11: It’s the only browser on the market that is not either apple webkit or google chrome based. And it’s in our best interest to keep said market healthy, with as many competing actors as possible.
At some point there were more than 1 relevant browsers using Gecko, though. Somebody at Mozilla decided to gloriously triumph over allies by killing XULRunner and not offering a replacement.
Not sure if WebKit is such a bad choice in that context.
As it should be. But honestly unless there needs to be a change there is no reason to fork.
Most of the chromium forks are just branding and proprietary features they want built in, with brave being the only one that feels a little more aggressive in changes from the base.
Well, there are also the mobile variants of Firefox, which are more of their own thing.
IMO Mozilla limited itself a bit too much on Firefox. Which results it their web engine not attracting many developers for it outside Mozilla.
Embedding gecko in your own app was much easier in the past. This is now mostly taken over by CEF and WPE for Blink and WebKit respectively.
Also stuff like B2G (Boot 2 Gecko) or FirefoxOS are dead as well.
A goal of open source should be to be hacker friendly as well, were currently Blink/WebKit is leading. There are so many more projects around those engines than Gecko, which is sad.
Yes, I’m talking about that. I was using conkeror (Gecko-based browser with emacs-like controls, which is funny since for editing I’ve never learned emacs and use vi/vim) until it stopped being practical.
I feel like I’m going crazy since we kept preaching for years that this is the end goal and that this is what will happen with Google’s anti-competitive practices. Just get shit on in the comment threads until recently.
It’s not even a feel good I told you so because this just sucks.
There’s a new feature inside Firefox that allows you to report webpages that are broken on Firefox but work in other browsers. Please use it. It’s a great way to push for universal compatibility within browsers. It’s usually the webpage developer’s fault for using a non-orthodox technique that works exclusively on Chrome, but shouldn’t be done for any sort of reasons, like compliance with web standards. But, it’s possible for Firefox to derive intelligence from the reports and write workarounds.
If websites don’t work on Firefox even if the user agent was changed to Chrome I recommend you to use a privacy preserving browser like ungoogled chromium.
It’s a string that your browser sends to websites with information about the browser itself and your OS. Sometimes that info will be used to block functionality.
Years ago I tried to use TurboTax from Firefox on Ubuntu. It wouldn’t work because only Internet Explorer on Windows was supported. I changed the user agent to make it appear as though I was using a supported setup, and it worked flawlessly.
I haven’t actually needed to use one in a long time, but an extension search for “user agent switcher” should turn up something that can do it.
Easiest would be to install a plugin such as “User-Agent Switcher.” This is the string of text that identifies what browser, version, and platform you’re running to the server you’re accessing.
11: It’s the only browser on the market that is not either apple webkit or google chrome based. And it’s in our best interest to keep said market healthy, with as many competing actors as possible.
At some point there were more than 1 relevant browsers using Gecko, though. Somebody at Mozilla decided to gloriously triumph over allies by killing XULRunner and not offering a replacement.
Not sure if WebKit is such a bad choice in that context.
The Tor browser is still Firefox based. Not a large niche, but being THE preferred way to browse with Tor makes it on its own imho
Tor browser is just Firefox with a different default configuration and add-ons though.
As it should be. But honestly unless there needs to be a change there is no reason to fork.
Most of the chromium forks are just branding and proprietary features they want built in, with brave being the only one that feels a little more aggressive in changes from the base.
Well, there are also the mobile variants of Firefox, which are more of their own thing.
IMO Mozilla limited itself a bit too much on Firefox. Which results it their web engine not attracting many developers for it outside Mozilla.
Embedding gecko in your own app was much easier in the past. This is now mostly taken over by CEF and WPE for Blink and WebKit respectively.
Also stuff like B2G (Boot 2 Gecko) or FirefoxOS are dead as well.
A goal of open source should be to be hacker friendly as well, were currently Blink/WebKit is leading. There are so many more projects around those engines than Gecko, which is sad.
Yes, I’m talking about that. I was using conkeror (Gecko-based browser with emacs-like controls, which is funny since for editing I’ve never learned emacs and use vi/vim) until it stopped being practical.
It really is telling that even Microsoft don’t find it viable to maintain a browser engine.
The “standards” are an absolute fucking nonsense, and boil down to “just do what Chrome does because nobody can stop them”.
To be fair to Chrome.
Microsoft had the vast majority with Trident. Mozilla/Firefox slowly gained market share with Gecko. Chrome/Webkit* then took market share from both.
It’s not like Chrome just appeared one day and demanded everyone use them, they gained market share by being a good browser.
*(Chrome now uses a fork of Webkit called Blink.)
That being said I do think Firefox provides the best browser experience, and Chrome users should look into switching.
Which is a long way of saying Microsoft fucked up bad. Real bad.
Yeah, like Nokia-bad. Wait…
I feel like I’m going crazy since we kept preaching for years that this is the end goal and that this is what will happen with Google’s anti-competitive practices. Just get shit on in the comment threads until recently.
It’s not even a feel good I told you so because this just sucks.
I just had to install chrome to book plane tickets. Kept getting an error on Firefox.
There’s a new feature inside Firefox that allows you to report webpages that are broken on Firefox but work in other browsers. Please use it. It’s a great way to push for universal compatibility within browsers. It’s usually the webpage developer’s fault for using a non-orthodox technique that works exclusively on Chrome, but shouldn’t be done for any sort of reasons, like compliance with web standards. But, it’s possible for Firefox to derive intelligence from the reports and write workarounds.
All the more reason to get more people to use it.
Try changing your user agent. What’s the error?
When I was choosing a return site it kept saying, “oops there was a mistake. It was not your fault. Try again later”.
Their mobile app sucked too, so I installed chrome to see if it would work and it did right away.
If websites don’t work on Firefox even if the user agent was changed to Chrome I recommend you to use a privacy preserving browser like ungoogled chromium.
Or find another service.
Bit hard to do that with government websites and stuff like that.
Time to emigrate! /s
How would I change the user agent? Never heard of this before, what is it?
It’s a string that your browser sends to websites with information about the browser itself and your OS. Sometimes that info will be used to block functionality.
Years ago I tried to use TurboTax from Firefox on Ubuntu. It wouldn’t work because only Internet Explorer on Windows was supported. I changed the user agent to make it appear as though I was using a supported setup, and it worked flawlessly.
I haven’t actually needed to use one in a long time, but an extension search for “user agent switcher” should turn up something that can do it.
Easiest would be to install a plugin such as “User-Agent Switcher.” This is the string of text that identifies what browser, version, and platform you’re running to the server you’re accessing.
This is the way I do it when necessary.
Thanks! I just downloaded chrome to use for this one off instance. I’m pretty degoogled, but needed to book a flight so I just needed to get it done.
Thai Airways by any chance? I kept getting weird errors in ff but was ok I’m chrome.
The one time I have to use Chrome is T-Mobile’s site for some reason