basically devolved into copying everything that chrome does, but a year later and not as good.

amatecha 39 minutes ago | parent

Oh well. I just don't use sites that don't load on Firefox. I'm already pretty used to missing out on a lot of websites because I just close websites that show a pop-over modal ad or video ad or anything particularly intrusive like that...

andrewstuart 37 minutes ago | parent

Use it or lose it folks.