What can we do to keep the web open?
heyfrancis@mastodon.social to 
What can we do to keep the web open?
You are viewing a single comment
heyfrancis@mastodon.social to heyfrancis@mastodon.social to heyfrancis@mastodon.social to What can we do to keep the web open?
Twice in the past few months I came across a site that would not work with Firefox. The other time it actually did work, but said that it recommends chrome to function properly.
The first one was a local government form that would not let me select boxes, but chrome worked without any problems.
The second was some 3d game or something like that.
Look into user agent extensions for Firefox. Sometimes tricking a website into thinking you're using chrome is enough to get the site to work.
Could you maybe still go back and find those links? I use FF for well over 10 years now. And I would say, the amount of websites that do not work, are less than one a year. The only reason are really bleeding edge css filter or MediaDevice instantiations (Webcam, etc.). Video, JS, and HTML is nearly Browser agnostic by this time. I would love to see those non working firefox websites everybody always talks about.
https://www.matecat.com/ for one
FWIW it works fine in Firefox if you change the user agent.
They actively prohibit to use their website with FF. When I look at it in Chromium (only Chrome and Chromium are allowed. No Edge, No Safari, ...) I can not see anything why it should not work. Drag and Drop an Image into a dropzone.js container is no crazy technology. Imgur does it every day.
Do you know why they think it would not work in FF? It is just a translation service. I think this is not a good example, as it more seems like they do not want to support webkit and optimized it only for chrome, but their product does not seems to crazy for FF.
They also have Google Drive files connections. Maybe they have just bundled their product the the google ecosystem and therefore prohibit FF/Safari/etc. But this is not the problem of FF/Safari/etc., they just decided to offer a google product only on google browser.
(I would not support such a vendor lock-in, but that is just my 2 cents)
I 💯 agree and I don't like it either (I use Firefox as my daily driver). However I occasionally work as a translator and the competing CATs are inferior. So I have installed Chromium just for this one website.
I was an early adopter to Matecat but I stopped using it to be fair… what do you like so much about it? I’m using OmegaT and DeepL for MT atm
The second one that recommended chrome, I honestly can’t even really remember what it was.
The local government one is local to just a few city blocks, so I’m not going to share it. But the only thing that didn’t work was when I input my city for example, the next box to select the street did not activate. When I clicked on it no streets were listed. Just a single empty box appeared.
When I did it in chrome I listed my city and then the next box populated with the streets.
I’m not sure if this makes sense, I’m from but not in the US and I’m trying to write about it in a way that makes sense.
Biggest issue i've had is AMDRewards site not working on firefox. AMD just ignores the issue and treats it like its a bad redeem code issue, no matter how many times I've laid it out for them.
So 3 fucking times I've had to install the linux version of Edge, to redeem the code, and download the PVT, just to get my shit. (and immediately uninstall edge afterwards).
I miss the fucking days when they just put the cdkey in the box, and didnt treat me like a thieving piece of shit that had to go through 5 different hoops to prove to them I'm not.
This is one of the reasons to use FF. I know it can be a bit inconvenient, but these sites don't care about optimizing for anything but Chrome because it has such a huge market share.
And you can keep a second browser installed for the few times this happens, e.g. Chromium or Brave. Also an addon to change your user-agent string for a website works 90% of the time.
I keep brave or chromium installed for cases like this (if I really have to access that website).
Regular use it's just Librewolf. No point in adding to the chrome's stats, and still sending data back to Google on top of that.
Same! I have a copy of chrome, but I should get rid of that and just use brave. I didn’t really think about it and just put chrome on there in a rush.