Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

[sbsnb]

Yes, I read a similar article.

What would be a good alternative (privacy focused) search engine?

This page might help:

A look at search engines with their own indexes

A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.

seirdy.one

 

[Yota]

What bugs from Microsoft? So far, I've been unsuccessful at getting a response from Bing regarding SNBForums' removal.

If you don't see bots from Bing after you submit for indexing, I think you may need to contact Bing Search's tech support for assistance, in my experience some bugs in their indexing rules can cause a site to be removed from Bing.

Sign in to Bing

 

[BikeHelmet]

What bugs from Microsoft? So far, I've been unsuccessful at getting a response from Bing regarding SNBForums' removal.

Maybe their crawlers suffer from the same issue that I do? Starting a few months back, every page on these forums that I load fails to load with this error. Then I Shift+Reload and it loads fine. Makes browsing take a little longer, but whatever. Have not encountered it on any other sites, and I visit quite a lot of websites daily. Clearing cache does nothing. Who knows how a crawler would react to that? Every link followed being dead on the first attempt? Just a theory, though. It is possible that it's on my end... maybe my Merlin router is malfunctioning? It does affect multiple web browsers and computers.

 

[Yota]

Try o365 with firefox... not much works or behaves at it should.

My memory could be wrong. I did remember that they both (Google and Apple) started from a same codebase, and they split at one point, but I could have misremembered the details. It certainly doesn't help that all of these browser report utter garbage in their user-agent nowadays...

In Firefox (and all forks), there is a local page about:compat that documents fixes that Firefox has been forced to take because popular sites are not compatible with Firefox, most fixes are just changing the User-Agent to Chrome.

More and more site developers are too lazy to test compatibility in Firefox, they directly display "Firefox is not supported" after detecting Firefox. And these popular sites have enough resources to test compatibility, but they choose not to support Firefox.

Sites like usps.com and covid.cdc.gov and some banking sites are on this list, and Firefox has to pretend to be Chrome when visiting them.

Firefox now is like Internet Explorer at dusk, and no one can save it.

Maybe their crawlers suffer from the same issue that I do? Starting a few months back, every page on these forums that I load fails to load with this error. Then I Shift+Reload and it loads fine. Makes browsing take a little longer, but whatever. Have not encountered it on any other sites, and I visit quite a lot of websites daily. Clearing cache does nothing. Who knows how a crawler would react to that? Every link followed being dead on the first attempt? Just a theory, though. It is possible that it's on my end... maybe my Merlin router is malfunctioning? It does affect multiple web browsers and computers.

View attachment 40857

I think this is an issue with Cloudflare's CDN, not SNB, and many people may have misconfigured their DNS servers, causing them to resolve to another country's CDN.

 

[torstein]

Hmm, I knew Chrome was ahead of everyone else in market share, but I didn't know Firefox was that far behind. Didn't it used to be in the 20% range? Maybe it might actually be sunsetting? What surprised me the most was Safari's market share, this is supposedly desktop browser market share, not mobile.


source: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/

 

[Paliv]

Hmm, I knew Chrome was ahead of everyone else in market share, but I didn't know Firefox was that far behind. Didn't it used to be in the 20% range? Maybe it might actually be sunsetting? What surprised me the most was Safari's market share, this is supposedly desktop browser market share, not mobile.


source: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/
View attachment 40953

Firefox still has approximately 200,000,000 users, so it’s not quite dead yet. There are articles every year saying it is nearly dead, but it still is kicking around. However, it doesn’t seem to be doing anything that’s going to take away Chrome and Chromium based browser market share. I still use it on occasion, but I have switched away from it as my main browser for a second time now.

 

[RMerlin]

Chrome shares are probably largely inflated by the fact it's used by Android as the built-in engine. Just like Safari numbers are boosted by the fact Apple makes it hard for anyone to run a different browser on their iPhone.

Firefox is not a bad browser. It just lacks any good reason to use it over the competition. Personally I largely stick to Chrome because of how well it integrates with my Android devices, including history and bookmark sharing among all my devices, plus it helps populate my Google Now feed that I frequently use on my tablet.