Tell HN: Stripe Dashboard no longer supports Firefox

[davidpolberger]

I was just in touch with Stripe support, and they confirmed that Firefox is no longer a supported browser. That means that issues that can only be reproduced on Firefox will no longer be fixed.

Obviously, Firefox's market share isn't what it used to be. However, Stripe has always cultivated an image of being developer-friendly, and Firefox remains popular with developers. Is not supporting Firefox a reasonable position for Stripe (and other sites popular with developers) to take?

Discuss.

[Yizahi]

The natural consequence of chromewashing. If people pretend that Chrome clones are a "competitors" or viable "alternatives" it's no wonder that the only real alternative (on Windows) loses marketshare and is slowly deprecated because not many people speak out. It would be a "fun" time if FF ever dies, new IE6.0 situation but worse.

[KingOfCoders → Yizahi]

The natural consequences of Mozilla spending money on everything except on creating a the best browser in the world and working on marketshare (written in Firefox).

[Yizahi → KingOfCoders]

I'm still mad at Mozilla for all their dumb decisions and arrogant behavior (case in point - actual FF devs responses on Reddit to the backlash against "uglybar", when they have radically chopped down functionality and UX of the old address bar, saying stuff that people who want sane UI are using it wrong and shifting blame in general).

[yoasif_ → Yizahi]

Can you link to this?

[freefaler → KingOfCoders]

Yeah, they've been doing strange things over there for sure. Still for Android their mobile version is way better than Chrome.

However, even if they did have the best browser how many installs would they get based on the quality of the browser? Most people don't care and those who care aren't significant slice of the pie.

Platforms dictate browser distribution because the average person is happy with what he god pre-installed or what google has shown as promo on their page.

[KingOfCoders → freefaler]

What I like - not sure about Chrome - on mobile is the nav bar at the bottom.

They had >$6billion so I'm sure they could have put in some marketing and distribution partners.

Ladybird will show what one/very small team of devs can do developing a browser and what amount of $ could have been used for marketing and market share.

[sofixa → Yizahi]

> It would be a "fun" time if FF ever dies, new IE6.0 situation but worse

How would it be worse? Chromium is Open Source, and anyone can fork it if Google go too far.

IE6.0 was entirely proprietary, and nobody could do absolutely anything if Microsoft went too far.

[markx2 → sofixa]

> Chromium is Open Source, and anyone can fork it if Google go too far.

'anyone'.

The resources required to fork and then maintain would be huge, and that completely disregards the publicity needed to say just why the fork was needed and is in the consumer's best interest to use instead.

Google have already gone too far. I can only hope the EU breaks them.

[bravetraveler → markx2]

Let's not ignore the institutional change they drive; attestation and the like is not what it appears.

They can become the next Microsoft with secure boot signing keys for the next Widget, but implemented even less kindly. Yes, one can enroll their own signing keys. Who does?

The frog may say the water is warm, I say they are being boiled

[wilsonnb3 → markx2]

> The resources required to fork and then maintain would be huge

Yes but browser companies have those resources and the expertise.

Microsoft is one of the most able companies to maintain a real Chromium fork, so a Chromium based Edge with actual marketshare puts them in a much better negotiating position than EdgeHTML based Edge that no one uses.

I think a Chromium based Firefox might be better long term than the current Firefox since Mozilla is going to get less and less of a seat at the table until they can get some real marketshare again.

[Yizahi → sofixa]

Sure it can be forked. I can probably fork it, just go to github or wherever it is hosted and press "fork" button. The problem is maintaining velocity and features with Chrome. Google can add new protocols and mandatory new features daily and nobody can keep with them or propose alternatives. Today you fork Chrome to some new branch Nickel. Tomorrow Google releases some new QUIC v100500 without which half of the internet doesn't work and forces to adopt this new feature as a standard. What do Nickel devs do then? Clone Chrome again? This will be a mirror of the current situation, where every Chrome clone has exact same browser inside. Reimplement this QUIC v100500? Push alternative? Won't happen.

[bachmeier → sofixa]

> Chromium is Open Source, and anyone can fork it if Google go too far.

Forking Chromium won't help unless developers are supporting Chromium rather than Chrome. There's no reason to expect Chromium to work with websites in the future.

[Tommy430 → sofixa]

> How would it be worse?

well Google is constantly moving too fast and they're mainly an internet company, whereas Microsoft was just the software company.

derp

[overlookedtale]

Their documentation says otherwise: https://docs.stripe.com/dashboard/basics#browser-compatibili...

[davidpolberger → overlookedtale]

Thanks, I'll point their support staff to that document.

I was told that Firefox is no longer supported by a support technician over the phone. A different support technician wrote this to me in an email:

"Regarding the printing option on Firefox, I'm afraid this is no longer within Stripe's support scope."

(I complained that it is not possible to print certain pages of the Dashboard through Firefox, while Chrome works acceptably well.)

[ksec]

I haven't done any serious, or hyped front end development in years. But I wonder why drop Firefox now? Compatibility is at all time high. Confined within a core and subset of HTML and CSS everything is so so much better than IE6 era.

[solardev → ksec]

As a frontend dev, every company I've worked for this decade has deliberately chosen to drop Firefox support. We've never gotten a single complaint about it from our users (we get plenty of other reports) and every analytics report showed decreasing usage.

The few developers I've met who still use Firefox eventually stop once we run into the first issue with it on our own projects (usually having to do with graphics rendering of some sort). We don't fix it for our users so we're not going to go out of our way to fix it for our own frontend devs. It's just not worth the time investment.

Firefox is totally dead aside from a few ideologues, who don't really constitute enough of the general population to matter. Webkit support (for ios browsers outside Europe) is much more important, and it has enough differences from Blink to be a time sink on its own, so all the extra dev time that might've otherwise gone to Firefox instead go to Webkit tweaks (with Chrome/Blink being the standard, both for users and devs).

Browser compatibility is a lie, even with polyfills and caniuse and browerslist. If you do enough full time frontend work you'll soon come across the various subtle bugs and incompatibilies. Browsers aren't necessarily more standard now, it's just that Chrome won in a way that even IE didn't.

I grew up in the IE era and did web dev then too. Yeah it's better now, but I think it's mostly because Google has such a monopoly that they are the real standards. The W3C is completely irrelevant now and WHATWG seems like basically a puppet government for the big corporations to dictate what they want. At the end of the day, Google decides what is going into Web, period. Apple controls half of mobile (apps) but Safari is always the odd duck. Firefox... nobody cares about anymore.

Kinda sad, as someone who loved early Phoenix, but honestly Mozilla has so thoroughly mismanaged Firefox over the years that I'm surprised it has any users left at all.

[asolove]

$5 says this is one support rep (or AI tool) just getting it wrong.

[sergiotapia]

I don't think anyone can judge unless they have actual usage % of Firefox for the stripe properties. If only 0.1% use Firefox then it's a no brainer right? might as well support gopher. unfortunately firefox dropped the ball so hard this past decade. all those distractions came back with a vengeance.

[al_borland → sergiotapia]

iOS probably hurts Firefox. Any Firefox installs on iOS don’t really matter, since WebKit is being used on the backend.

That said, I think it hurts Chrome more than Firefox, so I’m not all that upset about it. I think iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome/Blink from being the only browser anyone writes for, much like IE before Firefox came along. I think it’s important that Blink doesn’t end up with that market share. Once it’s past a certain point, everyone feels forced to use it so their pages work, and they end up on autopilot to 98% a market share. That that point, Google essentially owns the web, even more than they already do.

I’d have less of an issue with this if they weren’t ad company with data collection as their competitive advantage. There are a lot of conflicts of interest when it comes to Google and the future of the web.

[Cloudef]

No firefox, no buy

[readyplayernull]

I use Firefox as my main browser, and only use Chrome at work. Chrome seems to be more precise at rendering modern HTML. Why is Firefox losing ground?

[meiraleal → readyplayernull]

Because the hackers left ages ago and now there are only executives and smart juniors that don't take long to leave Mozilla

[denschub]

What's the actual issue you're facing? I just tested the Stripe Dashboard in Firefox, and everything works fine.

[shanecleveland]

Safari has also been buggy on Stripe's dashboard.

[bachmeier]

I mean this is nothing new these days. MANY sites no longer work with Firefox. Two I just came across this weekend are the local newspaper and the public library's login - but these are two out of dozens in the last year.

[virginia_hacker → bachmeier]

You can help by reporting the sites on webcompat.com or via Firefox's new-ish add-on "webcompat.com reporter"

[jesup → bachmeier]

Which are those sites? Did you report them? (Hamburger->Report Broken Site)

[tacone]

Time to switch to barter. /s

[CrimsonRain]

Firefox isn't the champion of web anymore. Nobody should be supporting this browser until it is split from Mozilla. So good on Stripe for cutting it off.

Hopefully Ladybird will be different.

[Larrikin → CrimsonRain]

Safari is a worse locked down experience, and if you run any variety of Chrome you're actively making the world a worse place by allowing a bad actor to dictate more and more web standards as user count increases.

Your crusade against Firefox because of Pocket or some other small managerial is a silly and meaningless when looking at what it means if Firefox actually goes away.

[CrimsonRain → Larrikin]

It means nothing if it goes away because it has strayed from it's mission. Now it's just a puppet of Google; and a bad browser too from consumer point of view.

[wilsonnb3]

Not a big deal IMO.

It is easy to have more than one browser installed and the cost to switch browsers is very low, this isn't like iOS vs Android or Mac vs Windows where not supporting one platform will prevent people from using it.