Europe wants easy default browser selection screens. Mozilla is already sounding the alarm on dirty tricks Europe's Digital Markets Act, which goes into effect next year, will require that companies designated as gatekeepers provide users of most popular operating systems with browser choice screens that ask them to select a default browser. Among the designated gatekeepers – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and …
Chromium and all the derivatives are banned in my home. The only browsers that work reliable (or via a VPN) are Firefox, WaterFox and Safari (on IoS).
Anything that starts sending data to the likes of MS, Google, Amazon etc trigger an outgoing firewall alert. Then they get blocked pronto.
Those annoying sites that demand access to Google for Captcha's are only usable via a VPN that shows that I have an IPofP (Internet Point of Presence) in Palo Alto , not the UK.
I wonder how much Google/MS are paying sites to demand a Chromium based browser? Any that I encounter get blacklisted. I have seen it once on my iPhone. Numpties the lot of them.
Google etc can go FSCK themselves.
> And there's no way you can verify that Firefox itself isn't using DOH behind the scenes.
There is, a MITM proxy.
All devices are blocked from accessing the internet, they must connect to a proxy and only the proxy IP is allowed through. Set the proxy up as a MITM proxy, and you get to see all traffic.
Growing, again. I remember "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" being popular once.
On the other side, web developers don't usually enjoy having to test their work in multiple rendering engines (boo hoo, right?) and as Chrome is often the default browser they have access to, "works on Chrome" is going to be what they give us.
React (thanks Facebook) and other component based frameworks should make this super easy, as you can then encapsulate your widget and check its cross browser and not worry about it later. This significantly reducing the burden of testing. I know JS slows sites down and all that, but honestly this plus typescript is an amazing step forward in my opinion. Sure, still need to test and try to keep the bloat down, but the trade off is very acceptable to me as both a user and a developer
The frameworks pretty much all have a policy decision that "unsuported" browsers will be disabled rather than partly-enabled. When you get that "upgrade your browser" message, it's determined by the framework in use, and happens when (for security reasons), the framework in use has been upgraded to the latest version.
I can’t speak for frameworks in general, or libraries in use, but react doesn’t, and neither does the “ootb” basic app either: https://create-react-app.dev/docs/supported-browsers-features/
You just change the browser list to the list that you’re testing against….
If you’re updating your app and not regression testing then that’s on you. If you’re not testing legacy browsers then getting annoyed you have to fill out a list then just use a “*” policy as you’re just chucking it over the fence anyway; if you’re not testing every single browser and are happy to please most people then than is exactly what the defaults are doing by only allowing recent versions of chrome…
I don’t see the issue, which explains my downvotes!
"On the other side, web developers don't usually enjoy having to test their work in multiple rendering engines (boo hoo, right?)"
Um, it's not exactly fun but it's part of the job. At my shop we had to test everything on Chrome, Firefox, and IE. Not sure what kids are doing these days though.
The good old days of having browser specific stylesheets for IE5.5, IE 6, IE 7, IE 8...
One massive problem though is that while devs tend to go with Chrome is because they use so many of the Google tools which play nicely in Chrome. Emails? Gmail. Search? Google. Analytics? Google Analytics. What mobile you using? Probably Android.
There is also a prevailing and wrong attitude about Chrome being "faster" than other browsers. That's not the case now I don't think, especially with RAM. But I would say too that Chrome is fairly frictionless to get going with while Firefox has a little bit of friction with it.
Caught out yesterday once again. Been visiting mega.co.uk for many years: now the poor pathetic dupes refused my regular usual browser for them, up-to-date Basilisk ( same with Pale Moon ), which always worked before, claiming it was out-dated, and presented the usual selection of approved browsers.
I managed with the hideous drivelling Firefox despite its resolute fugliness; but there's no reason why I should have to, let alone the sad Chrome.
.
And yet it is not just the rarer browsers: coders now find it exceptionally difficult to build a new browser from scratch; but if they do, they will then find it impossible to market if the purity crowd make sure websites won't display with them, taking away their purpose.
Much worse is the growing habit of web sites checking the browser and refusing to play if it isn't one of their favoured ones - which is increasingly likely to be Chromium based.
If the EU forces Apple to allow "real" Chrome on iOS instead of Chrome using Apple's WebKit like currently a lot more websites will do that. Safari is the biggest obstacle to doing that today, because iOS users can't run "real" Chrome. If they can web designers can just assume that designing pages only for Chrome will force iOS users to download Chrome to use it, effectively killing Safari. Firefox would probably be dead already if it was easy to design for Chrome+Safari only, but it will be dead for sure in this Chrome only future.
I worry that the EU is going to force Apple to do this, believing that it will increase competition, when it would actually do the exact opposite.
Now theoretically Apple could allow real Chrome in EU countries only, but it probably isn't practical for them to do so.
the growing habit of web sites checking the browser and refusing to play if it isn't one of their favoured ones
Simple: if they do that then I go elsewhere. If I spend money elsewhere, their loss.
There are very few places that would cause me problems if they did that, eg my bank.
Would not behaviour like this fall foul of disability legislation, eg refusing to work with a text-to-speech browser ? (Assuming that gov't can be arsed to enforce its own laws).
One also needs to wonder about their technical competence if they are apparently unable to make their web site work cross browser, it is not very hard.
Well yes, but it's a problem if you need to use their website e.g. in a professional capacity, even more so if the website owner is large.
In completely unrelated news, I find a vast number of Microsoft sites don't play nice with Firefox, but work very well with Edge Chromium.
As Doctor Syntax wrote, "Much worse is the growing habit of web sites checking the browser and refusing to play if it isn't one of their favoured ones...". Even some operating systems, read mictosoft windows, are written to use one particular browser. With the umpteen thousand security patches mictosoft has had to push out I wouldn't trust anything out of Redmond for use on the internet.
I'm sure we had this argument around ten years ago, and after an initial thrashing around it all disappeared quietly into the morning mist...
"Best viewed with"/"Only works with"... it's almost as if there were no such thing as web standards.
(Though there is the point that a choice for an uniformed user is no more than a lottery: how does he rate one over another?)
Or, you limit to the standards that all fairly-modern browsers support. There are always a few new CSS things that would make authoring web dev easier (and not to the detriment of users) but are not supported by enough browsers. So my staff are told not to use the them, simple as that. Sure, it makes life a little harder for us, but that's the world we live in.
To put it another way, if it doesn't work for all your users, then we don't consider that to have been built properly.
At the risk of sounding old, maybe it's because I've lived through the times when IE, Firefox and Chrome all had meaningful market share, so it's ingrained into my professional psyche.
Better yet, the intersection of the set of standards supported by fairly-modern browsers with the set of ones you have a real, demonstrable need for.
The vast majority of websites don't even need scripting. They might use scripting to offer additional features or "improve user experience", but they ought to degrade gracefully in the absence of scripting. It's Not That Hard. (I wrote my first website in 1993, and I've taught web application design. I can quote C&V for HTTP, HTML, CSS, and ECMAScript standards from HTTP 0.9 through HTTP/2, and HTML up through HTML 5 circa 2017, when I stopped following web standards so closely. I am not in any way convinced by arguments about how "modern" websites have to use every damn tool in the box.)
SPAs/RIAs are a different story, but there are very few websites that need to be or should be implemented as SPAs. And while there are certainly advantages to using the browser as a rendering engine, the craze for making every application an SPA (due in part to revenge effects from policies set by smartphone OS vendors) has gone much too far. Electron-hosted monstrosities like MS Teams are a case in point.
Windows 11 latest insider build now pops up adds INSIDE web pages trying to trick you into making edge the default browser.
Sometimes the options say stuff like "Make Edge the default browser yes/no" and sometimes the opposite "keep your current default browser? or change to Edge Yes/No"
the "ads" look like they're embedded into websites, but are actually OS overlays.
I've been using non-MS OS's for many years now so I was taken aback when I went to fix something on my mother's Windows 10 computer only an Edge window to open itself and tell me how great Edge is and ask me if I'd like to make it my default browser. I've never seen anything like this ever - not on my non-MS OS's and not on older versions of Windows. This type of user-unfriendly behavior wouldn't be possible if MS didn't have a vice grip on the OS market.
if it time to nuke MS for good.
To me, the purpose of an OS is to allow the applications to do their job and to NOT get in the way. If MS persist in this then they will drive more and more people away.
Perhaps.... that is their aim? After all, it is the corporate customers that provide them with the big bucks.
Apple is stupid having Safari, Books and Pages.
MS having Word, Excel, Explorer, Windows and Edge as names is crazy.
How do you search internet?
There is good reason to have made up names like Kleenex and Sellotape.
The GIMP is a stupid name for the image editor.
I did not. Firefox under Linux is a pain in the arse: slow to load and very resource hungry. Chrome is much faster and easier to run. I used to use Chromium until they removed the sync option.
It hasn't always been like this. Firefox was much better than Chrome at one point, after they fixed its old memory leaks, but they blew it about three years ago and it went crap again.
Yes that needs to be illegal. Along with dark grey text on black or light grey text on white. Or forcing a mobile version of the site on a big hi-res screen because OS is iOS or Android.
Or designing desktop applications or websites as if everyone has a 6″ screen with only touch.
I'd love to see more regulation against dark patterns in general. And, no, I don't think they need strict legal definitions. We don't have strict definitions of things like false advertising, and we still manage to squelch some of it. Some is better than none.
(At the moment I personally am annoyed by too-small "close" buttons on advertisements I get in certain phone apps, where not hitting the button precisely opens a web page that goes to the app store to try to make you download the advertised app. That sort of thing is extremely obnoxious.)
"China do it and it works" also applies to genocide. Simplistic arguments, especially superficially appealing ones, are usually false...
The underlying problem isn't necessarily the people in charge of businesses, who are pretty much legally bound to do whatever they can to make the most money for their shareholders, it is the lack of regulation that says, "within that context, you're not allowed to do X, Y, or Z".
As an Apple user (albeit also running Windows and Linux VMs on my MacBook) the only time Safari doesn’t work for me is accessing Teams. I have Edge installed for that (switching between different client logins is far easier than with the Teams app). I get plenty of pop-ups suggesting I should open a site in Chrome but I’ve never had an issue just ignoring that. I used to have Firefox installed as well (for sites that didn’t play well with Safari) but, not having needed to use it for several years (and finding it clumsy when I used it just to keep my copy updated), I removed it.
Unlike many here, I like Apple kit because it meets my needs without me having to delve too deeply; when I need to tinker, I have a choice of Linux VMs. I’ve used many combinations of hardware and software in my career (since 1974) and used to hate Macs when I had to use one, but OSX changed that. Several of my old Windows laptops have been successfully repurposed with Linux as loan kit (I now fill some of my retirement time supporting the older users in the community on ICT issues). What surprises me (though it shouldn’t) are the number of Mac users I meet who use Chrome; these are not particularly computer-literate users but had believed they needed Chrome to access the “internet” properly.
AdGuard is a good choice in the Apple orchard - there are versions for iOS/iPadOS too. There are free and paid options, the latter adding in more flexibility - including an option to block ads in apps (which I've found very useful for infrequently used apps that charge to remove ads).
I don't care about ads (as long as static and small and not disguised as content). I do object to 3rd party scripts and 3rd party cookies. That's what I block. Some stupid companies have web sites that are entirely blocked claiming you are blocking their ads and depriving them of revenue when you do that. They are idiots. Even CNN and BBC has had adverts serving malware. Which 3rd party advert sellers / script providers are honest and trustworthy?
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