Ha ha ha Apple still thinks 'the web' is Apple or Microsoft
(https://support.apple.com/en-us/120585) and Firefox is not supported at all.
It's time to shake the last rotten apple from the tree.
I normally find that stuff I build for the web just works in Chrome and Firefox and it’s Safari that requires hacks and workarounds, even when I’m using standard APIs that are widely supported. I’d have to go out of my way to have something work in Chrome but not Firefox.
I'm impressed with how well they've enforced that as well. I tried spoofing my UA to be safari (which I fully expected to not work), but it also didn't accept when I set my UA to Chrome.
What's especially odd is that Apple acknowledges Firefox's existence in their WWDC videos about web features, when they mention browser compatibility or who they're working with.
I thought the same, until I realised I still had `/unsupported` in the URL. Spoofing a Chrome UA and dropping that path from the URL let me load (and use) Apple Maps fine under Firefox.
You cannot fix bugs if you don’t collect them. Neither Mozilla. If you have not enough resources, just collect and track. Fix them when more people are available.
Same for native application ports, ship them as early as possible. Just mark them beta or alpha. At least you collect bugs. Bonus, you filter which are generic issues and which are platform dependent issues.
If it is in such immature condition it should be kept internal.
If it doesn’t work at all in a web-browser which handles HTML5 and modern CS it is probably not a website - but a proprietary protocol which needs a special client-application.
> browser compatibility could be something for the launch
This is indeed how many bad/junior engineers approach this issue but it's backward - anyone with any experience doing launch QA knows well that browser compat needs to be built in from Day 1 - retrofitting it is disastrously expensive from a launch-delays perspective.
Like others have pointed out, it seems to work fine in other browsers once you trick it into letting you in. General compatibility doesn't seem to be an issue. So, what is it that Firefox and Chrome on Linux (and only on Linux) don't support?
H.265 is what they don't support. I'm not an avid enough user to know where Apple Maps makes use of media, but the source code contains media player controls, so it must somewhere. Retrofitting compatibility by launch may be as simple as re-encoding the H.265 content. Not at all worth the effort for beta 1, but with an obvious path forward.
> So, what is it that Firefox and Chrome on Linux (and only on Linux) don't support?
H.265 is what they don't support.
Do codecs need to be supported by the browser itself? I thought this was unloaded to some media decoding framework. Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.
> Do codecs need to be supported by the browser itself?
Not necessarily. The browser could defer to licensing established by the operating system vendor, but Firefox places the expectation upon itself to have parity across platforms and to not support encumbered technologies.
> Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.
And if you've negotiated the licensing fees you can even use it, but chances are... Microsoft and Apple have dealt with the licensing for you on their platforms, so the ballgame is different there.
> To start, Maps on the web is available only in English. Maps on the web will be available for additional browsers, platforms, and languages soon.
Published Date: July 24, 2024
Everything works if you use User-Agent switcher extension. So they went through the trouble of making an "unsupported" page and redirecting you to that page instead of doing nothing
Of course I can. Add cleaning water, check oil levels, replace a light bulb. No much else I can do, but others may, and other won't even do any of this.
Point is, this is not a binary choice. Between user and developer there are many people with varying skills that will use a user-agent switcher if needed.
In my experience (systems engineer/devops for both Windows and Linux for more than 25 years), very few users are actually savvy. Even those working in tech.
there is a good reason that most of the people prefer apple for its simplicity, its because apple only shows you what is required. i agree with you there.
Extremely frustrating. If a user is smart enough to use Firefox, they're probably also smart enough to open another browser if a site does not happen to work on Firefox. (Which I haven't experienced for a while, except when using ESPHome which requires WebSerial)
...which only underscores how pointless this is: if it works in Chrome on MacOS and Windows (https://support.apple.com/en-us/120585), it will also work on Linux, so why exclude Linux?!
Seems like a baseless restriction. I can't find anything wrong with Firefox support itself as I changed my user agent under Firefox and Apple Maps works fine.
It sucks when companies restrict normal access to a website when it's uncalled for. It's not the first time I've gotten "Use Google Chrome" for no reason.
Apple says that MapKit.JS works on Firefox, so this beta web page is probably just working out bugs before they release for FF. Perhaps a rendering issue?
And even in their supported browsers (Chrome at least) I got the "unsupported browser" on Fedora Linux.. Wonder what makes a online map need such a specific (even if its widely used) setup.
Interestingly it works on Opera although the colours are weird (lots of dark greens and blues). On both versions (Edge and Opera), my local bakery is mis-located (by hundreds of yards) compared with its (correctly) reported location on an iPhone.
It's not financially worth supporting, Firefox has 6.53% of desktop and 0.53% of mobile marketshare (Statcounter), with a switching cost of zero if users encounter a breaking issue.
Not surprising it got to this point, Mozilla has been stagnant on features most users care about and catered exclusively to the privacy crowd for years - which isn't a large group and competes with Chromium offshoots (giving it a smaller niche, privacy but demanding an alternative rendering engine).
Sure, but the QA cost to support Firefox is significantly higher than the small fraction of people that will refuse to use a site that doesn't support it when they encounter an issue.
> catered exclusively to the privacy crowd for years
Not even that. Firefox on iOS doesn’t have an integrated adblocker. It’s been requested for years at this point, and browsers like Brave do have one. Pure unwillingness. It’s why I got all my non-techie family and friends to switch to Brave.
* Epiphany with WebKit2-Renderengine. The literally block their own engine.
* Firefox with Gecko.
What year is it? 2001?
No web developer should be allowed to “block” webbrowser. Test for features and say “this thing doesn’t work because of and I don’t care about another solution”. Same shitty experience with Microsoft Teams which blocked - at least some months ago - the call buttons for Firefox, despite everything works fine. And Confluence which claims they don’t block but started, Epipany is now hiding as Safari and…surprise…everything works.
