I'm just so fucking furious at how every company I work for ONLY supports Chrome (and by relationship, Edge). And as soon as I get issues using Firefox their response is "we don't support Firefox".
Like what the fuck???
Our company just installed a proxy system on our PCs that fucked everything up in Firefox and when I called IT for help, that was their response.
I work for an international corporation and we were told to stop using Chrome and use Edge only as it's more secure. Firefox was out of the question and not even installed.
Lol. I have no idea how Microsoft convinces these companies that they're the "secure" option. My workplace has banned any AI except copilot, because Microsoft told them copilot is secure.
Why are you people soooooooooo worried about viruses? I think the last virus I got was on WindowsXP.
Pretty sure viruses don't exist. I'm using a windows 7 pc for 10 years, and the only virus protection is whatever they put on windows 7 by default, with no updates ever, and I STILL don't get viruses. I'm at a point where it seems like virus makers just gave up.
You get that idea because no one actually browses the internet anymore. All people ever do is use fucking social Media and that's about it. No one's using Limewire to download porn/music, no one's using warez websites anymore, there are trustworthy porn aggregators so no one needs to visit dubious websites anymore.
Viruses are still a thing, and as someone already mentioned, chrome and edge themselves are spyware. Phishing is the more prodominant modus operandi nowadays.
Hard to argue with them not wanting to support a browser that only makes up 3.3% of browsers used worldwide. Actually, it's probably not even their decision, but the decision of some higher ups that want to save development or software cost.
You might try convincing them by polling how many people in your company wants to use Firefox, though. There could be a significant enough proportion of you guys that do.
Am I the only person who's been using Firefox for roughly 20 years? Fuck chrome, fuck internet explorer, fuck oprah, fuck edge, fuck netscape........actually netscape was kinda cool. I liked it.
But, this idea that it's chrome or IE is baffling to me.
I've been using Firefox since like version 1.5 and never found a reason to switch off of it. I have Chrome as a backup for shit sites that refuse to work in anything else, but that's all it gets used for.
edit: It's also the only browser I tend to recommend to people and has been that whole time as well.
There is no fucking way Firefox is that unpopular, but actually yeah it's trivial to argue that browser choice is hanging by a thread and it's not a good thing
A lot of Linux Distros seem to have Firefox telemetry disabled by default (even the minimal, one-time ping, telling Mozilla to know there is another user), so that might be skewing some of the stats.
100% feel you on the overall sentiment. I've reached an age these days where I don't do anything other than work stuff on work equipment, which not only helps re-enforce the work/life segmentation, but also absolves me of having to worry about and be responsible for stuff like this. Gotta say, it's very nice for mental health and sanity
I've heard web developers say that a lot of that is due to Firefox's annoying (to them) choices.
I happen to know HTML, CSS, & raw JS even though nothing at all from the last roughly decade, and I guarantee you that I can, and have, written webpages that work on any browser. More to the point, Firefox does not fully support HTML5 - and while tbf none of the browsers do(:-P), it does lag noticeably behind. Then again, it has made major pushes forward in terms of security... though seemingly at the cost of its basic functionality, to the point where if you want to use some even moderately complex coding framework, then you pretty much have to use Chrome.
So what I do is use Firefox for personal use, and Chrome at work. I then also use Chrome at home for personal use, unless I want to view a commercial site (where ads make every experience not only slower but practically unusable imho). Sadly, that's the only option I have, if I want to be able to "view websites".
In the past, Microsoft used to encourage features that would work only in their shitty-AF browser. But I got the sense that this is not what is happening now, b/c it's simply HTML5 - did Google somehow have some "in" with whoever designed that, hoping to give themselves an edge?
Anyway, I use Firefox, but I wish it was better.:-( I'm always so frustrated with it that I keep telling myself I will replace it someday, perhaps with LibreWolf?
Well yeah. If you want features that screws up user privacy, then its already bad to do it that way. Use js obfuacation and webassembly so thay you can hide the js running, make more and more of device info availiable to the websites you use so that they can have a tiny little featute at the cost of privacy, etc.
Not the particular web developer I had in mind, who prefers raw JS and resents having to use libraries, but sadly yeah far too common it's that, for basically no other reason than that - like, there's other ways to make "pretty" and "functional":-(. The web has truly enshittified, and I'm glad Firefox is still fighting against it.:-)
Can you create a policy (not allowing users to install extensions, defining starting page etc) and roll it out to thousands of Firefox installations across the enterprise?
Wanna know what’s funny? I work for a company that develops web application for business use. Officially, we claim to support Chrome, Edge (this was pre-chromium Edge but the terms haven’t been updated), Safari and Firefox.
Unofficially? Most of us only test in Chrome and call it a day. I’m literally the only one in the company actively testing Firefox first, and then MAYBE checking if Chrome works. Because 99.99% of the time if it works on Firefox it works on Chrome.
Now, that has at times brought some problems to light that would have been undetected since from what I’ve understood, Chrome is big enough to start introducing ways of doing things that are not officially part of any standard and just.. brute force their way to make it de facto standard. But each and every time someone tries to get away with using breaking non-standard things, it usually gets caught because I’m apparently the only one left who actually gives a fuck about the promises made to customers, as well as the web diversity. Even if we are a small company with a website that gets used mostly by Chrome users, I’m looking out to that 1% or whatever the most recent statistics for our user base was.
But I did also mention Safari is supported. That’s a different beast and I don’t think anyone in our company tests on that, since it’s mainly windows PCs all around. I had a chance to get a new work laptop just recently but didn’t dare to go for a Mac because our test automation code base might have still some windows dependencies and I didn’t wanna start dealing with those just yet, but next time I probably will. On another, newer project I work on I’ve picked Playwright as the test automation framework which has capability for testing on Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, so that should at least be covered. The legacy projcet could maybe be ported on that as well (currently using selenium on that one) but it’s a big hassle and there’s no way I’ll get the green light from higher ups to do so without proper justification and proof that it would improve something.
But yeah, when ever I test manually and go elbow deep into it? It’s Firefox first and whatever I have time for afterwards. It’s worked so far, can’t see why I would need to stop doing it this way now.
I really truly appreciate the effort. I don't know why people stopped caring about these things. The internet has become so commercial that the open standards seem to have become an afterthought to most companies. It's important to have people like you to ensure the standards are still respected.
Thank you. I admit I don't use Firefox right now due to issues I ran in to during my trial run earlier this year. Once the battery drain issues are fixed on the Android client I can at least switch back to it on my phone.
My company surprised me last week as we did an install and things didn't work right in Firefox for the customer. My boss and the team are committed to fixing it and doing better on browser testing. There was not a moment of hesitation on this decision. We of course told them to use Edge, Safari, or Chrome in the meantime, but by no means are we throwing it on the bottom of the "fix" pile. Team is almost done and ready to send to QA. Super proud.
