3 ms·

Yes, it's worth "supporting" Firefox. Just like it's worth it to "support" a standards compatible web browser. I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days

Yes, it's worth "supporting" Firefox. Just like it's worth it to "support" a standards compatible web browser. I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed. Do you really want Google to dictate how the web works? I don't. When Microsoft did this we lost _years_ of meaningful improvements and just recently got the ability to vertically center in CSS.

Jach 8y ago
As long as Google keeps pushing forward new useful features with Chrome, people won't care. Even more so if those new features get standardized within a few years. MS dropped the ball by resting on their laurels with IE6+ActiveX (plus the antitrust stuff scared them quite a bit) while the rest of the browser ecosystem innovated and standardized. If MS had instead kept leading the way, things could have played out differently. Instead I feel like we've gone back to IE6 days where there's one browser holding everyone else back, in this case mobile safari (and sometimes desktop safari) causes the most problems in things I work on. IE11 is more tolerable to support for me. I still fight the good fight every now and again on respecting standards, though I get sad when it seems even the standards compliant browsers implement 99.99% of various standards but then each differ on the leftover .01%, leading to shims or workarounds for everyone. It's definitely better than it once was though -- http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ is one of my favorite sites.
squarefoot 8y ago
"I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed." It's even worse than that. The Internet grew in the hands of engineers who cared about functionality and compatibility first, then about profitability. About two decades ago the industry started turning tables (and later the smartphone boom helped to achieve that goal even more). Now every big player is looking to build its own proprietary environment to get the most users on so that they're forced to use that player resources; this is precisely the mindset the world wide web openness fought against. Sadly they're now fighting back: if yesterday a browser could help to surf 10 sites, today you need 10 apps, each one closed source and doing who knows what under the hood. And this monstrosity is slowly sneaking into the non mobile world hidden behind catchy buzzwords and fancy graphics. Using "the cloud" to store documents and important data seems so cool, but is not that different from going back to the 60s world of dumb terminals and big mainframes where the mainframe owner decided if, how and when the user could access to his/her own data. Both engineers and users are losing control and quite frankly I have no idea of what to do.

Jach 8y ago

As long as Google keeps pushing forward new useful features with Chrome, people won't care. Even more so if those new features get standardized within a few years. MS dropped the ball by resting on their laurels with IE6+ActiveX (plus the antitrust stuff scared them quite a bit) while the rest of the browser ecosystem innovated and standardized. If MS had instead kept leading the way, things could have played out differently. Instead I feel like we've gone back to IE6 days where there's one browser holding everyone else back, in this case mobile safari (and sometimes desktop safari) causes the most problems in things I work on. IE11 is more tolerable to support for me. I still fight the good fight every now and again on respecting standards, though I get sad when it seems even the standards compliant browsers implement 99.99% of various standards but then each differ on the leftover .01%, leading to shims or workarounds for everyone. It's definitely better than it once was though -- http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ is one of my favorite sites.

squarefoot 8y ago

"I swear we're going backwards in time to IE6 days when everyone built for just one browser and forgot that others existed." It's even worse than that. The Internet grew in the hands of engineers who cared about functionality and compatibility first, then about profitability. About two decades ago the industry started turning tables (and later the smartphone boom helped to achieve that goal even more). Now every big player is looking to build its own proprietary environment to get the most users on so that they're forced to use that player resources; this is precisely the mindset the world wide web openness fought against. Sadly they're now fighting back: if yesterday a browser could help to surf 10 sites, today you need 10 apps, each one closed source and doing who knows what under the hood. And this monstrosity is slowly sneaking into the non mobile world hidden behind catchy buzzwords and fancy graphics. Using "the cloud" to store documents and important data seems so cool, but is not that different from going back to the 60s world of dumb terminals and big mainframes where the mainframe owner decided if, how and when the user could access to his/her own data. Both engineers and users are losing control and quite frankly I have no idea of what to do.