Comment by MaXtreeM
8 hours ago
I always see these kind of comments, that many sites don't work in Firefox while they do in Chrome. When I encounter a broken site I always also check it in Chrome but the times where it is actually a browser's fault is like once a year. Usually it is some blocking of cookies or something that I have enabled in Firefox. Even sites from Google which everyone seems to describe that they are specifically made to work only in Chrome I never had issues with.
Yes I agree, there was a time where it was worse and FF just did not have the same support coverage for Browser APIs etc, but now if I encounter a problem in FF I tend toward blaming the website developer for ensuring it works ok.
It's crazy, but in 2026, websites still check the user agent string and will simply refuse to work if it's not one that they like. Financial and enterprise software is the worst for this. It's one of the reasons Vivaldi switched to simply copying the Chrome user agent string instead of their own.
Some sites also simply to not test their stuff on Firefox since it has such a small market share, and Firefox _does_ have minor incompatibilities that only tend to show up when using overly fancy Javascript or CSS frameworks. (But this is far less common than the first point above.)
Perhaps you use Firefox on Windows.
Firefox on Linux has much more problems than Firefox on Windows, mostly because it does not support many GPUs, so it frequently disables WebGL or it cannot use hardware support for playing videos, even now, in 2026. This breaks many sites.
Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies in comparison with their Windows versions.
That has not been my experience of Firefox on Linux.
Whenever I encounter a broken site, it's because I blocked some advertising scripts and the whole thing fell apart with a slew of JavaScript errors. I'm quite happy to avoid such shoddy sites.
Which is not Firefox's fault. It's up to the operating system to provide a stable API to make things like this work.
For the kind of things needed by Firefox, the Linux APIs have been stable for decades.
The problem is not stability, but the fact that there are multiple APIs, and it is unknown which of them will be available on the user system, so a browser may need to support all of them.
For instance, for video decoding on a GPU, the Linux APIs differ depending on the GPU vendor, unless you use Vulkan, but Vulkan video decoding is not available in old computers. Even so, Firefox could have used some higher-level API that takes care of the low-level GPU-dependent details (e.g. ffmpeg).
More baffling is the failure of Firefox to use OpenGL or Vulkan for implementing WebGL, depending on the GPU vendor, because at least the OpenGL API has not changed in a very long time. I have no idea which is the reason (because Firefox does not provide adequate error messages), unless they depend on some vendor-specific OpenGL extensions. I use an NVIDIA GPU, on which I cannot enable WebGL in Firefox, despite the fact that WebGL works fine in Vivaldi and Chromium/Chrome and I use a very great number of OpenGL and Vulkan applications, including some written by myself, all of which work perfectly, with no problems whatsoever.
> Unlike Firefox, the Linux versions of Vivaldi/Chromium/Chrome do not appear to have any deficiencies
Most of the time I switch to Chrome it's for web apps that use APIs like Web Bluetooth or Web USB. No way to use those in Firefox as far as I'm aware.
Same experience, both on macOS and Linux.