this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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What the heck is this trash shipping with firefox? about:compat (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by mvirts@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Visit about:compat in your firefox. I find it insane that these exist.

Edit: I've learned that this is part of the webcompat system addon developed by Mozilla and other contributors. I see why this is beneficial default behavior, since FF has no chance of getting enough market share to matter more if things are broken.

However, this behavior is too intrusive for my taste. For example this injection: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/8a4afb4d34f8/browser/extensions/webcompat/injections/js/bug1472075-bankofamerica.com-ua-change.js is basically just to silence annoying user reports.

Also, Every site FF pretends to be a different UA on is artificially reducing FF market share data.

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[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
  1. Why is this trash? It's making websites that are hostile work properly?
  2. The example you linked literally doesn't reduce FFs marketshare. It's a fix for a website that's hostile towards macOS and Linux users, by pretending to be FF on Windows...
[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)
  1. I believe including specific site fixes in the main browser release is a bad idea. It seems like many disagree with that belief, and that's fine.
  2. For that example I take issue with the justification in the comment above the code that the problem solved is a high volume of reported issues. That injection solves a problem for webcompat, not Firefox.

What I mean by market share is for each individual site that Firefox pretends to be another browser on, that site's statistics will show very few or no Firefox users. Sites that are already broken probably don't care, but they may see that as justification to disregard Firefox users i During future changes.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

If they are having to add compat, it is because it is a popular site that is already ignoring Firefox. I am sure they have communicated the problems. The website operators don’t care.

What hurts Firefox market share is when regular users have problems on the sites they frequent. The lower Firefox market share, the fewer sites care about it ( as you seem to understand ). Firefox has to make these kinds of fixes.