I imagine the overlap of people who use Snapchat and people who use Firefox is pretty small, they probably see such a small amount of users with Firefox and they just decided not to support it.
So often just swapping the user agent from Firefox to Chrome makes these sites work flawlessly. So they’re putting in extra code to detect Firefox and serve a “we don’t support your browser” page when they could just… not. And if a user complains about X, they could say we don’t test on Firefox, try on Chrome.
Snapchat has been a shit company for years. They threatened to sue third party client developers for Windows Phone, they purposely degrade camera quality on Android, etc (For awhile on Android they were just screenshotting the viewfinder instead of actually using the camera APIs.)
I imagine the overlap of people who use Snapchat and people who use Firefox is pretty small, they probably see such a small amount of users with Firefox and they just decided not to support it.
In this day and age it’s more work to explicitly not support a browser than it is to support it…
Sort of. I imagine the idea is they only need to test on Chromium-based browsers.
So often just swapping the user agent from Firefox to Chrome makes these sites work flawlessly. So they’re putting in extra code to detect Firefox and serve a “we don’t support your browser” page when they could just… not. And if a user complains about X, they could say we don’t test on Firefox, try on Chrome.
Yeah, but by putting up the “we don’t support this” banner, they won’t have to deal with the complaints in the first place.
It’s also possible they want people to use Chromium for telemetry or other data-collection reasons, not sure.
I wonder if it’s possible that they’re paid money by Google to not support Firefox?
Maybe they’re trying to become the new Internet Explorer?
Another side I haven’t seen mentioned
It might be easier to track users in Chrome. If even a few users open it in chrome instead of Firefox, that’s a benefit for them
Yeah, I’m sure Chrome works well with Google Analytics tools which seem to be on every site nowadays…
Even if true, do you support this funnel approach?
Snapchat has been a shit company for years. They threatened to sue third party client developers for Windows Phone, they purposely degrade camera quality on Android, etc (For awhile on Android they were just screenshotting the viewfinder instead of actually using the camera APIs.)
yeah, snapchat is far from open source and privacy respecting 😂