Hello, I started to experience a problem with Mull and Duolingo (and also bromite) that started about 1 month ago.
Basically Duolingo tells me that my browser is not supported but it worked perfectly fine before. Anyone experienced this issue? I can’t find an issue on mull repo apparently about this specific issue. Dunno if it is something about resisting fingerprint but I wonder why that happens…
I pretty much instantly lose respect for people who design sites to only support specific browsers. With the exception of Firefox, it’s all Chromium anyway so they don’t really need to worry about it. This isn’t like when Internet Explorer was a thing and broke web pages.
i guess it’s not about the actual site not supporting some browser. it’s usually about not wanting to deal with users that have problems with the page in some obscure browser caused by some random plugin or something but the user blaming it on the service. or because of tracking.
So do feature testing, not user-agent sniffing! For Pete’s sake, it’s 2024! That’s been the best practice for decades!
that’s not the point. the user is going to open a ticket because something does not work because their browser does not support it. and it’s way easier to tell them to install ‘this browser’ than to install ‘a browser that supports a specific feature’. most of the users don’t even know what a browser is…
I used to work for a web hosting company and have seen so many horror cases that I agree with you that this is what is happening. I also think it’s kinda lazy to just say that they won’t support what people are using because it’s hard. Even 5 - 7 years ago, this was much harder than it is now.
I’m working on an application right now that requires the ability to load and save data to the local file system. Firefox does not allow this, whereas Chrome does. The whole application runs from the local file system, so I don’t think there is much of a security issue.
But I actually do is test for the existence of the function to open the save or load dialog. That way, if Firefox does implement it, Firefox will work as well.
the ability to load and save data to the local file system
That sounds like a huge security risk. I’m surprised any browser allows it.
All it can do is open a dialogue to load or save a file. The action must also be initiated by the user (e.g. clicking a button). It’s not randomly allowing a page to load and save on its own.
You can try with an extension that changes the user agent of your browser; if you use the one from either firefox or chrome for android it should work. Usually its the only thing checked by sites when identifing browsers for non telemetry reasons; if the problem persists I’m not sure what it could be
No it’s not. Mull is built from the latest version of Firefox for Android, which currently is 122.
Install a user-agent switcher extension and pretent to be firefox or whatever. It should work.
I tried this a million different which ways a few months ago. Couldn’t get Duolingo to accept it. Gave up and haven’t been back since
Maybe it wants some opengl or webrtc, which are disabled by default in mull and bromite?
what on gods sake are they doing so special that requires those browsers explicitly
I’m guessing they don’t want to test on any other browsers, so it’s easier just to say that those aren’t supported. Most likely it works on others, you just need to spoof the agent.
This is definitely the case, but I wonder why companies don’t add a button, such as “Access website without support”, that would get you to the site while clearly telling you that any technical problems (of which, in 99% of cases, there will be none, since all of this seems like supporting Google internet dominance) will be ignored by support.
Sir, this is the internet. Morons will still complain about broken things in public forums even if you make them click through multiple dialogue boxes and popups with warnings in flashing text.
Most likely it works on others, you just need to spoof the agent.
I have both Mull and vanilla Firefox on Android, they use all the same headers (including User-Agent) according to DuckDuckGo’s “what’s my user agent” tool.
My guess is that the same defaults that makes Mull more private also disables either cookies or scripts that Duolingo expects to be able to use.
A few days ago I needed to download some transactions from a bank’s site. However, it kept giving “Something went wrong”. I called support and they told me I needed to use chrome. I did and surprisingly enough it actually worked. I did try Firefox less than a minute after that and it was still broken, so it wasn’t just a back-end issue that was resolved while logging on on Chrome. I still have no clue how it’s possible to create a download button that can break on Firefox.
Hey, I don’t want to discourage your language learning, but duolingo really sucks as a language learning platform. It honestly doesn’t teach you anything about actually using a language.
You might be much better served by using something like babbel, memrise or even better, Rosetta Stone. They are paid options, but well worth the price I think.
We got it for funsies and went through the final Spanish test. We’re both fluent speakers, he’s native. We were unable to pass the final tests–not because we didn’t speak Spanish, but because it was actually a subjective interpretation of what was being said rather than an objective one, btu they treated it like it were objective. Basically you have to learn it THEIR way. As a linguist, this is a big no-no and I walked away.
This is the answer.
The best one is Language Transfer. Completely free (I’m a patron, though) and speaking as someone who has learned five languages aside from English, this is the best system outside of full immersion.
