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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

Stuff like this is why I hope Firefox remains viable as a browser long term. Chrome is now what? 80% of the browser market share and they have no incentive to protect user privacy.

I'm really worried that we're going to head down the road of chrome becoming the only browser anyone tests their site against and we're going to go back to the bad old days of IE 6 compatible sites that are completely broken in other browsers.

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I would agree with other posters that it's already like that, reddit.com, one of the biggest websites in the internet, will ask if you want to continue on chrome or the app if accessing from a mobile phone, essentially calling the mobile browser Chrome.

It used to be like that, but not anymore. I just checked and if you access it through Firefox, it will have Firefox in the prompt.

To be fair to the internet at large, I'm 100% convinced that whoever develops the Reddit website intentionally makes it obnoxiously unusable. Even on a relatively beefy desktop I can't scroll past more than five or six videos before the video player becomes unusable. Opening a reddit link on mobile is a guarantee to get an ad for their app that requires several click to bypass.

It's like they're deliberately ruining the experience in everything but their app to feed their ever growing hunger for more user data. It's the worst website I regularly visit by a mile.

Even besides the performance issues, the UI is unusable (at least for people without accounts.) Many times I have found reddit links that seem relevant in my search results; I click through to the link to read the reddit discussion, read one or two comments (because that is all their UI will fit onto my screen) and scroll down to read more. Suddenly I'm looking at another reddit discussion about a different topic entirely. What the fuck?

Incidentally the problem (bug? feature?) goes away if you have javascript disabled.

From what I remember, it labeled the option "Browser" but always used the Chrome logo for it.

It's already like that TBH, especially with really important sites like banking or government services.

That in particular makes me nervous sometimes. If the implementation can't even run properly on other browsers, I don't want to know what other corners they're cutting behind the scenes.

According to this[1], Firefox is under 5% now. It’s already too fringe for some sites to worry about.

If those numbers are right, Safari has about 5x the number of users. Realistically, Safari is our only hope.

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

yet for most the inconvenience of having to port over all of their profiles, history, cookies will be enough to keep them on Chrome. Most can't be bothered with installing another browser or even aware that they can import Chrome profiles into Firefox.

Even for me for some stuff I keep on Chrome since its too connected to all the business/saas/hosting logins and etc.

those days have never gone away. all browser rendering and JS engines have their own quirks and bugs. even a very simple website with only basic CSS will look different in all three desktop browsers, often different enough to be broken.

Same here. And I will continue to use it

For every step in the right direction on privacy, Mozilla has taken 2 steps back. They're a bit like Apple in that they market themselves as the guy who cares about privacy, when in reality they're just slightly better than Google.

I don't believe you can care about privacy with half your org being hyper-political lefty activists, and Mozilla seems to be infested with them. Having monitored the Firefox reddit for 2 years, FF devs & leadership are often at odds with FF users who are people who want privacy above all.

Should we really care what the politics are internally at an organization? They make a solid browser that works well for me. Maybe I am just in the dark on areas they have intentionally reduced my web privacy but I cannot think of any off hand

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