So changing the user agent to chrome to fool websites that work shittier on non chromium stuff will ruin this metric?
No, what this means is sites might start adopting features like PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox and one where you just might not be able to access the service, at all, unless your browser has support.
(Passkeys are a replacement for passwords - essentially the idea is to take the technology commonly used for second factor authentication and use it as your “first factor” instead)
I’m using passkeys in Firefox everyday just fine.
Maybe its because I’m on Nightly but PassKeys work natively for me on Windows 11 with Firefox already
a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox
Funny cause it works fine in my browser with a bitwarden plugin. I don’t need and actually REALLY don’t want my browser handling my passwords… or passkeys… or whatever the fuck authenticates me.
I use 1password for passkeys on FF, works great.
I know your point is native, just want to point it out.
No, what I mean is “metric” as in data about users per browser.
I’m pretty convinced that a country with an annual military spend of almost three quarters of a trillion dollars can afford to QA their web services in at least the latest versions of the five major browsers(1). Anything less might be seen as corporate favouritism.
(1) Chrome, Firefox, Edge (so Chrome), Safari, and Opera (so also fucking Chrome, apparently) were the five I’m thinking of but I’m open to persuasion if anyone’s got a better list
I don’t think the issue is if it can afford it. The question is what constitutes a major browser.
Obviously, but that is a self-reinforcing loop. I’m not suggesting that government websites drive the most traffic or anything, but the government is kind of special as an entity. In several other areas the US government is bound to show no preferential treatment to vendors or other entities, such as in public broadcast TV or awarding government contracts. I don’t think “internet browsing software” is one such covered area, but forcing people to use one browser to access their websites is pretty equivalent in this day and age, so if they drop support for Firefox a lawsuit might change that.
My point with the money is that a whole team of highly skilled QA professionals isn’t even a rounding error on that kind of balance sheet, but thinking about it further there’s a solid argument to be made that supporting a variety of web browsers for government web services is in the interest of national security. In that case they could pull the money from the military budget for the project.
Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.
Even Opera is now Chrome…
And the last reason to even consider using it goes out the window 🙄 Thanks for the heads-up.
Not to even mention the fact a Chinese company owns Opera. Why is it even being considered?
Because it wasn’t based on the Chrome engine (initially, anyway). That’s actually a significant enough reason to at least consider it. I’ve never used Opera precisely because of its origins (honestly I thought it was Russian, though there’s not much practical difference in this case), but innovation is innovation. The fewer non-Chrome browsers exist, the worse off we all are.
Ah, didn’t know how old that doc was. Opera only switched to Chrome in 2013 or so.
But yeah, I agree. That’s why I support Ladybird’s and Servo’s development. They are the best bet to help stop the duopoly. If only Opera would BSD-license and open source their Presto Engine I would love to see someone pick up development of that. Instead we get Opera putting jumpscares in their browser .
I’ve not even heard of those two, I’ve stuck with Firefox for so long. I’ll check them out, thanks!
They’re both pretty new so dont expect a ton of stuff but they are both under heavy development and have funding. Enjoy!
Opera, chrome, but with CCP data theft and monitoring
All you people too young to remember the late 1990s, enjoy the internet as we used to know it before adblockers, because it sounds like you’re going to be out of options a lot of times soon.
I plan to use Firefox as long as I can, but I hate that I already have to have a backup browser for some sites, including the back end of the website where I used to work. And that will only get worse.
Oh it will be far worse this time.
Remember when websites could open infinite windows, and prevent you from backout out or closing windows?
Even if things get really bad, they wont get that bad. Also dont forget flash meant the ads were media rich, security hole ridden, cpu spinning, awful monsters as well.
It wasn’t that bad, you just have to reformat your pc every other week and have a second air gapped pc with anything important 😂
I will tell you something that most people won’t: you don’t have to use those websites.
It doesn’t matter how important you think they are, you can take a stand by not using them if they don’t respect you.
Do you know the reasoning behind the common saying “the united states doesn’t engage with terrorists”? Politics aside, it’s because engaging with your enemy legitimizes or empowers them. By refusing to negotiate or engage with terrorists, the policy aims to avoid granting them recognition or validation for their methods.
You can take the same stance; when a website stops working with non-chromium browsers you stop using it. You IMMEDIATELY stop using it, even better if you pay them money, you should IMMEDIATELY cancel citing that they’re stealing your intellectual freedom. If the US government does the same and you’re required to use a chromium browser to fill out your taxes for example, do it on paper, give them a message that you’d rather not use technology than have guns pointed at you
Sure, until there are almost no websites left you can go to.
that will likely not happen, FOSS tools will still respect you as a sovereign individual
Many sites I visit are not because I like the design of the site, but that I like the content that the users it has attracted have uploaded. Sure, there’s YouTube alternatives, but they’re not a replacement for the scale of YouTube. There’s still a few subreddits I read because they don’t have a good lemmy alternative.
Then you’re still contributing to the problem.
Oh no, my local community events aren’t announced on Lemmy, therefore I should just never interact with people in my town and spend more time browsing lemmy.
If you only allow all or nothing adopters, you’re going to end up with nothing.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make, as it doesn’t pertain to the discussion that’s going on.
There will always be ways around it. Every time a barrier is put up, there are people who try to figure out how to break through it. For fun.
Sure, until there are almost no websites left you can go to.
It worked in the '90s with internet explorer, it can work again now.
You just have to care enough to push back, to leave suggestion comments saying their website doesn’t work with your browser, and that web browsing is an Internet standard. That’s how it was done last time.
I think, at least in my state, Unemployment needs to be filed online. I don’t believe there is an alternate process that doesn’t require the internet.
My first desk job was in 96 and even then I needed 3 browsers to get the different government websites to work properly. I don’t know if there was a time before needing a backup browser.
Yup, just like the days where sites would just display a “this site is designed for internet explorer 6” and nothing else unless you were using IE.
In Soviet Russia, browser drops government!
Edit: FireFox fire + outfox you!
Pretty sure those Edge numbers are from using it under duress…
Edge really isn’t an awful browser. At least not in the same league as IE
Yeah because its just Chromium which isn’t an awful open source browser developed and maintained by Google.
I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon.
Yeah about that. Manifest V3 will infuse Firefox userbase nicely come next summer.
Get out of the lemmy Foss bubble and ask again. I don’t know anybody that actually gives a fuck about manifest v3 tbh.
People don’t care about anything until that thing hits them.
Because they haven’t been affected by Manifest v3 yet. As soon as they realise just what Manifest v3’s all about…They’ll give a fuck.
Savvy people may bother. Everyone else, who are much more numerically significant, still won’t.
Those two crowds intermingle, you realize that, right? They’re your family and friends, and they talk to each other.
My family prefers convenience and I cannot for the life of me make them realize the value of their privacy. They get lost if a button is placed at the top of the phone instead of the bottom. They complain when they click on an ad and the resulting page is a “cannot find the server” (because of it being blocked). To them, ad blocking is an inconvenience.
I guess it will just come down to which is more inconvenient, a web page that doesn’t work every once in a while, or constantly being bombarded by ads which makes a web page hard to read.
They will care about their adblocker no longer working
Given the amount of people all too happy to use Chrome on Android where you can’t block ads easily, I doubt it.
I use ublock origin on firefox on android, wasnt that hard.
That’s usually not because they don’t care but because they don’t know that ads can be blocked on the phone as well
They don’t make the effort to find out.
Do many real life users even know about ad blockers?
YouTube seems to think so
YouTube has been running a successful awareness campaign for those that didn’t know about Adblockers.
The reason there’s such a pushback against them is because they’ve become popular. It used to be a secret amongst nerds; now it’s common even on the iPhone.
I once saw stats from a 2015 study that said 40% of people on the internet used ad blockers. Who knows how that’s changed since then, but as somebody else said, the majority of people who don’t probably don’t even know that you can block ads, otherwise they’d probably be using it.
That’s much much higher than I would have expected.
Agreed, I expected it to be 10% or less. I was very surprised.
I’ve never even heard of it…
The short of it is that Google wants to prevent ad blockers from working in Chromium based browsers.
I don’t remember if this is also planned for v3 or unrelated, but there was also talks of essentially DRM-ing the internet to block non-Chromium browsers.
Yeah, it’ll be more common knowledge when it hits next summer and current era of adblocking seizes to exist on Chrome.
Are they talking about government devices? I’ve never seen firefox installed on a government device.
Do school or library computers count as government devices?
Generally I was talking about Federal devices. Those move a lot of needles because one federal change can switch a lot of stuff over.
Technically, yes, but in this context government devices means systems used by federal employees which have access to PII or classified information.
It is installed on our computers, depends on the agency it policy
Yeah, I’m surprised your agency let’s you do that with firefox. First time I have heard of that.
Firefox already doesn’t work well with government sites, so this doesn’t really change anything.
It would be more accurate to state that any given site chooses not to work well with any given browser.
Your phrasing makes it seem as-if this choice is in the browser developer’s hands. It is not.
Governments agencies usually obtain software through contracts with vendors. Microsoft is one of those vendors so I’m not surprised to hear about this.
Also, Firefox is the pretty much the browser of freedom and independence so I’m surprised it’s not illegal or “against family values” at this point. 😔
Horrific but strategically inevitable, switch to chromium engine, and do your own privacy related fork . Like all the other browsers.
fork
what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation…
firefox is the only way for a free web…
Then they’d be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn’t be able to lock down the code that’s already been released under the more permissive BSD license.
Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It’s huge, which makes me think it’s the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.
EDIT: turns out it’s Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.
deleted by creator
Who cares? I use Firefox but why do I care if the US government does? I thought they were still using Netscape on Windows ME
When I worked for the USDA in 2010 we had several web applications that depended on Internet Explorer 6.
I worked in an office in 2009 with a Windows 95 PC (a Packard Bell that barely ran the OS).
I got them to upgrade it in 2012.
To Win98 or ME?
I suppose I should have said replace it. :p
I worked at a software company in 2010 and was still actively coding web applications that work in ie6. They wanted web 2.0 flashy things… And also must work in ie6. It was not fun
Knock on affects could hurt firefox quite a bit
Did you read the article? This is about how the government’s web developers could stop writing websites that support Firefox. You might have to switch to Chromium to use government websites.
How convenient for them and the Corp lining their pockets.
Web dev here. Unless they explicitly block other browsers or somehow adopt bleeding-edge tech that other browsers have and Firefox doesn’t (has Firefox ever not been the first to support new standards?) I don’t know how this would even be a problem.
has Firefox ever not been the first to support new standards?
doesn’t really matter when it’s a google standard…
The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.
Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.
That’s the opposite of most UK government websites. I’ve always found them very well designed and easy to use. I think they’re well regarded by web designers
UK gov site is pretty good, NHS can be an absolute mess, especially going into the different trusts.
That’s because the US government outsources a lot of software development to consulting firms who bill hourly for developer time while paying the developers a fixed salary. Even though these developers have to do at least 40 billable hours a week, they don’t get time and a half for overtime.
The UK outsources too.
But they limit the amount of kickbacks, America has the freedom of unlimited corruption. (j/k, but only kinda)
We just ‘hide’ ours better.
Never attribute to malice what is better explained by incompetence. Someone’s razor or something.
Here are a few names you can blame in addition to the USWDS:
- Deloitte
- Accenture
- Ernst & Young
- KPMG
- PwC
The four corporations other Accenture constitute the US’ “Big 4 accounting firms”, and they get a shitload of money from local, state, and the Federal government to develop software for them at taxpayer expense – and none of this publicly-funded code is FOSS.
The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.
What about security? If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to exploit way easier.
That’s the same bullshit line politicians and corporations use, it’s simply not true
If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to
exploit way easierpatchFTFY. Open source software is more secure than closed source, not less
No, you can’t really make blanket statements like that at all.
Open source doesn’t compromise security on its own and closed source is the same.
Open source might be more secure but that’s only if people actually audit it properly and some closed source codes are audited more closely than some open source code.
Depends how u interpret it. I would assume they talking averages.
Lol
Security through obscurity doesn’t, work the vulnerabilities are still there. Also if the vulnerabilities are visible they’re also easier to close.
Tell me you have never worked in IT security without telling me you never worked in IT security.
To give you an actual answer, instead of pure Internet snark, the concept you’re proposing is called “security through obscurity” if you want to research it.
The TL:DR of it is it doesn’t work. If it did, all software would be proprietary and things like viruses wouldn’t exist. The source code for Windows isn’t available, but Windows gets exploited constantly.
Is this a serious question?
This is the exact same ridiculous argument that proprietary software corporations make. It never made any sense, security through obscurity will never work. Linux is open-source used on ~80% of all web servers, in your logic these servers would all be vulnerable. It just doesn’t make any sense. Linux is also used in many embedded devices and Android is based on the Linux kernel. But Android (which is also entirely open source) has one of the best security models out there.
More eyeballs are from people wanting those flaws fixed that wanting to exploit them.
Proprietary source code has much fewer eyeballs, none of which you can verify belong to competent or trustworthy people.
Vulnerabilities can and are usually found without code inspection. Fuzzing, reverse engineering, etc. At the same time, it is easier to find vulnerabilities having the code to check, but it is easier also for those who want to have them patched. That’s why we have tons of CVEs in Windows, iOS etc., and they don’t all come from the vendor… Depending on the ratio of eyeballs looking at something to fix and the ones looking at something to exploit, open source can be more secure compared to closed source.
And 100% of it is dog shit. I have seen custom products from Accenture, Deloitte, and E&Y, and they were passable prototypes at best.
Accenture doesn’t make shit. They bring in expensive ass consultants with 25 years of experience (on paper), then they sell something basically off the shelf. What’s left of the budget goes to a subcontractor, who now has to glue the already purchased pieces together with spit and gum, now on a very tight timeline before the funding runs out and your tiny company gets the blame
Haven’t worked directly with the others, but the Accenture story was the same everywhere
Well, that plus CGI
Bold of you to assume that people writing contracts or working them know about these standards at all.
every single US government website being so poorly put together
So, just like the rest of the internet? A technology, that popularly speaking, has only been around for 30-years?
And you expect an entity, as huge and diverse as the US government, on federal/state/local levels, to be on the same page?
I can safely make 2 predictions about you:
- You’re young, and that’s A-OK. My kids are GenZ, maybe Alpha? They’re my last, best hope for this world. But you haven’t had the benefit of watching all this evolve. I was writing BASIC on a VIC-20 as a child. 3K RAM!
- You’re not in tech. So again, you haven’t had the benefit of trying to make all this shit work. GenXers physically and programmatically built the world you live in, on top of the work of the Boomers. I’ve hung cable drops and coded, all messy.
This clusterfuck is both expected and natural. Or did your science teacher tell you evolution was orderly? Or perhaps intelligently designed?
And anyone else wanting to complain, I’ll remind you, this is how the government vs. the free market works.
Government works by rules that are not broken or bent. And this pisses some people off. Private enterprise works by what works and what doesn’t. It’s fast and fluid, and not designed to take “the people” in mind. And this pisses some people off.
Some tasks are appropriate for the government, some for the public sector. We’re still working this shit out. (website_under_construction.gif)
What a weirdly arrogant, condescending response. I also started on basic on a vic20, had a dad who worked in IT for the government, and have done all of that except the physical wiring on any noteworthy scale. This is utterly unhelpful.
I can safely make 2 predictions about you:
You might wanna check the reception on your crystal ball, Nostradamus, cuz you’re wrong on all counts. I’m 38 and have worked in general IT as well as network engineering.
This thread is filled with people who don’t make a connection between shitty government websites and the roads that are filled with pot holes, several train derailments every day, a tax collection agency that doesn’t have enough staff to do audits on wealthy people, and schools that ban books that have rainbows in them but teach books by Prager U.
We could have better government websites - but not if we elect “starve the beast” politicians.
USWDS is new and is a response to exactly that problem. You’d be blaming people who have nothing to do with the status quo who were hired to fix the problems you’ve experienced.
but when you point out the problems with mozilla in any of their subs/echochambers their usebase is by far worse than any other.
I took the liberty of reading the article but I’m gonna say the title is quite… tendentious. Makes it sound like it’s yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as “The CIA will stop funding Signal” (never has been) or “FBI wants to sell Wikipedia” (never has been).
What is going on?
EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of “tendentious”, which I have linked.
tendentious
ten·den·tious /tenˈdenSHəs/ adjective expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one. “a tendentious reading of history”
New word for me, too. Odd, considering how incredibly relevant it is nowadays!
It’s a very common word in other languages (Spanish) but my brain didn’t even process it correctly the first time I saw it in English lol
Very common word in Dutch too, but the Spanish did at one point rule the low countries before we kicked them out, so.
Thanks for taking the time to explain it to others, which I should have done beforehand. Admittedly when I wrote that post I was thinking of the term “tenacious” which means something completely different, and that distracted me from noticing I was using a perhaps obscure word.
Thank you. I’m not too proud to say I didn’t know this word. And, you saved me looking it up. When I was a kid, my dad got tired of defining words for me when I was reading a book, so he taught me to use a dictionary. From then on, I’ve read with a dictionary next to me.
Thank you. I’m not too proud to say I didn’t know this word.
You’re welcome, and yeah I had no idea what that word meant either, its why I looked it up in the first place.
Much of it has to do with Firefox’s decisions in the past 5-7 years that have made it very unfriendly to enterprise environments. The provisioning tools have gotten progressively more hostile to IT departments.
The US government is also finally moving to more modern systems for authentication and Mozilla has incorporated some particularly poor changes to how the stack is handled that are very unfriendly to IT environments that need to manage credentials for multiple authoritative sources. We had to switch to Chrome a couple years ago because our support cases with Mozilla would on many occasions come back with a response of ‘we’ve made our decision and will not be considering changes’.
Unfortunately, as Firefox kicks itself out of the enterprise market; that’s going to cascade to the personal market even further as well.
Serious question re the auth part:
Have you tried submitting PRs? Much of the complaints that I see about the development side of Firefox are grounded on the fac that “they won’t have this cool thing that Chrome has”, ignoring that those things are usually dangerous or are rejected for justified, studied reasons (see: WebUSB). Sounds just about the area where auth would have issues, and it’d be interesting to see what Firefox’s actual response was.
Who knows, maybe they’re cluing you that you shouldn’t depending on Google…
Well, as much as I like Firefox (and I even donate to the Mozilla foundation), I know for a fact that companies won’t pay their programmers money to make PR on Firefox.
I did try, unfortunately, in something as big as a browser it’s very time consuming to even fix simple bugs without side effects.
True. Browsers are so damn complex these days!
Original title is worse, I editorialized it as much as I thought appropriate
You made it express an opinion as if in an editorial report?
Or do you mean edited/revised?
edited/revised
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
Your adroit incorporation of "adroit " reminds me of mine own erewhile efforts to incorporate “adroit” into my poetical experimentations, which I hope resulted in an execution considered adroit back in the time.
Grateful I am for your bringing of this memory of creation to me.
We speak murican here friend
The fuck does tendentious mean and how do I even pronounce it?
Someone call 911, I think I’m having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.
We would be euphoria-laden in our willingness to expeditiously mobilize and engage medical assistance should it become categorically imperative.
Something can’t become categorically imperative, a quiddidity such as an essentially categorical property is invariant with respect to time. It either is or it isn’t. Per contra, aesculapian aid might become dispositionally required.
Just kill me instead. Thanks!
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
Completely off-topic but I recall a lawyers TV show back in the day where the response to this joke was something like:
“About at the same time you stopped beating yours”
Which would have been interesting to see how that would have worked at the court. Can’t remember the show alas, but it was probably The Practice (a late 90s show I think, predecessor to Boston Legal).
2% is huge. Many companies still have their website support ie6, and the US gov wants to abandon 2% of their users???
Nobody supports IE6. The OS won’t even load the sites these days thanks to TLS1.2 support being required for a lot of sites.
