When you visit certain large sites in Firefox or Safari, the browser may detect your visit and change its behavior. It could be as simple as lying about its identity, or it may totally change how it renders the page. But according to a post by [Den Odell], this isn’t a conspiracy between browsers and big Internet — rather, it is a byproduct of Chrome’s dominance.
Here’s how it goes. Chrome puts out a new feature and everyone rushes to implement it on their site. Maybe the new code breaks other browsers. Maybe the other browser supports the feature, but the website doesn’t detect it correctly or is unaware. Maybe it just relies on some quirk of Chrome. Regardless, Firefox and Safari will change to match the site rather than mess up the user’s experience.
If you want to check it out, Firefox will show you what it does and let you disable specific fixes if you visit the about:compat URL. For Safari, you’ll have to read code from a file named quirks. Bugzilla tracks the fixes for Firefox, if you want more details.
Browsers are huge and complex so even niche browsers, today, usually use one of a handful of rendering engines. It seems that the question isn’t if a big company should control the way the web works. It is more a question of which one is currently dominating.
Yes it’s Internet Explorer’s type enshittification all over again.
But Google is a good guy, is has a “Don’t be evil” motto.
Google dropped the “Don’t be evil” motto and it never was official to begin with. Make no mistake: Google is Evil! Very Evil! But of all the big tech companies, I believe Google is by far the least evil. So just like politicians on election day, you have to choose between a douche and a turd sandwich.
I’d disagree strongly there, not least because their evil isn’t obvious.
Apple is obvious – it charges you more for (admittedly good quality) hardware, and the devices are locked down.
Amazon is obvious – low margins push other sellers out, and mean bad wages for delivery people.
Meta – everyone knows now that they violate privacy laws, steal all your personal data and sell it off.
Google – manages to hide how much data they collect on you, and the way they’re enshitifying the entire internet through their dominance.
Apple makes money from it’s users by selling products at a premium price.
Google makes money from it’s users by spying on them.
They just dropped the Don’t.
Except scaled up x100.
What goes top of my head is that why people are still using Chrome. I really don’t get it.
Or be it other Google services..
The alternatives are . . . Microsoft, or Apple (or the complete fragmented mess that Desktop Linux is)? Microsoft is objectively crap, and I just don’t get Apple at all lately, the UI now has a swipe up and pause before lifting finger mechanic.
Completely non-intuitive. My Android still has a virtual button to bring up the running apps list, still works fine. Come on Apple.
I’ve been using future exclusively for years now, but recently started using Brave Browser, first on a new android tablet, then also sometimes on my Debian laptop. Like anything, there are certain things that bug me a little (it does the to be a little memory hungry), but I’m pretty happy with it overall. Who knows what’s gonna go down with Firefox now, but for now either Brave or Firefox would be more better than Chrome or whatever garbage MS is serving now (I quit watching).
You do still have choices.
Isn’t Brave just Chrome in different clothes?
Most of the alternative browsers are based on Chromium, so that’s not exactly an alternative, just a re-skin of what Google is doing.
There is a difference between Chromium and Chrome proper, so it isn’t quite just reskinning Chrome, as some extra building blocks are placed on top of an identical foundation to create them all. I do agree they are not all that much of an alternative though.
It’s chromium based, yes. As to your point, a vast majority of the “alternatives” are chromium. Even the edge browser is chromium-based now. Firefox uses their own gecko engine, though.
There’s a project I’ve been looking forward to that seems pretty promising. It’s called Ladybird. Should be releasing to Alpha sometime this year. It started as a project in SerenityOS, which itself was a post-rehab project to keep himself out of trouble. It took the majority of the development time, then forked because writing a brand new browser engine is a massive undertaking.
Create the “for freedom” engine. Be out sometime 2028.
I use firefox with ublock origin. It works great. I used to keep Chrome as a backup, but I haven’t needed to use it in years. I have ALL the tracking protection stuff set to strict which breaks some sites, but if I turn that stuff off they always work fine. Every year or so firefox will add some product tie in feature nobody wants which you have to manually right click and remove from the toolbar, but that’s it.
Because extensions.
Nothing comes close to Chrome in termes if extensions. Firefox is a joke.
Care to explain what you mean?
I’m using Firefox with plenty of extensions. What am I missing?
Extensions are a joke in firefox. Just go into the ‘store’, search anything and you won’t get any relevant result but a lot of themes which do not contain the terms you searched for.
I need an extension for dealing with SharePoint at work ? At home, I need some webgl explorer to fix some issues ? You’ll find that for chrome.
Firefox has just the minimal survival extensions (adblocker, script blocker) and that’s about it.
Hmm, what do i have over there for the occasional Aliexpres or other brittleness visit, that doesn’t work in Firefox? ViolentMonkey, Stylus, uBlock (except crippled). Tree Style Tabs doesn’t work there but instead Tab Nodes Tree, which adverts some should-be-default features in the paid version. I think i pass.
Sorry, what? Chrome, the browser that was getting all the negative attention last year because they decided to neuter ad block extensions? Meanwhile I’m happily using u-block origin on Firefox (on mobile, no less).
Yeah Google happily shoot for its feet sometimes.
Since google pushed that Manifest V3 through which largely neutered the ability of Extensions to modify site behavior. I find not a lot of use for Chrome extensions unless all you care about is changing the UI of the browser itself and don’t want to deal with the lack of a suggestions algorithm for its add-on browser.
Using FF everywhere: phone, computer at work and home… no issue… no 4gb ia bloat…
I’m having a terrible time with chrome mobile on a Galaxy Fold 2 (it could also be just some terrible websites).
Problems range from buttons and UI being drawn off-screen, to using ‘desktop mode’ being detected as ‘hacking’ by Cinemark and the website being completely inaccessible (yes I have my DPI set at 420, the resolution is higher than half my desktop and laptop PCs).
I understand how we got here, 16 years ago the Nexus was a 3.7″ screen with 480×800 pixels, the web was best serving a mobile version. But today my phone has 180CM^2 screen area vs my first tablet (Nexus 7) at 142CM^2, now I do nearly everything on my phone and websites should just serve me the desktop site if I ask. Although some rely on stupid mouse-over tricks as part of the UI 🤦🏼♂️(facepalm)
If Chrome mobile would let me set my user agent it would go a long way.
You have a Samsung device. Use Samsung Browser. Much better for most sites.
I meanwhile switched from Samsung to “Cheap china brand” due to cost reasons. I still love the Samsung Browser.
ex eOnly annoying quirk is, I can’t export Bookmarks properly. But the user experience for surfing the web is much better than chrome for me.
I miss the internet.
“I miss the internet.”
This….
I miss the WWW.
Want to be part of and contribute to a game’s community?
Forget it. Forums are dead, non-existence or if it exists you can’t create an account there – only login via FB or Google. (No, Reddit is not an adequate alternative for a proper forum.)
Oh and if you lower yourself to Reddit all posts have non-titles that say nothing relevant about the actual content – meaning equal to ClickBait because you have to click to even learn what’s it even about.
Expecting others to search before posting is frowned upon… but the garbage titles don’t contribute to search-ability anyway.
Some /r/ literally remove rules against double-posts.
Discord is “on” the Internet but not the WWW (it’s a closed system not searchable from outside – at least some IRC channels were stored and made public – not to mention public mailing lists).
YouTube is a money grabbing ClickBait dumpsterfire. YTers literally change titles to be as clickbaity as possible to get more views. :-(
Discord ia the worst form of a Internet, for which you need to be logged in to even read it.
“you can’t create an account there – only login via FB or Google.”
Often you can still create an account with your email address, but it’s hidden by dark patterns.
Even if you already have an account the email login button is often hidden and Google login is shown first.
I miss the horse and buggy.
I miss Ford T.
I miss having hair on top of my head
Meanwhile, patiently waiting (20 some odd years) for browsers to properly implement user-level stylesheets.
It’s annoying having to manually futz around in developer options to find and fix user-hostile design choices.
not sure which browser you are using but both firefox and chrome have extensions to load custom style sheets. I’m using firemonkey on firefox which also does custom JS and can load on a per site basis so no worrying about scripts messing with the wrong site. I dont’ have alot of them but find it usefull for the bigger/regular annoyances.
that and ublock origin
We jumped the shark when the Log Out button became hidden in a drop down menu. I used the web on Dialup for the first few years and waiting for a log in or out button to /load/ was the dumbest thing ever. . . Well not quite, now it seems to take meganytes of data to load simple commands. I get encryption and security keys and stuff, but we are quickly approaching a point where the user commands will run on a local AI model that needs gigabytes of data (Google is showing the way with Gemini Nano, go remove it now on your PC)
developing hobby projects like SMTP servers has led me to the realization that everything lies on the Internet. I answer all sorts of obscure queries and give back false information because the person/thing to be asking is almost certainly bad.
Want to know if I have 100 variants of Barack.Hussein.Obama as a user? I sure do, every single one, I’ll say; and if you send them an email, I’ll tell you I delivered it, but the whole thing’s a trap and the reward at the end is a tarpit.
oh. and don’t get me started on sites that detect you are using a phone and refuse to run, insisting that you install the app instead. clicking “use desktop site” in the firefox settings bypasses this most of the times. (looking at you slack…)
And the irony is, that most apps are just browsers with some cruft on top.
This has been a thing ever since early HTML, back when the browsers weren’t “on the same page”, with no Standard language and sites had to cater to each one. Remember endorsements for “IE compatible” or “Netscape compatible”; “optimized for IE”, etc?
One of the things then and now supported by HTML is telemetry to the site on the browser species and version specifically for this purpose.
This is a problem that will never plague us in the near or immediate future. Ai can monitor and fix on the fly, eventually your browser will be custom anyway.
Irony or clueless dreamer, you never know.
possibly brilliant soothsayer? I would be willing to compile my own browser and leave out the trash I don’t want. In fact, I should probably do this. WIth an LLM to help wrangle the dependencies, it would be pretty easy to get compiling.
So true
it’s subjectively very different from the msie days, for me. the sort of things msie broke were very very basic. now, you can make most good page layouts using html/css from 2015. all the browsers are about the same and they mostly comply with the standard, at least at that age. no one should be using bleeding edge features unless they’re trying to accomplish something bleeding edge.
around 2005, even very basic layouts required working around bugs in msie. and even in 2005, they were outright bugs compared to the standard. but also, the standard you wanted was very recent and no one had had a chance to converge on it, and your users were using something older than the standard you wanted.
so yeah of course people are still chasing bug compatibility with the biggest player, but the bugs are less and the compatibility is better and it’s just not the problem it used to be.
Actually, the problem is far worse now. Some forms just don’t work anymore, because a third-party plugin is blocked by Content Security Policy or a cookie uses a deprecated tag. For browser-native functionality emulated in JS.
This is a common practice to test your product against the top 100, top 1000 something. Then make sure your product works. If not workarounds for support are added. This is without the knowledge or consent of the top 100 owners.
Video Game drivers have been doing this forever… or MS Office… or…
So, if you own top 100 content, good for you, your bugs are getting fixed by others. For everyone else it’s frustrated head scratching. “Why does this work for facebook.com and not my site?”
Some sites had copy/paste, to clipboard, before it was a standard.
Or way back in time: “Why is Quake running faster in GL than my stuff?”
“How can MS Office do this and my code can’t?”
Uhm, what? They deliberately made their office format consisting mostly of proprietary extensions (which didn’t fly with ISO, hence Ecma and bribery scandals) and now don’t even keep to them anymore, so competing office suites always run behind MS office in even basic layouting features.
MS Office was getting support from Windows, or at least inside knowledge, to have an UI that normal windows devs could not get access to.
Might be a bad example. MS is a big company, perhaps the Office guys started to make their own UI, independently of the OS team. Still, you had to know a lot about the OS to jimmy that in there.
Digging through the MSDN docs (we did pay for those), trying to see how our stuff could look like that, and nothing to be found.