Somehow snapchat for web doesn't support firefox 🤦

potentiallynotfelix@lemdro.id to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 380 points –

I know I can spoof my useragent, it's just ridiculous that such a massive app doesn't support an equally massive browser.

90

Try the user agent switcher add-on. The volume of times I've changed my agent to chrome and had a site work perfectly is infuriating.

They said they know about that, but it’s ridiculous.

My problem was that CloudFlare refused to validate me when I have it enabled. I could have stock FF UA, but if my user agent switcher addon isn't disabled then I didn't get to use Crunchyroll and a few other sporadic sites.

I haven't been able to use a cloudfare website for a while now. If they're going to make me go through hoops because I refuse to use chrome, fuck it, they don't get my business.

FF works with CloudFlare sites, just not with that extension enabled. It doesn't make sense that they'd purposely block sites if you have a UA switcher that isn't even changing the UA so I'm hoping it's a bug that will get fixed

it depends on how much anti-fingerprinting you've setup. I only get endless captchas from every site and ended up just using an extension that blocks all crimeflare sites and redirects to an archive.org version of the page.

I have a setting somewhere that pisses off cloudflare then. It doesn't matter what I do with FF, it just keeps making me click the checkmark over and over.

That was my experience as well until I read a comment on Reddit that disabling the UA switcher addon in Firefox's settings fixes it. It's really annoying having to enable it every time I want to pretend to use Chrome but at least I can watch anime again.

I still doesn't work even if I have changed user agent to chrome. I guess they have some other mechanism to find the browser.

That's okay, I use Firefox and don't support Snapchat.

You should submit something to the webcompat website. It would help and they'll contact Snapchat and see what they can do.

I doubt that a company with billions in revenue and thousands of coders is going to change mind after that. They exactly know how many people are getting the error and intentionally decided to implement it

At the same time, the variables in that calculation might change over time. If it becomes easy enough for them to support it, or the costs of not supporting it get too high, they might change their minds.

Alternatively: wean yourself and your friends off of snapchat. In my part of the world, snapchat isn't popular anymore. It doesn't offer anything new and so barely anyone uses it.

If Snapchat does nothing, the Firefox team will change the user agent to trick the website into thinking it's something else.

I don't think they ever did that, otherwise add-ons like "Google search fixer" that change the user agent wouldn't exist. (My fix in that case is don't use Google at all - installing an add-on otherwise amp links aren't shown and the useless ai search isn't available doesn't make sense, that's a plus)

I thought the Google search fixer was only for mobile.

I imagine the overlap of people who use Snapchat and people who use Firefox is pretty small, they probably see such a small amount of users with Firefox and they just decided not to support it.

In this day and age it's more work to explicitly not support a browser than it is to support it...

Sort of. I imagine the idea is they only need to test on Chromium-based browsers.

So often just swapping the user agent from Firefox to Chrome makes these sites work flawlessly. So they're putting in extra code to detect Firefox and serve a "we don't support your browser" page when they could just... not. And if a user complains about X, they could say we don't test on Firefox, try on Chrome.

Yeah, but by putting up the "we don't support this" banner, they won't have to deal with the complaints in the first place.

It's also possible they want people to use Chromium for telemetry or other data-collection reasons, not sure.

I wonder if it's possible that they're paid money by Google to not support Firefox?

Maybe they're trying to become the new Internet Explorer?

Another side I haven't seen mentioned

It might be easier to track users in Chrome. If even a few users open it in chrome instead of Firefox, that's a benefit for them

Yeah, I'm sure Chrome works well with Google Analytics tools which seem to be on every site nowadays...

I imagine the overlap of people who use Snapchat and people who use Firefox is pretty small

::: spoiler I argue it's 0, as it does not work. It's a joke, I know what you are meaning; you meant using both separately.

:::

Even if true, do you support this funnel approach?

Snapchat has been a shit company for years. They threatened to sue third party client developers for Windows Phone, they purposely degrade camera quality on Android, etc (For awhile on Android they were just screenshotting the viewfinder instead of actually using the camera APIs.)

As @denschub@schub.social always emphasises: make sure to file a report at https://webcompat.com!

We ask everyone to file their reports, because all reports are really useful. Even if we don't respond to every single thing you report, it's a signal that we're processing in many different ways. (...) please, keep reporting all issues you see, because every single blip counts!

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/comment/l8ghtr2/

Fuck every form of this. Website: you deliver the document, and I decide if it works.

You are supposed to do feature detection, not user agent detection since it is easily spoofed, isn’t realiable, & doesn’t account for literally all the alternative UAs that can support it. This is bad/lazy practice.

Fx doesn’t always have all the features you need, but often it usually does & where I have seen this as being deployed is management saying it isn’t worth the effort to support. Just having one person on the team running Fx is usually enough to catch the game-breaking bugs.

FYI navigator.platform and friends will still return Linux, even in Tor Browser... so it's still trivially easy to detect your OS, Browser etc. and block that even without the user agent.

That’s still not feature detection & is in the exact same sniffing category

I didn't even know that there was a Snapchat for web

I've never used Snapchat on mobile, so I didn't bother checking if it works on web. It's neat, but I still don't care.

Snapchat has a web client? :o

doesnt that kind of defeat the point ?

what even is the point of snapchat?

well it was sending nudes at first, before people realized that nothing really got erased

I would simply not use the service. Capitalism says good services are rewarded for being good, the inverse would be they dont get to make money off of you for a bad service

It actually works just fine if you change your user agent. BTW Snapchat likes to break support for Firefox or re-enable support all the time. Don't know what their issue is but whatever.

Doesn't for me for some reason.. I change to chrome on windows and just get an "Oops something went wrong..." I think it might be because I forgot my password and tried like 10 of them so it locked me out, however.

doesn't it utilize some fancy camera APIs or whatever? last time I tried it on firefox with a spoofed user agent there were errors in the console

Can you get away with a change of the "User Agent"? Edit (: Reading is hard. I only read the title and looked at the screenshot, without reading the body text of the post. So my question is answered. Sorry for wasting time.)

massive browser

2% market share

lol, lmao even

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

On desktop (which is what the website in question is mostly loaded in) is 6,6%. Still isnt huge but definitely more significant.

Wow Firefox just barely beats out Samsung internet and opera???

I knew chrome had the majority but I didn't know even edge was above Firefox in market share.

There's like 30 people at the company I work for. 8 of them use Firefox only, about 10 of them use Firefox half of the time when chrome breaks or hogs every resource possible.

REMINDER: These market share figures are self reported based on browser user agents. For over a decade now, Firefox requires you to opt into this reporting. Its true that Firefox has been slipping in market share, and that things can be rather gloomy, but they're not as doomed as its widely reported. The big driver of declining market share for Firefox these days is CTOs telling their engineering directors to not check Firefox compatibility because they perceive it as wasted time for 6.6% of people. The easiest way to combat Google Chrome's hegemony is to show friends and family that actually most of the internet works on Firefox despite what you've been told, and that also Firefox isn't somehow outdated

But it's the fourth most popular browser according to your chart. Considering there's probably 2 billion browser users, that's something in the ballpark of 40 million users. 20 if you say 1 billion.

I just want to say, this is less bad than websites requiring that you use internet explorer.

Those were dark days.

It's just slightly less bad cause it requires a chromium based browser

Oh yeah, I'm not saying it's good, just less bad.

Now instead of being crammed into a single option, you get the "choice" of several (probably equally bad) options.

Honestly, everything should just conform to standards, and it's up to the browser to support those standards. If your browser doesn't support it, well, good luck.

Not this bullshit of "your browser isn't compatible with this website". Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Have I ever told you the story of Darth Microsoft Teams? Only Chrome and Edge. Some limited stuff works in Firefox, but it's flaky at best.

As a firefox user... This.
Calls work now, but dont you dare share a screen in the call.

... But meetings work fine, even if you share a screen. Thanks microsoft.

I can reach the login page on FF Mobile with user agent switcher + desktop mode

Use a user agent switcher, works for me.

Firefox doesn't support snapchat? Finally a good feature.