this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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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.
And people don’t use it because they assume it doesn’t work. Turns out it works fine and perhaps licking googles boots isn’t necessary.
I have no idea what google sheets can do when loaded in chrome but it works just fine in Firefox with the couple of sheets I have, one of them is rather complex with a bunch of muli-table vlookups and nested conditions. This thing washing your fucking dishes when you run it in chrome?
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.
I thought that too. Poorly worded title.
tbh I already editorialized the title a bit to make it less exaggerated, wasn't sure how far to take it.