As if they needed to check for ““compatibility”” at all - just let the users try their makeshift coded-in-a-weekend browsers, or their 2008 version of IE.
The better question is why some websites even bother checking for the browser when the vast majority of people uses mainstream options that follow web standards and self-update.
Checking the browser version kind of made sense 15 years ago when updating the browser depended on the user’s awareness and willingness of doing so, and the lack of standards across browsers was blatant. Nowadays that’s pretty much useless. The maximum these sites should be doing is displaying a banner letting the user know their browser might be incompatible (because it’s likely not in a way that prevents usage), then fuck off.
I had a client once who used to be obsessed with this. By his logic, if a potential customer visited the website and had a bad experience because the site didn’t work properly in their browser, they’d think the company was unprofessional and wouldn’t come into the store and we’d lose them as a customer forever. Analytics showed that 99+% of people would visit in one of the big three, and he wouldn’t pay for someone to test the site on the less popular browsers, instead he insisted on fingerprinting logic that broke all the time and probably caused more bounces than any possible rendering quirks from niche mobile browsers would have caused
It’s ridiculous some people even consider blocking a browser completely and having a near 100% chance of turning away the customer that uses it instead of just letting the user browse and have a significant chance of nothing bad happening.
People are not going to change browsers to visit this website unless they absolutely have to - in which case they’ll hate this company for it.
Oh my god, you get it. Thank you for your continued existence. Keep going!
Checking the browser almost never makes sense these days.
Sites should be using feature detection instead. Rather than checking the browser version, instead check if the browser supports the features they require.
Time for OP to install a User Agent Switcher plugin
🍻here’s to all the developers out there who makes sure there site works great not only with Firefox, but also with ublock origin and piholes!
It is always shocking to me how many sites or apps completely fail to load if you dare block google analytics!
I don’t know, works on my browser.
-Devs, probably.
“We’re a very inaccessible and hostile webpage. Turn back now.”
Abandon all hope ye who enter here
If it’s a website which only works with a specific browser, it’s a shitsite.
cheap. easy to admin.
Well good thing my employer runs a script every 15 min to set the default browser to Edge.
They probably get better metrics off of you running corporate logins and edge. Edge is equivalent to Chrome It supports all the same plugins.
It’s probably just secops picking the low hanging fruit dissuade you subverting network security.
Edge is built upon chromium
When I say that Edge is equivalent to Chrome, I don’t mean that Edge is exactly Chrome It’s not what I said and it’s not what I meant. I mean that for all intents and purposes you can use edge for anything you want to use Chrome for. Major differentiation is that you’re giving all of your data to Microsoft in lieu of Google. And you could look at all the other chromium base browsers and say yeah you could do the same thing with those but in this case we have a business user. There’s businesses are probably already running Microsoft networks. They might very well already have Microsoft SSO. Edge is going to have all kinds of great tie-ins to active directory policy. So secops/it is going to try to force you to use Edge, instead of say Firefox with a barely have any control over or maybe brave where you’re going to try TOR or IPFS and just basically be a stain on their HIDS board.
Edge is equivalent to Chrome It supports all the same plugins.
What’s this then?
Jesus man I just explained it to you. Welcome to my block list
Ah I see Mr I’m never wrong
run a script to set the default browser back to chrome just after it changes, using some timer estimation magic also… try taskkill
Limited time to build something so you have to pick based on a couple factors, often largest % of users.
Ads and tracking ? Browser with the largest market share ? Well, we are back to IE6 monopoly. :(
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If it truly is only an hour of someone’s time, then I’d much rather they made that insignificant amount less profit, but did the work to make our experience better.
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On the other hand, if it works in Firefox, it’s likely to work everywhere else.
I use Firefox for development and then, barring some weird chrome bug, things just work everywhere.
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Firefox is less sketchy, and is one of the last browsers left that isn’t based on Chromium. Just saying.
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what’s sketchy about Firefox?
This video explains pretty well how Firefox is turning worse on the privacy aspect of things.
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bravevivaldi!only if you have to use chromium of course!<
I wonder if it would work if you spoofed your user agent.
it almost always does, lol
Chrome implements features that aren’t standards track into their browser, and lazy/oblivious devs use these features to build their products - only to realize wayyy too late it won’t work in Safari/Firefox because it uses APIs that are chrome only
Firefox still has no month or week inputs. These things have been standardized 10 years ago and implemented in Chrome as of version 20.
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https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/worldwide
According to this:
On the desktop, Firefox has about 6% marketshare, and Edge, the Windows default, about 11%.
On mobile, however, Firefox is at 0.5%, and Edge at 0.3%.
A lot of people only browse the Web on a mobile platform. And the ones using those tend to use the default browser bundled with their phone; if what they have out-of-box works, they’re not going to install anything else. Apple bundles Safari, and Google bundles Chrome, so that’s what gets used.
Chromebooks are frequently used in US schools, this has to screw the statistics.
It still doesn’t explain all the extra work of detecting and intentionally blocking firefox…
Something didn’t work on Firefox and the dev didn’t get permission to work out how to fix it as it was uneconomical compared with just disabling firefox
I expect that they had something break on it and decided that it wasn’t worth the time spent fixing it, so they just blocked it so more users didn’t run into it. A simple message may be annoying to them, but at least they have a straightforward workaround then.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I use Firefox on both mobile and desktop, but it’s not too hard to see why they’d do a cost/benefit analysis like that. No one company is in the business of trying to do antitrust work, to avoid a browser monopoly, and that’d be the reason why it’d be important to have competing browsers.
for the love of god, charge your phone
4%, absolute madman, probably only had time to make this post and can’t answer comments anymore
RIP {I can’t type out that username}, you shall be remembered while you charge your phone
To avoid testing on other platforms. Money is limited.
This could be a ‘works better on chrome popup’. Instead it’s a hard block