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It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main b

It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful. As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.

theshrike79 2y ago
> Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome I've heard this before... Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Developers will always be time crunched / lazy. Why target multiple platforms when you can just support one?
  - basilgohar 2y ago
    This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.
    - rileymat2 2y ago
      I have never had a manager that said “don’t make it work for firefox”. What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        I had one who did say "don't make it work for firefox" but he was the only one. The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear. (In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.) The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
        assimpleaspossi 2y ago
        This is why I always develop to web standards and not to any browser. You follow the web standards and then check to see which browsers do it right. Then adjust for that browser if necessary.
        cpeterso 2y ago
        > There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox Firefox's performance engineers are eager for bug reports! You can record a performance profile [1] and file a performance bug report in Bugzilla [2]. It helps if the slow page is accessible to Firefox engineers for testing, but your performance profile is a big head start. [1] https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/ [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=Performance&bug_type=defect https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...
      - doctor_radium 2y ago
        Early fall 2023 it certainly feels like I caught Verizon discriminating against Firefox. It was a CSS issue in their payment portal where some information wasn't rendering as a DHTML popup but at the bottom of the page. You could still pay your bill, but to an untrained eye it looked broken. I reported it and was sent to "Executive Custom Service", which would never acknowledge the problem. They would call once a week and make some statements like the problem was on my side and they couldn't reproduce it at all, to which my BS meter kept responding "I don't believe you." After several weeks of this, the issue mysteriously disappeared one Saturday morning, with no further word to me. I'd also complained to my state PUC (this was a landline bill) and think the added pressure helped convince them to do the right thing, even though the PUC has no online jurisdiction. At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves. Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.
        cpeterso 2y ago
        Aggressive ad blockers are often the cause of many “site doesn’t work in Firefox” issues. When the Firefox user then loads the site in Chrome, it works because the user doesn’t have an ad blocker installed in Chrome (because they don’t typically use Chrome) or their ad blocker hasn’t updated its blocklists recently.
    - horsawlarway 2y ago
      I agree that this is a "management problem" in the sense that if you want to support Firefox, you should allocate resources for testing on Firefox. But also - it's not high up the priority list given Firefox's marketshare. In most cases, you'll get the support by default, but I don't really see many US managers being tasked with allocating resources to support UC browser, or Opera, and those are both in the same space marketshare-wise. My management is actively discussing EOLing several Firefox products because we have basically no real paying customers on them, and Mozilla is unpleasant to deal with in the extension space (genuinely - https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-firefox-store-support-slams-mozilla-for-hostile-reviews/ https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-fi...)
      - bartread 2y ago
        You're right, although you'd probably find that in many shops developers have the latitude to use Firefox off their own initiative if they so chose. I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work. I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
  - samuellavoie90 2y ago
    The goal of a standard is to not be forced to code specific things for each implementation out there. This is failure of the web standards that the google implementation has become the standard.
    - cj 2y ago
      We have web standards, but one area they breakdown is adoption of those standards. Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa). For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in unison. Until then, developers (should) keep track of whether the syntax they're using is supported by all major browsers. Or, develop just for Chrome, which seems to be favored by most.
      - pkasting 2y ago
        We vendors disagree about the relative value of different standards. Adopting at different times makes life harder on web devs, but it also seems like the only route forward. Do you want any one vendor to be able to force the others to implement something they disagree with, or (vice versa) to have veto power?
      - int_19h 2y ago
        Part of the problem is that so many web standards these days are basically an officially blessed repackaging of what Chrome is already doing.
PaulHoule 2y ago
For years I have used Firefox as my daily driver, anything I work on works on Firefox. Maybe once a year my tester finds a problem w/ Chrome, if that. Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
- phkahler 2y ago
  >> Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by. Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.
mrweasel 2y ago
To some extend this is also down to developer having to stop trying to be clever. I can understand having something look a little weird, maybe not align 100% correctly, but how to you actively go about building something like an e-commerce site that doesn't work in Firefox? My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
gorhill 2y ago
I randomly browsed the site with Firefox stable and I couldn't see any obvious malfunction. What exactly is not working? Is there a specific webpage where the malfunction can be seen?
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
rei.com generally continues to have issues with firefox. Completely absurd.
- cptskippy 2y ago
  I've never noticed any issues and I use Firefox as my daily driver.
- 0xffff2 2y ago
  What issues specifically? I'm a long time REI customer and a long time (since it was called Firebird) Firefox user, and I've never encountered any issues.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    It may be interactions with ublock origin. On Chrome, I only have adblock plus. However, disabling UBO on Firefox does not fix the problems. The most obvious one right now: blank page after login.

theshrike79 2y ago

> Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome I've heard this before... Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.

ethbr1 2y ago
Developers will always be time crunched / lazy. Why target multiple platforms when you can just support one?
- basilgohar 2y ago
  This is a management problem, not a developer problem. Yes, developers should advocate, but it's not the developers' burden to make time out of thin air.
  - rileymat2 2y ago
    I have never had a manager that said “don’t make it work for firefox”. What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      I had one who did say "don't make it work for firefox" but he was the only one. The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear. (In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.) The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
      - assimpleaspossi 2y ago
        This is why I always develop to web standards and not to any browser. You follow the web standards and then check to see which browsers do it right. Then adjust for that browser if necessary.
      - cpeterso 2y ago
        > There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox Firefox's performance engineers are eager for bug reports! You can record a performance profile [1] and file a performance bug report in Bugzilla [2]. It helps if the slow page is accessible to Firefox engineers for testing, but your performance profile is a big head start. [1] https://profiler.firefox.com/ https://profiler.firefox.com/ [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&component=Performance&bug_type=defect https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...
    - doctor_radium 2y ago
      Early fall 2023 it certainly feels like I caught Verizon discriminating against Firefox. It was a CSS issue in their payment portal where some information wasn't rendering as a DHTML popup but at the bottom of the page. You could still pay your bill, but to an untrained eye it looked broken. I reported it and was sent to "Executive Custom Service", which would never acknowledge the problem. They would call once a week and make some statements like the problem was on my side and they couldn't reproduce it at all, to which my BS meter kept responding "I don't believe you." After several weeks of this, the issue mysteriously disappeared one Saturday morning, with no further word to me. I'd also complained to my state PUC (this was a landline bill) and think the added pressure helped convince them to do the right thing, even though the PUC has no online jurisdiction. At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves. Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.
      - cpeterso 2y ago
        Aggressive ad blockers are often the cause of many “site doesn’t work in Firefox” issues. When the Firefox user then loads the site in Chrome, it works because the user doesn’t have an ad blocker installed in Chrome (because they don’t typically use Chrome) or their ad blocker hasn’t updated its blocklists recently.
  - horsawlarway 2y ago
    I agree that this is a "management problem" in the sense that if you want to support Firefox, you should allocate resources for testing on Firefox. But also - it's not high up the priority list given Firefox's marketshare. In most cases, you'll get the support by default, but I don't really see many US managers being tasked with allocating resources to support UC browser, or Opera, and those are both in the same space marketshare-wise. My management is actively discussing EOLing several Firefox products because we have basically no real paying customers on them, and Mozilla is unpleasant to deal with in the extension space (genuinely - https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-firefox-store-support-slams-mozilla-for-hostile-reviews/ https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-fi...)
    - bartread 2y ago
      You're right, although you'd probably find that in many shops developers have the latitude to use Firefox off their own initiative if they so chose. I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work. I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
- samuellavoie90 2y ago
  The goal of a standard is to not be forced to code specific things for each implementation out there. This is failure of the web standards that the google implementation has become the standard.
  - cj 2y ago
    We have web standards, but one area they breakdown is adoption of those standards. Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa). For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in unison. Until then, developers (should) keep track of whether the syntax they're using is supported by all major browsers. Or, develop just for Chrome, which seems to be favored by most.
    - pkasting 2y ago
      We vendors disagree about the relative value of different standards. Adopting at different times makes life harder on web devs, but it also seems like the only route forward. Do you want any one vendor to be able to force the others to implement something they disagree with, or (vice versa) to have veto power?
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Part of the problem is that so many web standards these days are basically an officially blessed repackaging of what Chrome is already doing.

PaulHoule 2y ago

For years I have used Firefox as my daily driver, anything I work on works on Firefox. Maybe once a year my tester finds a problem w/ Chrome, if that. Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.

phkahler 2y ago
>> Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by. Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.

mrweasel 2y ago

To some extend this is also down to developer having to stop trying to be clever. I can understand having something look a little weird, maybe not align 100% correctly, but how to you actively go about building something like an e-commerce site that doesn't work in Firefox? My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.

gorhill 2y ago

I randomly browsed the site with Firefox stable and I couldn't see any obvious malfunction. What exactly is not working? Is there a specific webpage where the malfunction can be seen?

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago

rei.com generally continues to have issues with firefox. Completely absurd.

cptskippy 2y ago
I've never noticed any issues and I use Firefox as my daily driver.
0xffff2 2y ago
What issues specifically? I'm a long time REI customer and a long time (since it was called Firebird) Firefox user, and I've never encountered any issues.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  It may be interactions with ublock origin. On Chrome, I only have adblock plus. However, disabling UBO on Firefox does not fix the problems. The most obvious one right now: blank page after login.