It’s time to get rid of user-agent strings that declare anything other than desktop, mobile, or html version.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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If I was a Firefox dev I'd start looking into building in user agent spoofing right into the browser.
It already opens Facebook pages in a special isolated tab. They could have apple.com open in it's own special "safari" tab. I wonder if there's anything preventing them from doing that. I guess it could be bad because it would make their market share appear even smaller.
The irony of Firerfox officially agent spoofing while everyone else uses some variant of "Mozilla" as their UAS is too much.
I think user agent scrambling is part of privacy.resistFingerprinting, but it's a controversial feature and breaks a lot of webpages
Broken webpages might be a good thing. There are too many browsers that aren’t adhering to standards. Stop coding around it and start publicly shaming these megacorps.
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The biggest offender is, surprisingly, cloudflare. They will straight up refuse to serve you any site if your user agent is not one of the mainstream ones. It's not even "find the traffic light to prove you're human", but a page basically saying "fuck you, go away".
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User agents are not unfortunately not the only way to identify a browser, there are other ways to fingerprint a platform.
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Actually, the top one is the logo of the chromium browser engine, but the bottom one is not the logo of the Gecko browser engine. That's the logo of SpiderMonkey, Firefox's Javascript engine (Chromium uses V8).
This is the logo for Gecko:
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It's especially moronic that Cloudflare thinks everyone using Tor is trying to DDOS every site.
Do you know how fucking slow Tor is? You couldn't DDOS an Arduino with it.
Probably because there are A LOT of people using that tor exit node that have visited that site recently. So, cloudflare sees it as a potential DDOS
Onion sites get DDOS attacks constantly. That's why Dread has so many backup links.
afaik, cloudflare has an option to disallow tor traffic. so the website owner decided they don't want tor
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Do we, as an industry, have such short attention span, that we forgot how Microsoft abused their monopoly in the 1990s to force everyone to use Internet Explorer? Now that Google is doing the exact same thing, nobody seems to mind.
Because the tech gigacorporations have literally spent the last three decades brainwashing us into accepting shit like that and even convincing us that it's better this way.
Not better. No one thinks anything is better, just that we don't have a choice but to take what they serve.
I remember using Netscape (my Google keyboard didn't know that word) before Firefox and SeaMonkey. I mostly used SeaMonkey to edit HTML and Firefox for my casual browsing.
I get the joke but I don't have any problems visiting websites. Neither with firefox nor with mull
Go to https://business.apple.com/#/main/users
Reset your user agent string. It will tell you that your browser is unsupported. Switch your user string to chrome and everything will function as expected.
IT people probably run into more problems with non-chromium browsers.
Edit: it has to be visited on a desktop regardless. ABM does not like mobile browsers.
IT person here, Firefox works fine for everything that matters.
That's highly subjective. At our org there's a reason our baseline deployment for workstation images comes with both Chrome and Firefox. We have thousands of users across dozens of specialties (HR, logistics, scientists, engineers, etc) and they all have a multitude of web apps they use day to day. Some of those don't like Chrome or Firefox. Hell, we even had to support god damn IE11 for way too long before Microsoft thankfully forced its death by discontinuing security support (our cybersecurity people ban anything that doesn't have active vendor support with very few exceptions).
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What the hell is wrong with apple?
That's not firefox' fault
Btw: what's abm?
Here is the problem with changing the user agent (IMO). It just re-enforces the idea that Chrome/Chromium browsers are the only browsers and therefore sites should just be coded for them. Which they are currently the most common for people to be using since even Microsoft gave up on IE and the original Edge. But the fact that Microsoft and Google are still the most dominate OS'es means that we are just seeing IE all over again. With sites being coded to only expect Chromium, then they are just set to not even allow them to be loaded by anything else.
The fact that so many of the sites do in fact work with Firefox/Safari when the user agent is set to falsely report that it is Chrome/Chromium should be kind of concerning. Just leads to false narratives that other options are not worth using due to being bad products. Kind of like how in the US we are conditioned to believe that there are only two parties to choose from and all other options shouldn't be allowed or are never okay to support.
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I 100% expect websites to soon start breaking their interface on Firefox. With Chromium blocking the best adblockers, they will be incentivized to nudge people to Chromium browsers.
Didn’t we already see Youtube sneaking in a 5 second delay for Firefox users?
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My wife was recently in school. Almost all the services she used decline to render unless you're using Chrome.
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It's "how it feels" or "what it feels like", not "how it feels like"
Thank you! Also "how it looks" and "what it looks like". I see people messing those up all the time
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my company give choice to use Firefox and Chrome and it is mandatory to install those browsers on those computers. But, 95% use Chrome.
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Brave isn't doing much better with captchas lately due to having adblocking built in, google is just on a crusade against anyone blocking stuff.
It's so absurd. It feels like half of the websites out there actively don't want me to visit them.
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What is the second browser from the bottom on the right?
Librewolf
As the other two said, Librewolf. It's basically a very privacy-focused fork of Firefox, where just about all privacy settings are on by default.
Now that is driving me crazy, it looks so familiar, but I just can't place it.👿
Found it!
It's Librewolf, a Firefox fork.
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Duck duck go?
Their browser on Android relies on Chromium, on Windows it uses Edge's webview thingy and on macOS Safari afaik
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