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It would be easier for companies (who aren't anti Google) to administer Chrome policy via their existing Google/Gmail accounts and Google Workspace. Profiles, s

It would be easier for companies (who aren't anti Google) to administer Chrome policy via their existing Google/Gmail accounts and Google Workspace. Profiles, sync, extensions, etc. can all be centrally administered. And also deployed to Chromebooks for certain users. All without having to manage the overhead of a minority browser with < 5% marketshare. The "I can't get this web app to work in Firefox, how do I install Chrome?" support calls probably outweigh any ideological preference for a libre browser. Especially for any web shop... Firefox is even less relevant than Microsoft now and forcing it as a primary internal browser is a great way to alienate your company from end user experiences.

raxxorrax 5y ago
I couldn't name you a single webapp that requires Chrome and it wouldn't fit our quality p expectations and would get booted. Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE. Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Small business/government sites in the US sadly are very guilty of breaking. Esp. for payments, which makes me feel like I'm back in the late 90's with form submissions... I use chrome for important stuff for that reason.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  > Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE. It already has, sadly. > Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones. Yes, definitely. For non Microsoft shops, Google is a very common option (eg academia).
- jhasse 5y ago
  WhatsApp Web was Chrome only for quite some time. From personal experience I know that Teams definitely has some Firefox-only bugs.
thrower123 5y ago
What large companies use GMail like that? Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  People still use Microsoft? My experience is largely in small medium biz and academia, both of which use a lot of Google. I haven't seen a Microsoft shop in decades. But that's just my own limited spheres of work. (edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)
  - SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
    It depends heavily on the industry, but in my experience the vast majority of the business world runs on Microsoft products. For a lot of businesses (think more accountants or law firms than devs), Outlook, Excel and Word are must-haves. That means Windows is a must-have. That means if you don't have the supporting infrastructure (Azure or Active Directory) then administration becomes a nightmare, so those are a must-have. And at that point, since everything else is Microsoft, Teams gets used for comms and OneDrive gets used for filesharing.
    - technobabbler 5y ago
      That makes sense. In the small dev world it's kinda the opposite. Linuxy servers beget Mac dev machines, so AD is mostly out, leaving Apple enterprise stuff (shitty) or Google (OK, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft). GDocs becomes the lowest common denominator and many people don't have Word anymore. Data is either cloud native (json, csv) or else imported into Gsheets. I suspect some of this is due to the modern educational pipeline too, with gsuite (or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called these days) producing a generation of young workers who grew up on that stuff. It's caused quite a generation gap at my current workplace, where the older workers use Microsoft and the younger ones use Google and stuff keeps getting converted back and forth. And once in a while someone sends a PDF and both sides go nooooo...
Nextgrid 5y ago
Could you name any major websites/apps that break in Firefox but not in Chrome?
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Not, not any big ones, but I've seen a lot of Firefox specific bugs for smaller sites in the last 2 or 3 years. I've had to debug Firefox issues for my coworkers more than anything else. Sometimes Safari breaks too but that's important because of iOS. Firefox is only used by the ideologues and we don't bother officially supporting it anymore...
- dspillett 5y ago
  I found Amazon unstable on FF for a while a few years ago, it would randomly go off and spin the CPU or eat a pile of RAM, sometimes recovering and sometimes needing to be killed. It was one of the things that pushed me towards using Chrome more. Chrome has since started to have a few issues (occasionally dying and not remembering a chunk of my open tabs being the big recent one) so I'm starting to move back the other way ATM.
- Qem 5y ago
  M$ teams web doesn't work in Firefox. I was forced to install Chromium under Kubuntu just to use teams at work, as I avoid to install the crappy full teams application like the plague, given it is proprietary, resource heavy and tries to auto-launch whenever it can.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    > crappy full teams application like the plague, given it is proprietary, resource heavy and tries to auto-launch whenever it can. Sounds like they ported over all the best features from Skype! ;)

raxxorrax 5y ago

I couldn't name you a single webapp that requires Chrome and it wouldn't fit our quality p expectations and would get booted. Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE. Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones.

spicybright 5y ago
Small business/government sites in the US sadly are very guilty of breaking. Esp. for payments, which makes me feel like I'm back in the late 90's with form submissions... I use chrome for important stuff for that reason.
technobabbler 5y ago
> Apps that require a certain browser will cause problems in the future or force Chrome to become IE. It already has, sadly. > Can you centrally administrate Google accounts? Because employees certainly aren't allowed to use their privat ones. Yes, definitely. For non Microsoft shops, Google is a very common option (eg academia).
jhasse 5y ago
WhatsApp Web was Chrome only for quite some time. From personal experience I know that Teams definitely has some Firefox-only bugs.

thrower123 5y ago

What large companies use GMail like that? Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.

technobabbler 5y ago
People still use Microsoft? My experience is largely in small medium biz and academia, both of which use a lot of Google. I haven't seen a Microsoft shop in decades. But that's just my own limited spheres of work. (edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)
- SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
  It depends heavily on the industry, but in my experience the vast majority of the business world runs on Microsoft products. For a lot of businesses (think more accountants or law firms than devs), Outlook, Excel and Word are must-haves. That means Windows is a must-have. That means if you don't have the supporting infrastructure (Azure or Active Directory) then administration becomes a nightmare, so those are a must-have. And at that point, since everything else is Microsoft, Teams gets used for comms and OneDrive gets used for filesharing.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    That makes sense. In the small dev world it's kinda the opposite. Linuxy servers beget Mac dev machines, so AD is mostly out, leaving Apple enterprise stuff (shitty) or Google (OK, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft). GDocs becomes the lowest common denominator and many people don't have Word anymore. Data is either cloud native (json, csv) or else imported into Gsheets. I suspect some of this is due to the modern educational pipeline too, with gsuite (or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called these days) producing a generation of young workers who grew up on that stuff. It's caused quite a generation gap at my current workplace, where the older workers use Microsoft and the younger ones use Google and stuff keeps getting converted back and forth. And once in a while someone sends a PDF and both sides go nooooo...

Nextgrid 5y ago

Could you name any major websites/apps that break in Firefox but not in Chrome?

technobabbler 5y ago
Not, not any big ones, but I've seen a lot of Firefox specific bugs for smaller sites in the last 2 or 3 years. I've had to debug Firefox issues for my coworkers more than anything else. Sometimes Safari breaks too but that's important because of iOS. Firefox is only used by the ideologues and we don't bother officially supporting it anymore...
dspillett 5y ago
I found Amazon unstable on FF for a while a few years ago, it would randomly go off and spin the CPU or eat a pile of RAM, sometimes recovering and sometimes needing to be killed. It was one of the things that pushed me towards using Chrome more. Chrome has since started to have a few issues (occasionally dying and not remembering a chunk of my open tabs being the big recent one) so I'm starting to move back the other way ATM.
Qem 5y ago
M$ teams web doesn't work in Firefox. I was forced to install Chromium under Kubuntu just to use teams at work, as I avoid to install the crappy full teams application like the plague, given it is proprietary, resource heavy and tries to auto-launch whenever it can.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  > crappy full teams application like the plague, given it is proprietary, resource heavy and tries to auto-launch whenever it can. Sounds like they ported over all the best features from Skype! ;)