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> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. That's

by umvi 8y ago

> developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. That's me. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to support every browser's quirks. I check Firefox every once in a while, but really, I don't mind losing a few users if it means significantly less maintenance and testing for me. It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes - if it works on Windows, it's ready to ship. Yet people do this all the time for video games and most Linux users understand that making a game that runs equally well on Windows and Linux and Mac is no simple task.

deleted 8y ago
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bantunes 8y ago
And this is why Chrome will win, become complacent, and a new browser will dethrone it like it did IE. Meanwhile, Firefox will continue to hover around the 10% mark or so.
- bobajeff 8y ago
  Don't see Google pausing Chrome's development for 4 years like Internet Explorer.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    I honestly don't remember what the last time was Chrome introduced some cool new feature in Chrome. Maybe the PDF reader?
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      PWA, WebComponents, File Access, Worklets and Houdini and everything else in HTML5/CSS3 still missing from ChromeOS are all being pushed by Chrome.
      - lucb1e 8y ago
        Aside from File Access, I haven't seen any of these. PWA is sometimes mentioned on HN but I've never seen one in the wild (I had to look up the term a few weeks ago). Worklets, WebComponents, and Houdini, I never heard of. I'm not the most in the loop person since I'm not a web developer, but you'd think the cool stuff gets at least mentioned, so going with that, the most recent progressive feature that comes to mind is still the PDF reader (other than general maintenance work to keep up with HTML5, which all browsers do, and which I assume MSIE was also doing in the 4 year period mentioned -- or CSS3 or whatever was hot back then).
        pjmlp 8y ago
        Twitter and Starbucks mobile apps are PWAs. Houdini allows for low level control of CSS rendering, basically it allows for creating CSS classes with our own paint methods, and in the process having lower level JavaScript concurrency using less resources than workers.
      - zaarn 8y ago
        I don't see how those really benefit the end user. Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.
        kkarakk 8y ago
        i'm a developer and i find it hard to give a shit about any of that, container tabs are cute but they end up breaking a lot of websites, the rest is not even a blip on my radar as for addons changing how my browser works - no thanks, i'd rather have a consistently nice browser experience than have to re-install addons everywhere
        zaarn 8y ago
        If container tabs break your website, I suspect you're doing something shady with tracking. It does literally nothing but isolate cookies/storage/scripts.
hashhar 8y ago
Developing against Chrome is exactly "support every browser's quirks" instead of developing against the actual standards (usually Firefox has the truest implementation of which).
- dx034 8y ago
  But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you target Enterprise users). Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    This is like an unpleasant blast from the past. It was wrong when web developers did this for IE, it's wrong now.
  - Blaiz0r 8y ago
    Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about standards, otherwise you have no standards. The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can change at any time.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      This point of view is as ignorant of reality as the grammarians that say Webster's English is the only true English. Every standard is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent behind the spec, and the practical application of the spec in the real world (which all-too-often, unfortunately, includes things like "Yeah, that's what the spec says, but then scammers realized you could exploit that to use people's browsers to mine Bitcoin or something, so no browser actually does that"). A web developer codes against real machines, not the imagined, idealized, and non-existent machines the specs describe.
pjmlp 8y ago
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Linux, macOS and Windows aren't variations of the same OS APIs.
_jal 8y ago
> It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes Except that web apps are easy to make OS-agnostic and always have been[1]. If your webapp isn't, that is because you chose to make it that way, not for a technical reason. Pretending that's OK because these other things have to be that way isn't going to convince anyone, but you can get away with that for enterprise-development or captive audiences. Just don't try to gaslight people. For me, I'm just going to close your site when it breaks and not come back. Seems that tradeoff works for you too, so that's good, at least. [1] Sure, that thing that never caught on, and IE6. Thanks.
jgon 8y ago
The web is a global open standard platform for the free exchange of information. I would call it one of the great achievements of computing and mankind. To hear someone say "Meh I'd trade that to save myself a bit of effort" is deeply, deeply disappointing.
cptskippy 8y ago
I've been doing web development for almost 20 years now and I've used Firefox as my primary browser since it was Phoenix and before that I used the Mozilla Communicator Suite and Navigator. I may not be rolling the latest features like WebSockets but I very rarely come across incompatibilities anymore. IE remains the biggest issue and honestly a lot of those are removing hacks and workarounds on older sites as after about IE9 they started to catch up with support. Most of the "incompatibilites" that I fix are actually when our Junior Devs are using CSS attributes incorrectly and they've hacked their code until Chrome mostly works. In this era of Bootstrap it's not uncommon for developers to just throw CSS at the problem and 99% of the time that's what's caused the issue in the first place.
isostatic 8y ago
I encountered so many people like you in the early to mid 2000s, IE6 or bust. 15 years later and we're stuck with old corporate sites that require IE6 and activex.
NeoBasilisk 8y ago
You would have loved working in the industry 10 years ago.
orange8 8y ago
You make it seem like the differences between firefox and chrome are HUGE. What quirks are these you've encountered that can be compared to the hardships of shipping a game that runs equally well in windows and linux?

by umvi 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bantunes 8y ago

And this is why Chrome will win, become complacent, and a new browser will dethrone it like it did IE. Meanwhile, Firefox will continue to hover around the 10% mark or so.

bobajeff 8y ago
Don't see Google pausing Chrome's development for 4 years like Internet Explorer.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  I honestly don't remember what the last time was Chrome introduced some cool new feature in Chrome. Maybe the PDF reader?
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    PWA, WebComponents, File Access, Worklets and Houdini and everything else in HTML5/CSS3 still missing from ChromeOS are all being pushed by Chrome.
    - lucb1e 8y ago
      Aside from File Access, I haven't seen any of these. PWA is sometimes mentioned on HN but I've never seen one in the wild (I had to look up the term a few weeks ago). Worklets, WebComponents, and Houdini, I never heard of. I'm not the most in the loop person since I'm not a web developer, but you'd think the cool stuff gets at least mentioned, so going with that, the most recent progressive feature that comes to mind is still the PDF reader (other than general maintenance work to keep up with HTML5, which all browsers do, and which I assume MSIE was also doing in the 4 year period mentioned -- or CSS3 or whatever was hot back then).
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        Twitter and Starbucks mobile apps are PWAs. Houdini allows for low level control of CSS rendering, basically it allows for creating CSS classes with our own paint methods, and in the process having lower level JavaScript concurrency using less resources than workers.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      I don't see how those really benefit the end user. Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.
      - kkarakk 8y ago
        i'm a developer and i find it hard to give a shit about any of that, container tabs are cute but they end up breaking a lot of websites, the rest is not even a blip on my radar as for addons changing how my browser works - no thanks, i'd rather have a consistently nice browser experience than have to re-install addons everywhere
        zaarn 8y ago
        If container tabs break your website, I suspect you're doing something shady with tracking. It does literally nothing but isolate cookies/storage/scripts.

hashhar 8y ago

Developing against Chrome is exactly "support every browser's quirks" instead of developing against the actual standards (usually Firefox has the truest implementation of which).

dx034 8y ago
But as a web developer I don't necessarily care about standards. I want the page to work for as many users as possible. For the longest time this meant to support IE's way of doing things, now it means to support Chrome (unless you target Enterprise users). Even if you develop for Chrome, Firefox and Edge you'll just end up building workarounds for all 3, not adhering strictly to the standard.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  This is like an unpleasant blast from the past. It was wrong when web developers did this for IE, it's wrong now.
- Blaiz0r 8y ago
  Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about standards, otherwise you have no standards. The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can change at any time.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    This point of view is as ignorant of reality as the grammarians that say Webster's English is the only true English. Every standard is a three-edged sword: the spec, the intent behind the spec, and the practical application of the spec in the real world (which all-too-often, unfortunately, includes things like "Yeah, that's what the spec says, but then scammers realized you could exploit that to use people's browsers to mine Bitcoin or something, so no browser actually does that"). A web developer codes against real machines, not the imagined, idealized, and non-existent machines the specs describe.

pjmlp 8y ago

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Linux, macOS and Windows aren't variations of the same OS APIs.

_jal 8y ago

> It's like complaining that developers are increasingly shunning other OSes Except that web apps are easy to make OS-agnostic and always have been[1]. If your webapp isn't, that is because you chose to make it that way, not for a technical reason. Pretending that's OK because these other things have to be that way isn't going to convince anyone, but you can get away with that for enterprise-development or captive audiences. Just don't try to gaslight people. For me, I'm just going to close your site when it breaks and not come back. Seems that tradeoff works for you too, so that's good, at least. [1] Sure, that thing that never caught on, and IE6. Thanks.

jgon 8y ago

The web is a global open standard platform for the free exchange of information. I would call it one of the great achievements of computing and mankind. To hear someone say "Meh I'd trade that to save myself a bit of effort" is deeply, deeply disappointing.

cptskippy 8y ago

I've been doing web development for almost 20 years now and I've used Firefox as my primary browser since it was Phoenix and before that I used the Mozilla Communicator Suite and Navigator. I may not be rolling the latest features like WebSockets but I very rarely come across incompatibilities anymore. IE remains the biggest issue and honestly a lot of those are removing hacks and workarounds on older sites as after about IE9 they started to catch up with support. Most of the "incompatibilites" that I fix are actually when our Junior Devs are using CSS attributes incorrectly and they've hacked their code until Chrome mostly works. In this era of Bootstrap it's not uncommon for developers to just throw CSS at the problem and 99% of the time that's what's caused the issue in the first place.

isostatic 8y ago

I encountered so many people like you in the early to mid 2000s, IE6 or bust. 15 years later and we're stuck with old corporate sites that require IE6 and activex.

NeoBasilisk 8y ago

You would have loved working in the industry 10 years ago.

orange8 8y ago

You make it seem like the differences between firefox and chrome are HUGE. What quirks are these you've encountered that can be compared to the hardships of shipping a game that runs equally well in windows and linux?