HoofandHeart

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i don't want to use firefox because sometimes i run across a website that only works on chrome

yes, that... that would be the entire problem actually


lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

earlier i ran across someone saying they would switch to firefox in a heartbeat, if only mozilla would fix the things their website does that don't work in firefox. i looked and the thing they specifically called out was... based on the nonstandard internet explorer zoom property.

which works in chrome. for some reason

it's all happening again. i've been sent back in time twenty years. soon there will be websites that refuse to work because my browser isn't sending them a list of ad topics it thinks i want to see, like chrome will soon do


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

Unless your PC is a potato you saved from the scrapyard, running both browsers simultaneously is quite feasible. I use Chrome only for work-related stuff because it's the Internet Explorer 6 of the roaring twenties—all of the stupid tools from work break in Firefox.

I've been running across government and job hunting sites recently where the bog-standard "submit this form and send me to next page, please" button just does absolutely nothing for some reason until I swap to Chrome. Clueless as to why or how, I'm not a programmer.

I run into shit like this all the time, and usually it's because the underlying code on the site is wrong, it's just wrong in a way that happens to work on Chrome.

If I spend hours tracking down the specific issue and point it out to the folks running the site their response is always just "We don't support Firefox, please upgrade to a recent version of Chrome" or the like, and fuck that noise

I've also run into a few instances where switching the user-agent (via an extension) fixes the issue, and I'm not sure how to start making sense of that since it's still running on Firefox's engine in the end :/

simple - it used to not work, so they blocked the user agent or put in an override to do some nonstandard behaviour - and now it works but the override they're using doesn't know that

just yet another example: when the first COVID vaccine became available Massachusetts's government site for finding and booking a vaccination only worked on chrome. at least it said it on the main page but i feel like "work on every major browser" should be a HIGH priority for a vital and life-saving piece piece of public health infrastructure. I remember a lot of pieces coming out around that time about how state governments going all-in on online and app-based tools for COVID testing and vaccines were ignoring the huge digital divide for the sake of their own convenience, and how populations with higher rates of computer illiteracy or lack of access also had higher rates of COVID risk factors (like being elderly, or being a low wage but "essential" worker). It struck me as so bafflingly sheltered that people in charge of the public health program in MA assumed all the high risk 75 year olds trying to book their covid vaccines even know what a browser is, let alone how to download Chrome. They eventually implemented a hotline you could call to find and book a vaccine but its telling that the web-form came first, and setting up and staffing a phone line was secondary. Sorry this is such a tangent haha

video conferencing in firefox isn't fully up to standard or something like that - sites that do support video conferencing on firefox apparently have to do a lot of extra work and server processing to support it. i haven't tried it but that's what i've heard.

back when i was doing web dev on chrome there was stuff like restyling input elements without extra elements that is against spec but works - stuff like that doesn't work in firefox

now that i develop for firefox, almost everything works in chrome except for the rare javascript api with implementation differences (drag and drop is so broken)

Like a dummy I had put all my passwords in chrome and I was locked in. This morning I had enough so I exported my password and moved them to a keepass. I already had syncthing running on my laptop, computer at home and phone to shard the database. I replaced the chrome icon on my phone with a firefox one and even re-added cohost to my phone through firefox.

I'm doing my part

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

they said preemptively that they don't think they should have to change anything, and then deleted the whole post while i was writing a comment to tell them i had already worked out how to fix their website and it wasn't very hard

We actually just discussed the zoom property last week in our meeting: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5623

Fun fact: zoom does do something useful, but it's still pretty fucked up, and we inherited it from the pre-fork WebKit days, where it had to be implemented for IE6 compatibility.

Unfun fact: it's likely impossible for Moz to implement zoom unless they simultaneously remove support for -moz-transform, for Stupid Compat Reasons.

wild as hell. specifying it as deprecated when it was never not deprecated, huh

The developers i spoke to from Microsoft and google thought that zoom did exactly what they wanted with 1 line of code, which was great from their perspective

this stood out to me as interesting because every other mention makes it sound like the common case is "i have a thing of X width and i want to fit it in a space of Y width", which often requires layout elsewhere to figure out what X is in the first place, and which is certainly not one line of code. if there's a replacement feature, maybe it should be more sophisticated than a single scale factor?

I had a bit of a panic because I was unable to log into my bank the other day. “Service unavailable”. I call the hotline and they tell me the service is up. Eventually they ask what browser I’m on, and guess what? My fucking bank’s website just fails with an inaccurate message on Firefox.

i am too tired to do all of this again!

if google gets its way and the entire internet is sealed behind some kinda personally signed public drm key scheme or whatever it ends up being, i think i'll finally just evaporate into nothing and stop using it for literally anything other than absolutely essential functions like banking and refilling medication

im honestly just too tired of trying to keep fighting every asshole quintillionaire company hell bent on undermining the mind bogglingly cool general purpose everything-machine i paid a couple thousand bucks for, so they can buy another yacht or idk whatever people with that much money do when they get slightly more of it

im just so tiiiiiiired of all of this

It's so funny cause from 2014-2020 the big tech jobs in the Greater New Orleans Area were web app development to "modernize" oil and gas infrastructure. Said infrastructure consisted of "ancient" web apps written in flash that could only be used on Windows XP and 98 systems. I'm wondering if we are just on a 20 year cycle and in 10 years we will have to go back and modernize the chrome optimized WebApps.

Oh god we're really about to reenter the bad old days of some folk "But since most people use Internet Explorer the standard should be what works in Internet Explorer and everything else should be compatible with that rather than what is actually the HTML standards" but with Chrome rather than IE now, aren't we?

I swear he seemed absolutely incapable of understanding that there were HTML standards that IE had deviated from in some ways (and Netscape had deviated from in others) in a weird arms race of compatibility hell, and that it wasn't just a 'more used = standard' situation but 'there are standards that an independent organization has set'.