25 ms·

Great improvements! I also notice that Edge is more stable now and doesn't freeze as much as before (still happens). Also, I am not sure if it is Google breaki

• josteink 10y ago
  > I hope more sites test on Edge and not just on Chrome. "Look for your friends, but trust not to hope. It has forsaken these lands." Seriously. I use Firefox as my main browser and I'm at the point where I'm surprised if anyone tests anything in anything except Chrome, or if they even realize such test-targets exist at all. Standard response to bug-reports? "Just use Chrome. Works for me!", "It's just Firefox. Low importance." Etc. From the glory days of web-standards following IE's demise, this profession has sunk gutter low.
  • Analemma_ 10y ago
    Yeah. It boggles my mind how quickly and totally the amnesia has set in; where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created is perfectly fine with "Just use Chrome" as a solution. I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?!
    • pcwalton 10y ago
      > I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?! This has been a meme for years now. I remember John Resig suggesting this in 2013—ironically, right before the Blink fork that ended mainline WebKit dominance.
      • dherman 10y ago
        Wasn't it Joe Hewitt?
        • pcwalton 10y ago
          I'm thinking of http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engines/ http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engine...
    • jhpriestley 10y ago
      This would leave the browser world with one high-quality, open-source implementation as the de facto standard. I don't think this is so self-evidently awful. There are a number of big open-source projects in this sort of position, like git, TeX, linux, GHC. What is special about browsers that we need multiple competing implementations of the standard?
      • soperj 10y ago
        git really? there are tons of big projects that don't use git. Java for instance.
        • graphememes 10y ago
          They use it when multiple people code on the same codebase. It's either in Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket and uses git. I haven't seen someone use anything other than git in a long time, and those that do are ancient projects.
          • jordigh 10y ago
            I suppose Firefox is ancient too. They use Mercurial canonically. :-(
            • ergo14 10y ago
              So does Facebook... My company also uses mercurial - I know plenty of people that prefer it over git - but there is no github equivalent for it.
              • ori_b 10y ago
                There's bitbucket. It also has free private repositories.
                • ergo14 9y ago
                  It never reached the mass that github has unfortunately.
    • endorphone 10y ago
      where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created While a web monoculture isn't ideal, it's rational that people might have differing comfort levels between an OS-tied, closed-source project actively used to undermine the web, and an OS-agnostic, overwhelmingly open-source project that has been a principal contributor to the web moving forward (and arguably delayed or prevented the wholesale app-ification of the industry).
      • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        I think you're granting way too much favor to a company that uses changes in Chrome to force other companies to do what they want, or as with yesterday's news, to actively block their market competition. Even as an open source project, the fact that decision making and control comes from Google, and the dominant distribution of it is a proprietary version built around Google's corporate needs, it is no more trustworthy than IE at heart.
        • endorphone 10y ago
          One of the fun differences between the Chrome and IE FUD is that the former is based upon "but what if!?!?!" (usually ignoring that there is effectively zero lock-in, everything is standardized and open, etc), while the latter is based upon what actually happened. That you mention the news from yesterday, and report on some cynical, nonsensical comments as if they are fact is a perfect example. I want to be cynical about Google and Chrome. But thus far I have absolutely nothing to actually criticize them on. They literally have kept the web alive, and their attempts to try to clear up the advertising market is yet another example. Or just be cynical about it while everyone migrates to apps.
          • pcwalton 10y ago
            NaCl and Dart are things that actually happened. They were decidedly not standardized.
            • endorphone 10y ago
    • ng12 10y ago
      Uh, the difference is Chrome is usually right. Dealing with Firefox bugs is starting to feel like dealing with IE. Favorite example: a 9 year old bug where a select's option menu will render in the wrong location if there's a transform in the DOM above it (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164)
      • pcwalton 10y ago
        I find problems in Gecko much less often than I find problems in Blink. For example, WebKit handles border-collapse by drawing borders on top of one another, which is totally bogus when transparent borders are involved. While not a spec violation per se, Blink's behavior when absolute containing blocks are split across multiple lines is really bizarre (objects parented to that containing block just disappear). WebKit violates the HTML spec when the top margin of an element at the top of the document is queried in quirks mode. Etc. etc.
        • esprehn 10y ago
          Can you file these bugs at crbug.com?
      • bzbarsky 10y ago
        I just tried reproducing that bug. It's fixed in multiprocess Firefox, which is the default configuration for most users. It'll be the only configuration a few months for now, once add-ons that are not multiprocess-compatible are no longer supported. Also, Chrome is not usually right in my experience. A lot of times they don't even manage to implement the specs they themselves write correctly... Then someone else has to come along and file bugs on them, and maybe they fix them. Sometimes. All of which is anecdote. Actual data would be much better, of course.
        • ng12 10y ago
          It doesn't matter if it's fixed in some configuration of Firefox; point is it shouldn't take nine years to fix an app-breaking bug. Even early 2000's IE had a better track record than that. It's not like this is the only instance either, here's a 17(!) year old issue about Firefox not supporting option's label attribute: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=option-label https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=option-label Could you specify some issues you ran into on Chrome that affected user space this directly or took anywhere near this long to fix? I've been doing all of my development in Chrome for ~6 years and have done very, very few Chrome-specific workarounds. On the other hand, I ran into both the Firefox bugs mentioned in the last half year.
    • fooey 10y ago
      To be fair, IE was awful and held back the industry. Likely, it was awful and held by the industry by design. To this day, the versions of IE in use by actual people are awful. MS finally has Edge, which isn't awful, but absolutely no one uses it. If I tell an end user to get Chrome or Firefox, that's the end of the problem, whatever system they have it will work. If I try to tell someone to update their IE or to get Edge, I'm stepping into a black hole of trying to divine which version of Windows they're on and how recent their updates are. None of my mac loving coworkers can easily test against IE or Edge and headless unit testing against IE isn't a thing.
      • z3t4 10y ago
        You can get a free copy of windows for testing purpuse. you cant do that for mac.
      • WorldMaker 10y ago
        IE invented nice things like AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) and the "modern" border-box sizing model that has become almost a CSS boilerplate requirement (* { box-sizing: border-box; }), which was how IE originally interpreted the CSS spec. IE wasn't awful at the time it was built. It was ahead of its time in some areas. It became awful because of tech debt: people building for it and only it. Companies having key line of business apps built solely for IE that locked everyone into a compatibility nightmare. It is the same thing with the "Just install Chrome" crowd. If all anyone uses is Chrome, then no one else can move forward without first guaranteeing "Chrome compatibility" rather than spec compatibility. How soon until even Chrome has to maintain compatibility with ancient Chrome bugs because some Fortune 500 company relies on that specific bug for LOB software, willing to throw money at dumb bugs? (That Fortune 500 company could even be Google at this point, because they very much seem to have invested in an internal monoculture.) (Your Mac coworkers can find free Edge testing VMs from Microsoft. There's also "headless" tools like BrowserStack.)
        • pcwalton 10y ago
          > How soon until even Chrome has to maintain compatibility with ancient Chrome bugs because some Fortune 500 company relies on that specific bug for LOB software, willing to throw money at dumb bugs? Too late. This has already been happening for years in the mobile space. It's why WebKit refuses to remove -webkit prefixes, and other browsers are now forced to implement them.
    • amelius 10y ago
      W3C should write machine readable specs and vendors should transform those specs into working browsers, where the transformation is mechanically provably correct.
      • tannhaeuser 10y ago
        That ship has sailed a long time ago, though I'm all for a formal semantics for CSS, safe JavaScript subsets, etc. Also it's not W3C who do browser and HTML specs these days but WHATWG (eg. Google).
    • shurcooL 10y ago
      People didn't like primarily because IE was fixed version, tied to operating system version, Windows-only. Chrome is evergreen, cross platform, open source. That makes a big difference. Chrome gets bug fixes, implements new standards, etc.
      • pcwalton 10y ago
        When IE took over the market, it was implementing new features at a breakneck pace. The browser wars were not "IE sits still and gains market share"--they were "IE develops rapidly, takes over the market, and then stops development".
      • hashhar 10y ago
        AJAX, bi-directional text, most conformant CSS 2.0 browser, border-box sizing CSS model are all things where IE was ahead of the times. The reason people hated IE was because it implemented only "just enough" to get ahead and then sat on their asses until someone catched up. That's where the antitrust came from.
        • blackoil 10y ago
          I believe, order is reverse. IE team was dismantled after the antitrust suit.
      • zp-j 10y ago
        Sorry, Chrome is not open-sourced, Chromium is.
        • shurcooL 9y ago
          That is a valid point, thank you for bringing it up.
    • moron4hire 10y ago
      It's not the same crowd. We've been pumping and dumping tons of "bootcamp" programmers on the field. With the way things go, experienced professionals who know the old gods and the new will always be an extreme minority, just from attrition.
    • staticassertion 10y ago
      >where the same crowd who vilified IE It's a different crowd, I think.
    • paulddraper 10y ago
      You have a point, but at least Chrome doesn't need me to install a specific OS at a specific version to make it work. Installing a new OS to view a webpage was a tall order.
  • hashhar 10y ago
    I've seen things go the other way around. As an example, use Chrome Canary to browse https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/its-like-tweeting-but-you-cant-use-the-letter-e https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/its-like-tweeting... and then use Firefox Nightly. Chrome can barely manage to keep up with scrolling while Firefox chugs along nicely. The only issues Firefox has are when you get to media handling and non-standard APIs from Chrome. 99.9% of websites "work" on all browsers though and I haven't seen any need to run Chrome for a specific website (Google Docs used to be a case but not anymore).
    • esprehn 9y ago
      I filed this bug here http://crbug.com/713982 http://crbug.com/713982 This is a behavioral difference with Firefox. Chrome is currently blocking scrolling on the JS inside the wheel event handler which appears to be very slow on the linked website. Firefox is only blocking on the JS for the first event inside the scroll gesture and asynchronously scrolling after which hides the very slow JS handlers. This is an interesting case because the Chrome behavior lets sites implement certain effects without lagging behind scrolling while the Firefox behavior favors smoothness of scrolling over JS effects synchronized with wheel handlers. In any case, Chrome is currently working towards switching to the Firefox behavior which will make sites like this scroll much more smoothly.
  • mbell 10y ago
    > It's just Firefox. Low importance. Well, the reality is that it is low importance. Firefox is down to ~2.5% of our traffic, Firefox is bleeding users badly. It's also not always a simple fix. In our current code base we have more workarounds for FF bugs than any other browser, and some of them are pretty nasty. e.g. monkey patching `getComputedStyle` to get around this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 So it tends to come down to whether or not it's worth carrying a bunch of technical debt to support a dying browser, not a simple choice and not a matter of sticking to web standards.
    • hutzlibu 10y ago
      "to support a dying browser" Wow, this is the first time I read FF being described as a "dying browser". Even though I don't think so and other sources https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... say about 12% market share, the fact alone that someone describes it like that, is very sad ...
      • gnaritas 10y ago
        It used to be much higher than 12%, so it is actually a dying browser.
      • mbell 10y ago
        > say about 12% market share 12% of desktop, ~5-6% of total. 3 years ago it was ~18% of total, there is certainly a consistent downward trend in usage.
        • hutzlibu 10y ago
          No doubt about the down thing, I also rarely use FF nowdays, but a downtrend is a different thing from "dying". Plus, I am optimistic about servo ...
    • pcwalton 10y ago
      > In our current code base we have more workarounds for FF bugs than any other browser, and some of them are pretty nasty. e.g. monkey patching `getComputedStyle` to get around this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548397 In that case, Blink and WebKit are changing to Firefox (and Edge)'s behavior, because it makes more sense. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1813 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/1813
  • qudat 10y ago
    Another reason for this is tooling. No one I know develops on Firefox, mainly because of how amazing Google Chrome's developer tools have become over the years. It's not even close. So yes, developers use Chrome because Google has an entire team dedicated to make their tooling cutting edge for developers.
    • pikzen 10y ago
      The developer tools on Firefox Developer Edition(Aurora) are miles ahead on most things aside from the network view, to be fair. Just because they're not integrated into default firefox doesn't mean Chrome is the absolute best.
  • tannhaeuser 10y ago
    What are you talking about? I'm using FF without any trouble at all on both desktop and mobile for each and everything, and so do many others, for its support of uBlock origin if nothing else. Also, the iOS devices out there have only Safari-Webkit.
    • johnnydoebk 10y ago
      There are some hipster web-sites built by amateurish developers who manage somehow to make them work correctly in Chrome only. I've faced those too and after reporting the bugs (like horizontal scrolling of menus) the reply is usually something along the lines of "most of our users prefer Chrome, so we won't fix it".
  • lacampbell 10y ago
    Standard response to bug-reports? "Just use Chrome. Works for me!", "It's just Firefox. Low importance." Etc. I remember wanting to use Italki, but their website wouldn't let me input my credit card details when using firefox. I mentioned it to their support team, and they just suggested I use chrome. I guess they're big enough that my lack of custom won't hurt, but I figured that since "inputting numbers into a field" was already a solved problem in front end web development, that they might as well sort it out.
  • Touche 10y ago
    A good step would be if browsers other than Chrome had decent devtools built in.
  • tn135 10y ago
    That attitude can work only for enterprise applications where people get paid to use the application. Not when you are a consumer app. We test even on Safari.
  • cdata 10y ago
    As a long time web developer, I worked through IE dominance. I was a Firefox early adopter and advocated for it amongst friends and family for years. Furthermore, I am very unhappy about the state of the landscape today. One browser should not be dominating all the others; it is an imbalance in the order of the web. The hyperbole in your comment kinda kills me though. The glory days of web standards that you are talking about were largely glorious because Firefox came out from left field and started implementing standards and new features at a high velocity compared to Microsoft's IE. Firefox started to beat IE in tooling and platform features, and it was open source to boot. Firefox even had the edge on IE with regards to security (to be fair the bar was low in those days). All of these details greatly endeared Firefox to me. As a web developer, I loved Firefox for what it stood for and also what it enabled me to do. Chrome is "winning" the web browser game by taking the pages out of Firefox's playbook. Chrome is open source. Chrome is heavily involved in the standards process. Chrome takes a lot of credit for pushing browsers towards evergreen release cycles. Chrome offers the best developer tooling. Chrome implements standardized web platform features at a rapid clip. I hate that Chrome is dominating the market. But I don't hate Chrome, and I definitely don't think the status quo today is worse than the one during the Internet Explorer regime. I hate it because it shows that there is a tremendous imbalance in the resources spent on other browsers compared to Chrome. I hate it because I don't think that the ecosystem is as great as it could be if the developer mindshare was more distributed across different browsers. It's easy to forget that the "bar" for "gutter low" was set a long time ago by a company (M$) that decided the web was boring and could die for all it cared. I think it's simplistic and misleading to suggest that the situation today comes close to that.
    • sangnoir 10y ago
      I too was an early-ish Firefox proponent, it was way ahead of IE on features (but behind Opera - the ads made opera unattractive to me). The devtools were revolutionary (Firebug!). Somewhere along the way, Mozilla lost momentum/focus - Chrom(e/ium) is what Firefox should have been. Hopefully Mozilla will find it's way again someday soon, for the moment I'm using Chromium- which I switched to primarily for the devtools.
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