Where are the sites that don't work in Firefox? [LWN.net]

Where are the sites that don't work in Firefox?

Posted May 17, 2024 8:38 UTC (Fri) by eduperez (guest, #11232)
In reply to: Where are the sites that don't work in Firefox? by dskoll
Parent article: Mozilla Foundation Welcomes Nabiha Syed as Executive Director

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Most sites that discriminate against a certain browser (or user-agent), do it because they lack the knowledge and/or manpower to make the site work properly with that browser, not because of some political agenda. During the early years of the world-wide web, "optimized for internet explorer" usually meant "this site only works with internet explorer, because it is the only browser capable of interpreting this pile of crap (aka HTML soup)".

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Where are the sites that don't work in Firefox?

Posted May 17, 2024 11:19 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

> because they lack the knowledge and/or manpower to make the site work properly with that browser

In many cases the site actually does work properly with minority browsers, but the site developers want to save resources by not even doing the testing to verify that it does work properly. And since they're not doing that testing, they don't know if the site works or not, so they warn users away from those browsers.

Where are the sites that don't work in Firefox?

Posted May 17, 2024 14:57 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Then regulations should say that *blocking* minority browsers is called "discrimination", preferably under one of the disability acts (if I need a word-based browser to read to me, I should be able to use the browser that suits me, not them!).

Some form of pop-up (along the lines of that cookie thing) that says "you are using an unsupported browser" is fine, if objectionable.

Cheers,
Wol