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belochtoday at 12:52 AM2 repliesview on HN

There's nothing too unexpected in this post. Firefox + uBlock is pretty much standard now. It's been impossible to recommend Chrome ever since Google moved to manifest v3, which can only be described as deliberate anti-privacy enshittification. The recaptcha solver is starting to become niche, since cloudflare has really taken over (for better or worse).

I would add one more useful tool though: A user-agent switcher[1]. There are still some websites that insist you must use Chrome (or sometimes Edge). They will block you if you try to use them with Firefox, even though they work perfectly well and sometimes even better on Firefox than they do on Chrome. A user-agent switcher gives you the option to simply uninstall Chrome for good.

e.g. My ISP provides a website for streaming live TV (e.g. sports) that claims to be incompatible with Firefox, but actually runs better (i.e. fewer glitches) on it than it does on Chrome. However, it refuses to load on Firefox unless you use a user-agent switcher.

Why do people write websites that refuse to run based on user-agent checks? By all means, warn users that you couldn't be arsed to test things on more than one browser, but why go that extra mile to brick your site when other browsers probably support it quite well?

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...


Replies

sgctoday at 11:39 AM

Every time I turn on ua switcher I wind up in an infinite loop with cloudflare captchas. I literally cannot turn it on because of the aggressive practice of this one company. I am going to try the chrome mask extension the other user just posted, since it deals with some js shenanigans as well.

snowfieldtoday at 6:45 AM

I'd recommend chrome mask instead. It's written by a Firefox engineer

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/