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Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by athenot on Saturday March 26, 2016 @11:36AM (#11366011)
> I've learned the hard way that Chrome is the new IE.

I started having similar thoughts when seeing sites that require Chrome because they use some (admittedly awesome) new browser feature that's not yet standard. It's given me flashbacks to the days where people used ActiveX for some accessory feature out of "coolness" when they could have had a slightly less fancy site but which would work across browsers.

Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by TazeTSchnitzel on Saturday March 26, 2016 @12:58PM (#11366364)
It's not unusual to visit a site (often something neglected but really important, like a support website), and find it simply doesn't load in Firefox.

Then I open it in Chrome and it works. And it's clear which browser the developers tested the site against.

Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by kbrosnan on Saturday March 26, 2016 @03:01PM (#11366921)
When people come across such things please report them to https://webcompat.com/ There are some Firefox, IE and webdevs that work on understanding what is broken and trying to get sites to work cross browser.
Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by smeehee on Saturday March 26, 2016 @06:18PM (#11367712)
Sometimes, it's clear what minimum window size they've assumed. I know of one (bank login) which doesn't work well on a netbook due to this.

I tried to report the problem via the site feedback link which they helpfully provide in most of their page footers. It fails in Firefox but works fine in Chromium; I ended up reporting two problems reported instead of one.

Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by jimmaswell on Saturday March 26, 2016 @03:30PM (#11367055)
There have been extensions for Firefox that opened tabs in IE compatibility mode, which were needed occasionally in the past. I wonder if such a thing for chrome compatibility will end up having to be made. Hopefully not.
Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by bzbarsky on Saturday March 26, 2016 @04:45PM (#11367373)
It's even more common for sites to require Chrome because they use a prefixed version of something that _is_ a standard, but they just can't be bothered to use the standard version...
Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by panic on Saturday March 26, 2016 @06:38PM (#11367789)
Chrome doesn't use vendor prefixes for new features: http://www.chromium.org/blink#vendor-prefixes
Re:The Chrome Distortion: how Chrome negatively alters our e... by bzbarsky on Saturday March 26, 2016 @07:01PM (#11367883)
Yes, I know. But they have plenty of old features that they support prefixed versions of, and people often enough use those without the corresponding standard syntax. This means, of course, that Chrome can't drop their prefixed versions without breaking websites. As a result, Edge and Firefox are now implementing a bunch of prefixed stuff simply to be web compatible.

For a view of what's needed in real-world terms for compat with the web nowadays, see https://compat.spec.whatwg.org/