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.
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
I visit weather.gov around once a day on both mobile and desktop Firefox.
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
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. 😔
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…
And the last reason to even consider using it goes out the window 🙄 Thanks for the heads-up.
Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.
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?
Iirc there’s a “per site” spoofer that people could use instead, for those sites that require specific browsers. I don’t actually know what it’s called, and my cursory Google search didn’t bring up much of anything, but I do believe I’ve seen them before.
The FF extension is just called “User-Agent Switcher” I believe?
And yes, you can set it blacklist mode or whitelist mode (in other words, “use the extension on every domain but:” vs. “Only use the extension with these domains:”).
I’ll only switch away from FF if a site is completely broken. I’ll try it before resorting to chromium
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?
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.
Remember when websites could open infinite windows, and prevent you from backout out or closing windows?
Even if things get really bad, they wont get that bad. Also dont forget flash meant the ads were media rich, security hole ridden, cpu spinning, awful monsters as well.
It wasn’t that bad, you just have to reformat your pc every other week and have a second air gapped pc with anything important 😂
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.
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.
Early chrome introduced a lot of features that attracted the tech crowd in the late 00s and early 10s like html5 video (replacing the need for flash plugins) as well as multithreaded tasks for better use of those newfangled multicore cpus people were buying.
Around the same time firefox was experiencing a memory leak and took too long to open(I switched over to linux at the time and didnt have the issue but it was a big complaint online).
Early on firefox was also slower to add a lot of the newer html5 stuff that was popping up around the web while chrome was more or less built from the ground up with it in mind which also lost it some enthusiast mindshare.
Along the same time google started a heavy chrome push. Of course the default browser on android was based on chrome, and google search results pushed people to download chrome, and youtube’s html5 video ran better on chrome(firefox initially didnt have all the codecs they used due to licensing). Google used its web dominance to advertise, and push, and advertise, and push.
Eventually firefox got to a point where they mostly caught up but by this point chrome had gained a solid footing and lead and here is where dirtier. Firefox was constantly behind on webstandard and synthetic benchmarks but many of the things firefox was behind in on these benchmarks were things that google had just introduced. Also with the new google dominance came lazy developers who would instead of building a site for web standards and test on multiple devices, build their site to run on chrome and bugs on other webrenderers be damned. With other major competitors like opera and Edge switching to blink it meant that the devs were mostly covered.
So this gave the appearance that firefox was still technically behind even after having closed the gap. And by the time chrome started having its own PR issues and memory leak problems the fluid tech landscape has changed.
Firefox lost market share in an era when tech and software were still fluid. New social media could rise up any day myspace could get killed by newcomer facebook. There can be multiple video sites who will win? IOS, Blackberry, Palm, Winmo, Nokia, and Android were going head to head in the smartphone space. Internet explorer, firefox, netscape, opera, chrome and safari all had different engines.
Nothing came to knock facebook out and the social media that rose up after was just different, youtube is essentially a monopoly in that space, IOS and Android are all that’s left of the smartphone war, and firefox still exists but chromium’s engine Blink powers most alternative browsers and firefox’s usershare is tiny now. Safari only has a marketshare because it’s default on macs and the only game in town on IOS. Chrome will have to really really really mess up in order to actually shed significant mainstream user marketshare.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
TIL Samsung makes a browser.
How else are you going to browse the web on your fridge?
Samsung loves bloat. Their attempt at creating an ecosystem and therefore lock in to keep using their devices. I like Samsung hardware but their software is shit.
And it apparently has just .6% less market share than the mighty Firefox
It’s just my intuition, but I get the feeling the data on Firefox market share is skewed
Are they talking about government devices? I’ve never seen firefox installed on a government device.
They are talking about .gov websites. Any website operated by the US government should, at least according to their own standards, develop for and test for users using Firefox. If this is followed in practice the article doesn’t really cover.
It’s USWDS, firefox should still work as long as it is standards compliant.
It is installed on our computers, depends on the agency it policy
Yeah, I’m surprised your agency let’s you do that with firefox. First time I have heard of that.
Do school or library computers count as government devices?
Generally I was talking about Federal devices. Those move a lot of needles because one federal change can switch a lot of stuff over.
Technically, yes, but in this context government devices means systems used by federal employees which have access to PII or classified information.
That’s terrible. How can Firefox usage rates be declining? It seems like every day there’s some new scammy feature being rolled out in all the other browsers.
Most people have no idea that there are differences between browsers, or how the internet even works for that matter, and as such, generally use either Chrome or whatever the default installed browser is.
Try asking a random person about any of those features. They’ll have no idea
https://gs.statcounter.com/ until G tries to force ads on all the Chrome
