Groups > alt.comp.software.firefox > #13257

Re: An annoying state of affairs

From	NFN Smith <worldoff9908@gmail.com>
Newsgroups	alt.comp.software.firefox
Subject	Re: An annoying state of affairs
Date	2025-05-01 12:48 -0700
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<vv0j7a$3c3bl$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References	<5c15d17484dnews@triffid.co.uk>

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Dnews wrote:

> She's been using Firefox on MS Windows for many years, and recently a
> couple of sites she uses will not work with firefox.
> 
> She's communicated with them and they say their sites have been tailored
> to work with 'MS-Edge or Google Chrome for a smoother and better
> experience for the users', and so she should use one of them.  :-(  (Crap).

There's different varieties of "not work".  One is that the site does 
browser user agent sniffing and decides that that's reason to refuse a 
connection.  Although they will insist that their preferred browser (and 
version) are essential, that's not always the case, and spoofing the UA 
string can sometimes be sufficient to get through.  Over the years, I've 
found that with a lot of financial institutions.  For that, the 
motivation tends to be driven by user support considerations, where the 
site either wants to make sure you're using a version with current 
security patches, or more likely, where they want the user using the 
same version that the customer rep has on their own desktop, especially 
where navigation of config settings is identical.

The other "not work" (and more likely) that the site has been developed 
for Chrome, and uses scripting or HTML that Firefox does not (yet) 
support.  This is much more common for trailing-edge Firefox forks, such 
as Seamonkey or PaleMoon, but I've definitely seen sites that will not 
work with the most current version of Firefox, even on a profile with 
entirely default settings.

For those sites, the developers so strongly assume Chrome as a universal 
standard that their attitude is essentially, "if it works in Chrome, it 
works".  If it doesn't work with something else, then they expect you to 
switch to Chrome, they neither care (or possibly even know) about the 
presence of other browsers, especially ones that aren't some derivative 
of Chromium. For them, Chrome is sufficiently dominant that it's not 
worth the cost or effort to bother with anything else.

> 
> I have a vague recollection there is a setting in About:config Preferences
> to spoof/make Firefox appear to be another browser, like Edge.  :-(
> 
> Is there a setting I can use to fix this for her?

As noted elsewhere, in about:config, you can create 
general.useragent.override to show a different User Agent String, such as:
	Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, 
like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/135.0.0.0

(That one happens to be what Edge is reporting on my own computer). 
That will change setting globally.  You can also do it by site, where 
the entry is general.useragent.override.example.com to show that UA 
string to just example.com, and leaving Firefox showing for everything else.

However, if the site uses features that are unique to Chrome that aren't 
in Firefox, there is no amount of spoofing that's going to make a 
difference.

The reality is that those of use that prefer Firefox or other browsers 
are going to be forced into using Chrome (or similar) at least some of 
the time.

Although I'm not positive that there might not be a very few sites where 
it's "Chrome or nothing", there are other options that will give you the 
capacities of Chrome without having to interact with Google. When I need 
that, I tend to go with either Edge or Brave.  Both of those take a 
little effort to review all the privacy settings, and for me, if I'm 
using an alternate browser, besides support for ad blocking, the thing 
that I want most is the ability to flush all user history when I close 
the browser, and when I re-open, there is no history or accumulated 
cookies. Both Edge and Brave do that.

Despite the connectivity question of Microsoft, I find that I like Edge 
when I need a Chromium browser.  It does require a review of all the 
settings, but at least Microsoft is actually pretty good about disabling 
a lot of things.  For good measure, I do recommend for any Windows user, 
whether you intentionally use Edge or not, it's worth going through and 
reviewing the settings, as Windows 10 and Windows 11 will occasionally 
force use of Edge for system-related interaction (and ignoring setting 
of something else as the default browser).  For that, it's better to 
have Edge properly tuned to reflect your own preferences, rather than 
having all of Microsoft's defaults in place when Windows processes force 
rendering through Edge.

Smith

Thread

An annoying state of affairs Dnews <dnews@triffid.co.uk> - 2025-04-30 20:33 +0100
  Re: An annoying state of affairs "Alan K." <alan@invalid.com> - 2025-04-30 15:39 -0400
  Re: An annoying state of affairs jjb <jjb@invalid.invalid> - 2025-04-30 22:09 +0200
    Re: An annoying state of affairs candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> - 2025-05-01 16:00 +0000
  Re: An annoying state of affairs Newyana2 <newyana@invalid.nospam> - 2025-04-30 17:22 -0400
    Re: An annoying state of affairs "David E. Ross" <nobody@nowhere.invalid> - 2025-04-30 17:23 -0700
      Re: An annoying state of affairs NFN Smith <worldoff9908@gmail.com> - 2025-05-01 12:56 -0700
    Re: An annoying state of affairs "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-05-04 15:00 +0200
  Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-04-30 19:57 -0500
    Re: An annoying state of affairs The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> - 2025-05-04 09:50 -0700
  Re: An annoying state of affairs NFN Smith <worldoff9908@gmail.com> - 2025-05-01 12:48 -0700
    Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-01 22:33 +0000
      Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-01 18:47 -0500
        Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-02 08:00 +0000
          Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-02 05:02 -0500
            Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-03 00:39 +0000
              Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-03 01:51 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-03 07:43 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-03 10:44 -0500
              Re: An annoying state of affairs Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2025-05-03 08:31 +0100
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-03 07:39 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid> - 2025-05-03 09:12 +0100
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-03 22:30 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-03 19:18 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 02:07 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-03 22:48 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 06:40 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 05:28 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 05:32 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 23:56 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 21:43 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 21:58 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-06 22:42 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-05 07:26 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-05 07:28 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 21:41 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 17:33 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 23:20 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-05-04 15:02 +0200
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 12:44 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2025-05-04 20:11 +0200
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 21:36 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 17:34 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-04 23:20 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-04 21:48 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-05 07:29 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-05 05:11 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-06 22:44 +0000
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Ken Blake <Ken@invalid.news.com> - 2025-05-07 08:58 -0700
                Re: An annoying state of affairs VanguardLH <V@nguard.LH> - 2025-05-03 10:53 -0500
                Re: An annoying state of affairs Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2025-05-03 22:33 +0000
    Re: An annoying state of affairs Mark Lloyd <not.email@all.invalid> - 2025-05-02 17:36 +0000
      Re: An annoying state of affairs sticks <wolverine01@charter.net> - 2025-05-02 14:32 -0500
        Re: An annoying state of affairs "Alan K." <alan@invalid.com> - 2025-05-02 17:08 -0400
  Re: An annoying state of affairs Dnews <dnews@triffid.co.uk> - 2025-05-04 07:17 +0100
    Re: An annoying state of affairs Dave Royal <dave@dave123royal.com> - 2025-05-04 07:59 +0100
    Re: An annoying state of affairs Newyana2 <newyana@invalid.nospam> - 2025-05-04 08:20 -0400

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