this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Firefox

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[–] reddig33 206 points 11 months ago (7 children)

It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.

[–] [email protected] 129 points 11 months ago (9 children)

99% of sites only need to know your screen aspect ratio and maybe available input devices, can't think of a good reason to share anything else

[–] [email protected] 73 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Knowing OS is useful for download links.

[–] capital 104 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I’d be down for an ask to allow that info. Sort of like how sites request access to cam and mic.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

Before Windows 10, NVidia and others had this button Detect what thing suits me best on their websites. Now many of them just look it up in one's fingerprint without asking.

[–] AnUnusualRelic 45 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh no, they'd have to list more than one link,the horror!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The vast majority of people would have no clue what to download.

[–] daFRAKKINpope 44 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Let them be confused. They'll learn eventually. Or they won't. Computers are too user friendly today anyway.

[–] 1371113 27 points 11 months ago

Fuckin oath. If we cater to the stupid too much the folks who are middling just get lazy. Make people think. It’s important that we know how to use our brains.

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[–] datelmd5sum 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Microsoft hides their links if they see you run linux. So you need to manually set your OS in the browser settings to see the download link. Very convenient.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago (5 children)

The biggest offender is, surprisingly, cloudflare. They will straight up refuse to serve you any site if your user agent is not one of the mainstream ones. It's not even "find the traffic light to prove you're human", but a page basically saying "fuck you, go away".

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

If I was a Firefox dev I'd start looking into building in user agent spoofing right into the browser.

It already opens Facebook pages in a special isolated tab. They could have apple.com open in it's own special "safari" tab. I wonder if there's anything preventing them from doing that. I guess it could be bad because it would make their market share appear even smaller.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago

The irony of Firerfox officially agent spoofing while everyone else uses some variant of "Mozilla" as their UAS is too much.

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[–] thehatfox 12 points 11 months ago (6 children)

User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.

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[–] [email protected] 114 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Actually, the top one is the logo of the chromium browser engine, but the bottom one is not the logo of the Gecko browser engine. That's the logo of SpiderMonkey, Firefox's Javascript engine (Chromium uses V8).

This is the logo for Gecko: Gecko logo

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[–] [email protected] 95 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

It's especially moronic that Cloudflare thinks everyone using Tor is trying to DDOS every site.

Do you know how fucking slow Tor is? You couldn't DDOS an Arduino with it.

[–] QwertySpace 25 points 11 months ago

Probably because there are A LOT of people using that tor exit node that have visited that site recently. So, cloudflare sees it as a potential DDOS

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Onion sites get DDOS attacks constantly. That's why Dread has so many backup links.

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[–] iamtherealwalrus 87 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Do we, as an industry, have such short attention span, that we forgot how Microsoft abused their monopoly in the 1990s to force everyone to use Internet Explorer? Now that Google is doing the exact same thing, nobody seems to mind.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Because the tech gigacorporations have literally spent the last three decades brainwashing us into accepting shit like that and even convincing us that it's better this way.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Not better. No one thinks anything is better, just that we don't have a choice but to take what they serve.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

I remember using Netscape (my Google keyboard didn't know that word) before Firefox and SeaMonkey. I mostly used SeaMonkey to edit HTML and Firefox for my casual browsing.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Those of us who had to develop websites and make them even vaguely functional in IE6 haven't forgotten.

Dark times, those were.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 11 months ago (20 children)

I get the joke but I don't have any problems visiting websites. Neither with firefox nor with mull

[–] Sanctus 46 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

Go to https://business.apple.com/#/main/users

Reset your user agent string. It will tell you that your browser is unsupported. Switch your user string to chrome and everything will function as expected.

IT people probably run into more problems with non-chromium browsers.

Edit: it has to be visited on a desktop regardless. ABM does not like mobile browsers.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (4 children)

IT person here, Firefox works fine for everything that matters.

[–] bassomitron 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

That's highly subjective. At our org there's a reason our baseline deployment for workstation images comes with both Chrome and Firefox. We have thousands of users across dozens of specialties (HR, logistics, scientists, engineers, etc) and they all have a multitude of web apps they use day to day. Some of those don't like Chrome or Firefox. Hell, we even had to support god damn IE11 for way too long before Microsoft thankfully forced its death by discontinuing security support (our cybersecurity people ban anything that doesn't have active vendor support with very few exceptions).

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[–] derf82 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I 100% expect websites to soon start breaking their interface on Firefox. With Chromium blocking the best adblockers, they will be incentivized to nudge people to Chromium browsers.

Didn’t we already see Youtube sneaking in a 5 second delay for Firefox users?

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 11 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago

Brave isn't doing much better with captchas lately due to having adblocking built in, google is just on a crusade against anyone blocking stuff.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (1 children)

my company give choice to use Firefox and Chrome and it is mandatory to install those browsers on those computers. But, 95% use Chrome.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It's "how it feels" or "what it feels like", not "how it feels like"

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[–] DirkMcCallahan 21 points 11 months ago (4 children)

It's so absurd. It feels like half of the websites out there actively don't want me to visit them.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago
[–] bobo 11 points 11 months ago (5 children)

What is the second browser from the bottom on the right?

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

As the other two said, Librewolf. It's basically a very privacy-focused fork of Firefox, where just about all privacy settings are on by default.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

@bobo @SoccerGod

Now that is driving me crazy, it looks so familiar, but I just can't place it.👿

Found it!

It's Librewolf, a Firefox fork.

https://librewolf.net

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