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. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.
Thank you for the excerpt. I initially interpreted the title as US government agencies will stop using Firefox, not US government agencies will stop requiring their web masters to test in Firefox.
I’d imagine that effectively means agencies would stop using Firefox, if they can’t use it on their own sites.
Websites built for Chrome do work in Firefox.
Maybe like 98% of the time.
Google Sheets would disagree.
I use sheets in Firefox literally every day.
Yeah, Firefox works on everything right now. I have not opened chrome in ages, could easily have been a year since I have needed it.
https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+120,and_ff+119&compareCats=all
If you scroll down past the browser version checkboxes (I’ve ticked the right ones for you) and list of features FireFox supports, you’ll find a very long list of web features that don’t work (or don’t work properly) in FireFox.
Some of them are pretty important features and there are sites that use them. Pretty sure Google Sheets uses the Filesystem stuff for example - it “works” in FireFox but not as well as in Chrome.
What this article is about is unless FireFox’s marketshare trend reverses, websites are going to stop including workarounds specifically for FireFox users. They’ll just let the site be broken in that browser.
I’ve had some add-ons break, but I’ve never had any issues with sheets itself either. Wonder what issues the other guy’s been having
I always get annoyed by the copy paste thing. I can’t remember which way it goes but you either can’t copy paste with the mouse or with Ctrl c/v. That’s the only thing that bugs me about FF and sheets.
When the website and browser are made by the same company, they aren’t exactly motivated to make sure it runs well in other browsers.
Fat chance they’re actually using Firefox in the first place. My money’s on Chrome or IE.
Government IT worker here: IE was dropped off almost all DoD computers years ago when MS officially ceased support of it. Edge, Firefox, and Chrome come standard with the baseline image at most sites I’ve supported.
I think this article is also pretty silly. We have scientists, engineers, accountants, logistics, etc. all using various web apps and sites. Rather than fuck around with installing a browser that may or may not be compatible with any of them, we had our image team blanket install Chrome and Firefox to avoid unnecessary tickets. Just because government websites may not require designers to be compatible with Firefox doesn’t mean anything for all those federal jobs that don’t only use government sites for work.
tbh I already editorialized the title a bit to make it less exaggerated, wasn’t sure how far to take it.
Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting all websites.
^except the ones that only work in chrome
*especially! Spoof user agent if you have to.
if you spoof your user-agent it won’t help Firefox in metrics, since websites will think you’re other browser.
Well I only suggest it for sites one has to use, and even then I think it would still show google people are fed up with their shit
Or just in general
I visit weather.gov around once a day on both mobile and desktop Firefox.
I’ll be over here making sure they still got a sliver of Mosaic in their logs.
I actually did that today before reading the article.
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”
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.
New word for me, too. Odd, considering how incredibly relevant it is nowadays!
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
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.
The fuck does tendentious mean and how do I even pronounce it?
We speak murican here friend
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.
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
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.
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.
kid called EU anticompetitive laws:
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.
They will get rekt by Vestager faster than they can say “profits”
me waiting for browser news 👀
yea my dad would not survive not having adblock on his evenly youtube sessions XD
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.
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
Even Opera is now Chrome…
Opera, chrome, but with CCP data theft and monitoring
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!
Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.
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. 😔
Some of you need to stop spoofing browsing agents. We need to show people that Firefox is used. This telemetry can help Firefox support and become a big competitor to Chrome and other Chromium based browsers.
Do you think the number of people spoofing user agents are going to even dent those numbers?
Why are people spoofing their browser agent?
Some sites that don’t work on FF will work if the site thinks you’re using a Chromium-based browser.
Huh. I can’t remember the last time a site didn’t work in firefox, but worked with a chromium-based browser.
I have NEVER seen a site that won’t work with firefox. What is everyone even talking about?
My local power company’s site is broken in strange ways in Firefox. Bars for recent bill amounts are all the same length, usage page throws an error and won’t open, a link in the dropdown for a home energy analyzer is completely missing.
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.
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.
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)
PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox
So… Chrome and Safari? Because the rest of browsers are just rebranded Chrome.
I’m not particularly a fan of passkeys, because I’m fairly happy with my password manager, but personal opinions apart, just because Google and Apple decided to implement a feature, that doesn’t make it an standard.
This is why Chrome having the web engine monopoly is such a big problem. They can implement whatever they want and because it will also be adopted by Edge, Opera and others, it seems to automatically be considered a web standard and websites will start using it even when the other major independent browser (Firefox) hasn’t implemented it.
Isn’t that what password managers are for? People don’t store credentials in browsers, not sure why they’d start for passkeys when password managers are rolling out support.
People don’t store credentials in browsers
Yes they do - every browser asks users if they want to remember the password they just entered. Many people say yes, I do too for most cases - it is very convinient.
Did you know that you can see those passwords in plain text in the browser settings?
Use a password manager
I believe you can set up a general password that you have to enter before you can see your other passwords in plain text. Unless I’m mistaken.
Either way, it’s not the default
If they are visible in plain text without a master password, then it’s not very relevant. I just tested this on my work laptop with a shared key I have stored in there and it didn’t require any master password, nor was I prompted to set one up when I originally installed chrome three months back.
Oh I don’t know about Chrome, I should have specified that I use Firefox
Trust issues aside, do you use the same browser for every task on every device? What do you use to generate your passwords?
Genuinely asking, this is wild to me. This would be like allowing location or desktop notifs from a website.
Edit: downvotes are weird. Fuck me for asking a question I guess? Would be more useful if y’all explained yourselves (and thanks to the one dude who apparently does use only one browser - cool that this works for you)
Personally for me, I use different browsers or at least different browser profiles for different uses - e.g. Work, personal, financial, etc.
I use KeePass for sensitive passwords, the browser’s password manager is good for general stuff.
Most people I know who don’t really care about tech don’t do any of this and use whatever they’re offered.
Thanks for explanation, TIL
God this reminds me that it took Firefox forever to support security keys natively. I hope PassKeys are implemented quickly in Firefox if they take off.
Maybe its because I’m on Nightly but PassKeys work natively for me on Windows 11 with Firefox already
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.
it wouldn’t do anything if chrome was the next fallback that it was coded for anyway. worst case parts of the site don’t render correctly.
holy shit I didn’t realize the market share for firefox was so low. i remember when chrome was launched and figured they both had about the same
Firefox usage has plummeted. To be fair, 2% isn’t a huge slice of the pie, but it’s still a pretty large number of users in absolute terms.
I use Firefox exclusively. It is fast, responsive, and works on all the sites that I visit. So I don’t really understand why the share of users are so low. What sites are ya’ll visiting that doesn’t work on FF?
Mobile browsing altered the landscape.
and figured they both had about the same
Sounds like you’re living in a 10000 meter hole under a rock.
it’s filled with wizard piss
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.
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 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
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
Knock on affects could hurt firefox quite a bit
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.
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…
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.
I have had some luck using a user agent switcher in these cases. Might be worth a shot.
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?
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.
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.
2% is huge. Many companies still have their website support ie6, and the US gov wants to abandon 2% of their users???
