I use a Firefox addon that spoofs the user agent for Google-owned sites so it delivers the Chrome version of things.

Works without any issues and it's a much nicer product experience.

What is the name of this addon?

tagging myself in here as well

You can favourite HN comments if you just want to come back to them.

To clarify, since it's not obvious in the UI, you have to click the timestamp of the comment, and then you can favorite it.

Thanks, I should have mentioned that. A couple of features are hidden in the show comment view.

Damn, I've been here for years and never knew that you could favorite things!

Or install this extension https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news to have better UI on HN

afaik, pretty much any user-agent changer works. At least that's what one of my colleagues uses to join MS Teams meetings on Firefox. Simply switch your user-agent to Chrome, and it should do the trick.

On Android, it's one of the very few allowed ones, Google Search Fixer[1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

This is the one I use, i think: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

Afair there's also one for YouTube.

"This add-on is not available on your platform." on Desktop Linux.. what makes this windows only?

I'm not trying to excuse Google, but feature detection is really hard and browsers sometimes suck with their APIs.

I just recently started using a modified version of the "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites. With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.

There's no excuse for not being able to read the user-agent strings of the top five browsers in the world, especially when 2 of them (at least) are your own code base.

Everything is hard if you don't want to do it.

link?

What are the Chrome version of things specifically? I just wonder what I'm missing out on..

Mobile Firefox gets a very basic result page for "weather" for no clear reason.

Apple blocking iPhone browsers without Webkit (excluding Chrome and Firefox).

Android not exactly making it easy to change the default browser for average users either tbh

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1118/

yes on phones this has tradition to a point it started to got legislation involved

but on desktop legislation shut this down, or at least tried, and it wasn't a problem for years

honestly we need a proper "fair platform" legislation, world wide

and focus more on power abuse and free market damaging power dynamics instead of obsessing over the "mono" in monopoly (because with today markets you can have more power then a classical single market monopoly while not being a monopol or even duopoly in any of the many markets you cover, power you can even more efficiently abuse then a monopoly when adding new market to your portfolio...)

XKCD isn’t relevant to the sentence before, as comic notes, it’s about Apple.

the “Android makes you tap something to change your default browser!” was some FUD that either Brave/DDG stopped spreading because it was generating backlash.

Much like the “you have to confirm you enable sideloading!” alert in Android, it’s not clear what people want otherwise, a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult.

I wish these things would pass simply because it makes it harder to have the real conversations needed to get things back on track

> a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult

The problem with sideloading on Android is that it won't accept upgrades for your applications. You will have to get them from the installer app. And then it will confirm before downloading each app. And then it will confirm before installing each app. And then it will confirm again because, well, I have no idea.

One confirmation isn't the same as making it difficult. Piles and piles of them is.

Not entirely true on the latest version of Android. I'm not sure what the pattern is, but for most of the apps I've installed via Droidify, I don't have to confirm anything when installing updates.

My theory on this is it has something to do with battery life. I can't think of another reason they'd limit browser engines.

Apple's reasoning is that browser engines need JIT to run JS with acceptable performance, but if they were to give apps JIT capabilities, that would significantly open up the attack surface.

Apple has an ads unit, there have been multiple other times when they have shown that user privacy is a thing that really only applies to other companies.

Don't know if serious or not, but I'll bite.

Apple was in deep troubles when IE was all the rage, you needed IE to access your bank's site, your company's intranet, so many site that were strictly IE only. Microsoft gifting them an implementation of IE was a mild grace, but still wasn't enough. Not having a browser compatible with 99% of the web was an issue pushing people away from Macs.

They learned their lesson, and used their advantage in the mobile market to make sure no other browser ever puts them in a similar position.

Google has a slightly different issue, in that for instance a strongly privacy focus/ad blocking browser taking the android world by storm is nothing good for them.

Firefox and Chrome accounted for a third of browser marker share when the iPhone came out. It came out with no App Store, and there was no guarantee MS would develop IE for iOS.

> I can't think of another reason they'd limit browser engines.

Apple doesn't trust third party developers when it comes to running code that Apple has not vetted in advance.

For a while downloading a lot of freeware would result in installing Chrome and setting it up as the default browser on Windows.

Visiting any Google property would result in nagging to download chrome. Firefox and (classic) Edge would just break for no reasons on Google pages (changing the user-agent fixed the issue).