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I use and love firefox. I feel sad when I see brave, edge and other new browsers chromium based taking a lead. Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the

I use and love firefox. I feel sad when I see brave, edge and other new browsers chromium based taking a lead. Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the company behind it lacks any kind of vision. Brave has its own search, a better startpage, an ad network. From onboarding to incentivising user, they are doing it all very well.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity. Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chrome" when something is misaligned or broken in Firefox or Safari. I wish I could say it's the project managers, sys admins or the executives who are to blame like in the IE6 days. But painfully it's just lazy or incompetent engineers who don't understand or care about the importance of open and standard tech. When asked to build something they all treat cross browser as an extra and not-essential step and then inflate their estimates or claim it will be quicker if we don't bother. Wish this was isolated to a few people but I feel I'm like 80 young engineers deep who are like this and I think maybe 2 I've worked with in the past 7 years cared about cross browser. If your experience in the industry is different from this, I'm extremely envious.
- Asooka 5y ago
  If it doesn't work right in Firefox and Chrome, it's probably not standards-conformant and thus at a high probability of breaking when Chrome updates its layout engine. That's how I'd present the argument - making sure it works right across browsers makes your code robust against future changes in behaviour.
- notriddle 5y ago
  > But painfully it’s just lazy or incompetent engineers There are good arguments in favor of testing and developing for Firefox, but that is not one of them. Representing the interests of the end-user, in a typical SCRUM-ish development house, is supposed to be the product owner’s job, not the job of individual devs. If management isn’t rewarding cross-browser development, then that’s on management, or maybe even on the end-users. Not the devs. Expecting devs to put work into stuff that won’t be rewarded by their bosses if they succeed, and will likely be punished if something goes wrong, is kinda silly. It probably doesn’t matter that much, anyway. Firefox is being killed because some of the most popular websites on the internet are made by a competitor, the vertical monopoly between YouTube and Chrome. Everything else is just a distraction.
- iso1631 5y ago
  > Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. And many in the older generation saw no point in testing anything but IE6 on Windows
- fleddr 5y ago
  I'm old school like you are, and morally agree with you. Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for the sake of argument, assume we do use web standards. It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues. We've long seen this as some diversity feature of the web, but it's a bug instead. It means millions of developers are spending time on the same non-value added activity every single time. It's a massive and ongoing waste of resources for everybody. (browser makers agree with the above, they all have a compatibility program addressing this) Second, "progressive enhancement" too has been embraced by the careful web developer as the right thing to do. It is. Yet it effectively means building the same thing twice. We've normalized doing that, but it's quite an unnatural approach not seen in any other tech platform I know of. (the above can be solved by browsers coordinating important standards in time, but generally they won't...often) Both issues above are time wasters and technical shortcomings. They still are the right thing to do, but an unwanted thing to do when adding pressure. And pressure we have. We're no longer in the cute web, this is the business web. Developers are very expensive and need to deliver more than ever. Time to market is shorter than ever. Any activity not directly contributing to time to market, is under severe pressure. Note that I still agree with your point about some/many engineers being lazy, indifferent. But I hope you appreciate this view still.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    > It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues. Regardless of the technology, UNIX, C, TCP/IP, Web,.... either you get standards and differences across vendors, or monoculture. And we all know what monoculture brings into the party. I could use a similar argumentation to defend we should all be writing Windows applications, or Red-Hat Enterprise Linux and be done with it.
- kunagi7 5y ago
  As someone who has worked in quite a lot of web projects for the last few years I noticed the big difference in requirements. Back when I started it was all about supporting IE7/IE8+, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari (with an old iPad as a test device). A lot of polyfills were used to ease development and keeping older browsers alive. Testing on IE was quite painful (missing proper devtools, weird "Unknown Error!" alerts, slow scripts crashing the whole browser, browser implementation bugs, headaches with library conflicts, etc). I remember testing against hobby browsers like Pale Moon because things already worked fine. Nowadays it's just all about testing in Chrome and with less priority, Safari (mostly on iPad, iPhone). The requirement of testing against other browsers were dropped by most of clients. If a project has spare time fixes for those browsers are an extra. Most analytics tools don't even show anything else of Chrome/Chromiums and Safaris (desktop and mobile). So, even older engineers are slowly moving along with the newest generation and just test on Chrome and sometimes Safari. This days I just use a Chromium derivative, Vivaldi. It does the job and the UI speed has been improving quite a lot (but still lags a bit behind). If the project has some spare time I like to do some cross browser checks (most times, things just work fine). Sometimes I find an engineer using Firefox but most of the time they have a Chrome browser opened to test their work.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  Firefoxes share peaked at around 30% in 2010. It's now closer to 3%. The big 3 are now Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Firefox is no longer a major browser, and hasn't been for some time.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Edge is NOT a big browser.
kbelder 5y ago
One of the problems is that it isn't a choice between Good and Evil. (That's Mozilla and Google, if it wasn't clear...) When you look at Mozilla's leadership, it is not hard to be turned off by their actions. It certainly bothers me. But, returning to Chrome seems even worse. It's like a choice between 60% evil and (20% evil + 40% nuts). So I'm doing a trifecta. Chrome at work. A mix of Firefox and Brave at home... increasingly Brave, especially on mobile.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity. Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chrome" when something is misaligned or broken in Firefox or Safari. I wish I could say it's the project managers, sys admins or the executives who are to blame like in the IE6 days. But painfully it's just lazy or incompetent engineers who don't understand or care about the importance of open and standard tech. When asked to build something they all treat cross browser as an extra and not-essential step and then inflate their estimates or claim it will be quicker if we don't bother. Wish this was isolated to a few people but I feel I'm like 80 young engineers deep who are like this and I think maybe 2 I've worked with in the past 7 years cared about cross browser. If your experience in the industry is different from this, I'm extremely envious.

Asooka 5y ago
If it doesn't work right in Firefox and Chrome, it's probably not standards-conformant and thus at a high probability of breaking when Chrome updates its layout engine. That's how I'd present the argument - making sure it works right across browsers makes your code robust against future changes in behaviour.
notriddle 5y ago
> But painfully it’s just lazy or incompetent engineers There are good arguments in favor of testing and developing for Firefox, but that is not one of them. Representing the interests of the end-user, in a typical SCRUM-ish development house, is supposed to be the product owner’s job, not the job of individual devs. If management isn’t rewarding cross-browser development, then that’s on management, or maybe even on the end-users. Not the devs. Expecting devs to put work into stuff that won’t be rewarded by their bosses if they succeed, and will likely be punished if something goes wrong, is kinda silly. It probably doesn’t matter that much, anyway. Firefox is being killed because some of the most popular websites on the internet are made by a competitor, the vertical monopoly between YouTube and Chrome. Everything else is just a distraction.
iso1631 5y ago
> Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. And many in the older generation saw no point in testing anything but IE6 on Windows
fleddr 5y ago
I'm old school like you are, and morally agree with you. Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for the sake of argument, assume we do use web standards. It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues. We've long seen this as some diversity feature of the web, but it's a bug instead. It means millions of developers are spending time on the same non-value added activity every single time. It's a massive and ongoing waste of resources for everybody. (browser makers agree with the above, they all have a compatibility program addressing this) Second, "progressive enhancement" too has been embraced by the careful web developer as the right thing to do. It is. Yet it effectively means building the same thing twice. We've normalized doing that, but it's quite an unnatural approach not seen in any other tech platform I know of. (the above can be solved by browsers coordinating important standards in time, but generally they won't...often) Both issues above are time wasters and technical shortcomings. They still are the right thing to do, but an unwanted thing to do when adding pressure. And pressure we have. We're no longer in the cute web, this is the business web. Developers are very expensive and need to deliver more than ever. Time to market is shorter than ever. Any activity not directly contributing to time to market, is under severe pressure. Note that I still agree with your point about some/many engineers being lazy, indifferent. But I hope you appreciate this view still.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  > It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues. Regardless of the technology, UNIX, C, TCP/IP, Web,.... either you get standards and differences across vendors, or monoculture. And we all know what monoculture brings into the party. I could use a similar argumentation to defend we should all be writing Windows applications, or Red-Hat Enterprise Linux and be done with it.
kunagi7 5y ago
As someone who has worked in quite a lot of web projects for the last few years I noticed the big difference in requirements. Back when I started it was all about supporting IE7/IE8+, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari (with an old iPad as a test device). A lot of polyfills were used to ease development and keeping older browsers alive. Testing on IE was quite painful (missing proper devtools, weird "Unknown Error!" alerts, slow scripts crashing the whole browser, browser implementation bugs, headaches with library conflicts, etc). I remember testing against hobby browsers like Pale Moon because things already worked fine. Nowadays it's just all about testing in Chrome and with less priority, Safari (mostly on iPad, iPhone). The requirement of testing against other browsers were dropped by most of clients. If a project has spare time fixes for those browsers are an extra. Most analytics tools don't even show anything else of Chrome/Chromiums and Safaris (desktop and mobile). So, even older engineers are slowly moving along with the newest generation and just test on Chrome and sometimes Safari. This days I just use a Chromium derivative, Vivaldi. It does the job and the UI speed has been improving quite a lot (but still lags a bit behind). If the project has some spare time I like to do some cross browser checks (most times, things just work fine). Sometimes I find an engineer using Firefox but most of the time they have a Chrome browser opened to test their work.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
Firefoxes share peaked at around 30% in 2010. It's now closer to 3%. The big 3 are now Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Firefox is no longer a major browser, and hasn't been for some time.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Edge is NOT a big browser.

kbelder 5y ago

One of the problems is that it isn't a choice between Good and Evil. (That's Mozilla and Google, if it wasn't clear...) When you look at Mozilla's leadership, it is not hard to be turned off by their actions. It certainly bothers me. But, returning to Chrome seems even worse. It's like a choice between 60% evil and (20% evil + 40% nuts). So I'm doing a trifecta. Chrome at work. A mix of Firefox and Brave at home... increasingly Brave, especially on mobile.