Chrome: are more and more sites requiring it?

[PseudoRegister]

Is Chrome Becoming the New IE?​

This morning I tried to book a COVID test at this website:

https://curative.com

After several failed attempts using MS Edge, Safari on iOS, and Safari on macOS, I opened the URL in Chrome (by right-clicking a link in an email and selecting "open in ...") and was able to book the appointment. Curative's website seemed to stopped working in Edge and Safari in two places: (1) it would not send a verification text (only a verification email) and (2) after clicking the link in the provided email.

(Don't ask me for a click-by-click history of what I did; I was desperate to get the appointment booked as they were rapidly disappearing and didn't have time to note all of that; it's entirely possible this is something I was doing wrong.)

Perhaps this is a traffic volume issue and their website just handles it better in Chrome?

But also (perhaps notably) after booking the appointment the website asked if I wanted to add my appointment to my calendar. When I clicked "yes" I did NOT get an option to download a calendar event. Instead, a browser window opened showing my Google Calendar. That was the only option provided. Is that a Chrome thing or a site code thing?

I'm worried that Chrome is becoming the IE of the early 2000s. With private companies it's not that big a deal. If they think it's a wise idea for their website to be dysfunctional on the iPhone's default browser... well, I guess that's on them. But I recall in the early 2000s being unable to use some government sites because (as I understand -- I'm not a technical guy), the sites were coded not to HTML and CSS standards, but to proprietary MS standards that functioned only on MS IE. When IE for Mac stopped being updated I could still typically I could get what I needed by launching Firefox, but (except for several years when I used iCab), Safari was my preferred browser. And I really only used iCab because it would automatically report (grossly) how far from HTML standards the web site was. I knew if iCab was giving my a frowny-face I'd be opening the URL in Firefox.

What are your experiences with websites that seem dysfunctional in any browser other than Chrome? Is this my imagination or is it becoming more common?

 

[BigBlur]

Yes, Chrome - or perhaps more specifically, Chromium, is becoming the "standard" like IE once was back in the day.

The site you posted recommends using Chrome, but any Chromium-based browser should work. It's just easier to say Chrome, since it's popular and most people know what it is. Chromium is an open-source project and is what the browsers are based on, so I don't think it will become as big of an issue like IE did.

It's interesting MS Edge didn't work for you though. Are you still using the old/legacy Edge on Windows? The new Edge (with the wave icon) is Chromium-based, and sites should behave the same as they do in Chrome. I'm guessing you are using a Mac, so it'd be the Chromium-based version, but figured I'd ask. If that's the case, it could have been something with the site, or something you're doing. If you were using Edge on your iPhone or iPad, that is actually using Safari's rendering engine and wouldn't solve anything. In fact, all browsers on iOS/iPadOS are basically just Safari with a different skin and features.

I can't comment on the Google Calendar thing, but my guess is Chrome will try using Google's products and services first. Someone else will have to chime in on this.

I rarely come across a site that doesn't work in Safari on the Mac; but when I do, I switch to Edge and it works.

 

[KaliYoni]

After several failed attempts using MS Edge, Safari on iOS, and Safari on macOS, I opened the URL in Chrome (by right-clicking a link in an email and selecting "open in ...") and was able to book the appointment

A workaround that can get Safari to function on some websites is to enable the Developer menu (go to Safari Preferences/Advanced and look for the checkbox) and use the User Agent option to choose a browser for Safari to "emulate".

In any case, I personally use a multi-browser setup on my Mac. Since memory and storage space is ample on modern machines, I have Safari and Firefox as my main browsers. I installed a very limited set of add-ons/extensions in Safari because I only use it with an extremely small number of regularly visited, trusted websites. On the other hand, I maintain a full set of privacy and security add-ons in Firefox. Firefox is what I use for general browsing.

I do have Chrome, for the rare occasions that I cannot get a site to load in Firefox and for situations similar to the one you faced.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I believe you have to factor in what browser plugins may inhibit a website from working properly.

 

[Thirio2]

I had a problem paying bills one day on my bank’s website using the latest version of edge (chrome based, btw). When I called the bank help line they said to try Chrome. UsingChrome worked like a charm. I have since gone back to edge with no further issues (all this on a windows machine). Edge is supposedly chrome based, but google doesn‘t grab your information from edge, although Microsoft might.

 

[KaliYoni]

Edge is supposedly chrome based, but google doesn‘t grab your information from edge, although Microsoft might.

It's true Edge sends less information to Google than Google Chrome...but Microsoft has actually made Edge worse for privacy!

For instance, here is a comparison of six popular browsers that was done by a Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland) academic:

"We measure the connections to backend servers made
by six browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari,
Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser, during
normal web browsing. Our aim is to assess the privacy risks
associated with this back-end data exchange. We find that
the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy
perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the
second Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in the third (least private)
group lie Edge and Yandex."

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

 

[PseudoRegister]

Yes, Chrome - or perhaps more specifically, Chromium, is becoming the "standard" like IE once was back in the day.

The site you posted recommends using Chrome, but any Chromium-based browser should work. It's just easier to say Chrome, since it's popular and most people know what it is. Chromium is an open-source project and is what the browsers are based on, so I don't think it will become as big of an issue like IE did.

It's interesting MS Edge didn't work for you though. Are you still using the old/legacy Edge on Windows? The new Edge (with the wave icon) is Chromium-based, and sites should behave the same as they do in Chrome. I'm guessing you are using a Mac, so it'd be the Chromium-based version, but figured I'd ask. If that's the case, it could have been something with the site, or something you're doing. If you were using Edge on your iPhone or iPad, that is actually using Safari's rendering engine and wouldn't solve anything. In fact, all browsers on iOS/iPadOS are basically just Safari with a different skin and features.

I can't comment on the Google Calendar thing, but my guess is Chrome will try using Google's products and services first. Someone else will have to chime in on this.

I rarely come across a site that doesn't work in Safari on the Mac; but when I do, I switch to Edge and it works.

Definitely Chromium-based Edge. I too was surprised it didn't work. The fact that the site's "download calendar" function defaulted to my Google account (and opened a browser window to do it) made me think the link here is to Google (Chrome) specifically and not Chromium more broadly (Chromium is open source).

I also rarely encounter sites that don't work with Safari, but it's particularly irritating to find one with something as important as scheduling a tax-payer subsidized COVID-19 test.

 

[PseudoRegister]

I believe you have to factor in what browser plugins may inhibit a website from working properly.

The only active Safari extensions I have a 1Password and Rakuten.

 

[PseudoRegister]

... here is a comparison of six popular browsers ...

Thanks for the link! Interesting. My chief concern is not privacy (in this case), but functionality. Nonetheless, it was an interesting paper. I limit my use of Edge to work sites (SharePoint, Yammer, and several other Office 365 apps) and work-related searches and my main motivation was that it seems marginally faster on O365 sites than either Chrome or Safari.