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.
TIL Samsung makes a browser.
Samsung loves bloat. Their attempt at creating an ecosystem and therefore lock in to keep using their devices. I like Samsung hardware but their software is shit.
Eventually, the list of things Samsung doesn’t make is going to be shorter.
Yeah, comes on Samsung phones and tablets.
I tried doing my annual vehicle registration online on FF yesterday and the dmv site kept throwing an error and bringing me back to step 1 when I submit my payment information. Tried turning off all my extensions and still wouldn’t budge. Finally tried it in Chrome and it worked instantly. You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.
You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.
lol, I would never ever think that. government sites are just the worst fucking feverish web nightmare that exists, at least here where I live.
it’s like they deliberately choose people for this kind of work whom never seen computers in their life before and think Internet is just an energy drink you buy at the gas station.
dude i work with one that just recently added support for non-internet explorer… major. government. entity. places that are the reason for the required legacy i.e. code in edge.
this government shit is based on ‘lowest bidder’ mentality.
I have had some luck using a user agent switcher in these cases. Might be worth a shot.
Government websites don’t care at all about support, most of them were made 15-20 years ago and haven’t been updated at all
Well, those will work in Firefox just fine…
The government IT shops part feels like a real issue. If the government gets it’s self in a tech debt to two of the largest IT orgs because they didn’t want to invest the time to get Firefox enterprise installed and configured on at least their own machines I’ll be pissed. Like why are we spending so much but getting so little from our IT?
why are we spending so much but getting so little from our IT?
That’s easy, it’s called lobby!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Given the amount of people all too happy to use Chrome on Android where you can’t block ads easily, I doubt it.
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.
I use ublock origin on firefox on android, wasnt that hard.
https://gs.statcounter.com/ until G tries to force ads on all the Chrome
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. 😔
In Soviet Russia, browser drops government!
Edit: FireFox fire + outfox you!
So everyone using FF just had to start visiting more .gov websites (using the correct user agent) ?
Really sad. In Germany, Firefox sits comfortably at 10% market share, and actually is having a slight uptick in the last month.
Wait until Google implements manifest V3 and “kills” adblockers. Firefox will become cool again for the normies.
yea my dad would not survive not having adblock on his evenly youtube sessions XD
Unlikely. If they are prompted to remove it, normies will do it.
The tech iliterate folk will ask relatives but not the normies.I will wait and see. We could see Google pulling it’s weight to convince publishers to start blocking Firefox. Google is not just going to sit and watch its market share shrink.
Luckily for Americans, the EU actually kind of cares about monopolies and antitrust sometimes, and their market is large enough to force corporations to comply.
me waiting for browser news 👀
They will get rekt by Vestager faster than they can say “profits”
kid called EU anticompetitive laws:
People are so used to seeing ads they probably wont bother, i have friends who work in IT who just acceppt that half of the sites they visit are full of annoying flashy and intrusive ads.
Yeah but if you tell them about ad blockers and show them how to install them, and they see how much better the experience is afterwards, then they’ll bother.
They said their friends work in “IT”. They have most definitely heard about adblockers and know how to use them, if this claim is legit. As a person who works in the tech field, I don’t know any coworkers who would not use adblockers. I find it kind of crazy to believe there are any IT professionals that don’t use adblockers, but I guess some must exist. Maybe they feel like adblocking is stealing or immoral somehow.
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.
I’m just switching back to Firefox given all the bullshit that’s coming in Chrome. Hopefully others follow suit and that number starts climbing back up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
UK gov site is pretty good, NHS can be an absolute mess, especially going into the different trusts.
Well, that plus CGI
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.
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
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.
Security through obscurity doesn’t, work the vulnerabilities are still there. Also if the vulnerabilities are visible they’re also easier to close.
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.
That’s the same bullshit line politicians and corporations use, it’s simply not true
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.
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
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.
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.
Bold of you to assume that people writing contracts or working them know about these standards at all.
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
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.
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…
How convenient for them and the Corp lining their pockets.
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
but when you point out the problems with mozilla in any of their subs/echochambers their usebase is by far worse than any other.
