4 ms·

I'll write an unpopular opinion: 1. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that

I'll write an unpopular opinion: 1. Developer's time is not a commodity. The time you spend testing in alternative browsers is time you can spend in tasks that will make life less painful to the people who work with you such as writing tests, documentation, or new code. 2. A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist. The business should be the one who dictates which browsers should be supported, and it should be a rational decision based on data such as reviewing your own analytics. Nobody has infinite resources. 3. Using a website is a privilege, not a right. The same way you are free to choose your favorite browser, a website owner is free to choose which users to serve, the same way we can say "Are you still using IE8 in 2019? tough luck buddy, the site is broken", we can also say "Sorry dude, I didn't care enough to support Firefox because X feature was broken". 4. When you as a user decide to choose Firefox because "my ideological reasons", you are also choosing to deal with the negative aspects such as broken websites, broken extensions, lack of features, loss of mindshare, etc., etc., if you don't like dealing with them the alternative is pretty simple: Use Chrome, that's what the end users do anyway. The reason Chrome has gained lots of mindshare is because we all love convenience, and there are less-painful alternatives to push the "we don't like Google" agenda such as forking Chromium. The "we don't track you" is a huge competitive advantage against Google, why should you give up everything that Chromium does right? The resources that Mozilla spends maintaining Gecko could be used more intelligently to build for example a security team to alleviate the concern of having a huge common attack area. Wasn't "test once, run everywhere" the holy grail? Or now we like O(N) instead of O(1)?

btmiller 8y ago
> A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist I think the only scenario where that's acceptable is experimental/nightly features that haven't yet made their way to the majority of browsers. > Using a website is a privilege Some would dispute that. My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?
- Aldo_MX 8y ago
  > My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website? Glad you made this question. I'm a customer from BBVA and years ago, when Opera recently launched its Chromium-based fork I got a nag: You're using an unsupported browser I was infuriated: "How the f*ck are you targeting the new Opera?!?!?!?! I mean, even the user agent looks like Chrome, to display this nag you had to explicitly target the new Opera WTF?!?!?!" Now I ask you the following question: Can you access your bank account with Lynx? Curl? Where do you draw the line between which browsers to support? Where do you draw the line between telling a user "Use Chrome" or having the user to complain at your call center because the website broke specifically in Brave browser? (pretty unlikely but not unrealistic scenario) Years ago many banks and government agencies even required you to install Java to access their service. So yeah, it is a privilege to access your funds in a non-supported mean, if you complain at their call center they'll probably tell you "just use Chrome", or "install the Android app", or a similar alternative. If a bank thinks it is a competitive advantage to let you access in Mosaic, then it will push their development team to support even Mosaic.
millstone 8y ago
I agree but have a different perspective. The web is overrun with ads and user-hostile behaviors. Other browsers combat this in various ways (Reader View, Firefox's Tracking Protection, Safari's ITP) but Chrome basically does nothing. Websites work better with these features, not worse. And so long as Chrome is dominant, these protection features will continue to be effective, because there's not much incentive to defeat them. It's a bit like the blissful period when IE was dominant and still allowed popup windows. The div-style popups didn't take over until IE's popup blocker.

btmiller 8y ago

> A website that only works in Chrome is preferable to a website that does not exist I think the only scenario where that's acceptable is experimental/nightly features that haven't yet made their way to the majority of browsers. > Using a website is a privilege Some would dispute that. My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website?

Aldo_MX 8y ago
> My bank, for instance, doesn't have physical branches. Is it considered a privilege to access my funds via website? Glad you made this question. I'm a customer from BBVA and years ago, when Opera recently launched its Chromium-based fork I got a nag: You're using an unsupported browser I was infuriated: "How the f*ck are you targeting the new Opera?!?!?!?! I mean, even the user agent looks like Chrome, to display this nag you had to explicitly target the new Opera WTF?!?!?!" Now I ask you the following question: Can you access your bank account with Lynx? Curl? Where do you draw the line between which browsers to support? Where do you draw the line between telling a user "Use Chrome" or having the user to complain at your call center because the website broke specifically in Brave browser? (pretty unlikely but not unrealistic scenario) Years ago many banks and government agencies even required you to install Java to access their service. So yeah, it is a privilege to access your funds in a non-supported mean, if you complain at their call center they'll probably tell you "just use Chrome", or "install the Android app", or a similar alternative. If a bank thinks it is a competitive advantage to let you access in Mosaic, then it will push their development team to support even Mosaic.

millstone 8y ago

I agree but have a different perspective. The web is overrun with ads and user-hostile behaviors. Other browsers combat this in various ways (Reader View, Firefox's Tracking Protection, Safari's ITP) but Chrome basically does nothing. Websites work better with these features, not worse. And so long as Chrome is dominant, these protection features will continue to be effective, because there's not much incentive to defeat them. It's a bit like the blissful period when IE was dominant and still allowed popup windows. The div-style popups didn't take over until IE's popup blocker.