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Comment by cebert

3 years ago

I use Firefox as my daily driver and have not encountered any sites that work in Chrome but not Firefox.

Google slides didn't work properly for me on Firefox a few days ago, all fonts displayed as some ugly serif font. Though I assume this is Google being underhand and malicious rather than Firefox not working properly.

  • Google is especially malicious, as they disable the mouse based past options in docs on firefox. This is a pain for users that don't know the paste shortcuts, or who are more comfortable with just using the menus. Sadly, the "dontfuckwithpaste" extension doesn't seem to fix it.

The website for one of my local news stations, the one I prefer for severe weather coverage, causes Firefox to freeze. That started happening a few months ago, so I now have to use Chrome to check the weather. And last month my electric company's website stopped working with Firefox. It no longer displays any user data, such as amount owed, so I have to use Chrome to pay my bill. I've encountered a few other sites here and there while surfing.

  • Local news websites are some of the worst performing websites. Due to the death of local journalism these websites are deep in the vicious cycle of lower advertising revenue, partnering with bottom tier ad networks that are especially spammy or scammy, breaking their webpage layout with ads, and clickbait content. I remember newspapers and magazines were majority ads by layout area but at least those did not spy on you or make your copy heat up and sound like a hair dryer.

    If I cut out the worse 10% of websites I could easily browse on 2007 PC. It's sad that web advertising bloat and Microsoft Teams is a reason to buy a new CPU.

    For the weather I stick to Weather.gov.

I do too, and I have had great success... until recently, when I noticed multiple sites that don't display all form fields / checkboxes under firefox.

Most recently, I was checking into an international flight on aa.com, and there was some checkbox that Firefox was not displaying. I kept hitting submit, and AA kept telling me there was a problem, and it appeared that I'd filled out the entire form. I disabled Ublock, etc, and I could never get it to work. I eventually tried Chrome, and noticed the extra field.

It might be a specific security setting I've made more restrictive than the default, but Cloudflare's bot detector goes into an infinite loop on Firefox, thus making any site that puts that in front unusable, including OpenAI most notably. As a consequence, I don't use those sites, but I'm sure others would rather just give in and use a browser with settings that Cloudflare actually tests against and cares about.

  • >It might be a specific security setting I've made more restrictive than the default

    Probably not.

    I recently tried to go back to firefox and eat up some of my gripes with the browser because I don't like chromium's engine monopoly but I had the same issue you had, in my case with some web novels websites that ran cloudflare in maximum DDoS protection mode. Cloudflare would tell me to click to prove I'm human, and the page would just reload in place in an infinite loop.

    I ran Firefox on the default settings, and with uBlock (also on default settings). I deleted uBlock, and disabled every option that Firefox has for privacy. Still no cookie. Cloudflare blocked me.

    I opened Chrome on the same webpage and not only did it work immediately, but cloudflare didn't ask me to click to prove my humanity, the page just went away on its own without the "challenge" prompt. I had ublock turned on and it caused no issue.

    I'm a lesser man, I did what most people would do in this situation: apt purge "firefox*".

    I'm a linux user, who used to have a dual boot with windows for video games and who removed the dual boot and stuck with only linux since 2 years ago, I can say, I find being a linux gamer, quirks with proton and all, less painful than browsing the web with Firefox. It's a lost cause. There is simply no way that I am going to recommend Firefox to less technical friends the way I used to in the Internet Explorer vs Mozilla days. I can't see FF ever recovering.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) shows me the antiquated "lite HTML" interface with Firefox on my OS. If I change the user agent to claim to be Chrome on Windows, it shows me the modern UI (which works fine, however it gets the time zone wrong).

Accessing Google Docs, Sheets, etc. works OK with Firefox, but if I claim to be Chrome some things don't work. So they are defintely serving up something different to Chrome vs Firefox browsers.

I've had issues with video calls, particularly ones based on webex that were forwarded through other sites, my health insurer/other telehealth apps, netflix and other streaming sites, just to name a few I've seen in the last year.

It’s usually when the sites depend on Chrome-specific calls and don’t provide alternates for other browsers because they only test on Chromme.