Fudging the user agent however, allows that website to work perfectly fine.

Not testing in IE is one thing. Presenting an nonintrusive message warning you don't test in IE is another. Paying money to advertise your website, then, when I click your link, greeting me with a condescending "IE Users are idiots" type message that doesn't let me proceed, doesn't make me buy your product.

I visited their website and was, like in a lot of cases where they assume ARMv7 means I must be using a mobile device, redirected to the mobile site.

That's not the stupid part, though (just annoying). These guys took it one step further and had their mobile website decide that I was in fact not on mobile, and then they proceeded to throw me into a redirect loop between the desktop and mobile site. Talk about messing up with browser detection.

I wrote an e-mail to report the issue to the people in charge of the site, and you know what they tell me? Oh, "we forwarded your message to our web developers but they said that this doesn't happen". Wow, ok, "this doesn't happen". Guess I must be hallucinating, then? Well, jokes on them 'cause if they hire people who break their website so that I can't check the opening hours, guess where I'll be shopping? Not at their store, that's for sure.

I have Chrome on my Surface. I choose to use Edge instead because Chrome is unusable without my Type Cover plugged in, and I'm not doing that while laying on the couch.

Hey Google, want me to use Chrome on my Surface? Then give me the Android version of Chrome running in a container. Phone UI, please.

Windows tablets were my only option. An Android tablet (or an iPad) might work fine in the car, but it would make a terrible laptop in the hotel room, and a conventional laptop would be unusable in the car.

After my road trip, my Surface found continued use as my couch computer, effectively replacing my phone. Honestly, as long as I have a web browser that works I don't need much else. Edge works; it might be more minimalistic than I like, but the vast majority of what I want to do with a computer on my couch is satisfied by Edge. Oh, and the Facebook app for Windows 10 is awesome. It's everything I've wanted out of the Android app, which has been a constant disappointment for me.

On the other side, developers can spend more time developing features instead of fixing IE compatibility bugs.

Pun intended? But seriously, whenever I see one of these browser-blockers (and it seems Opera gets hit too), I just leave the site and never come back. Chances are, your site is not unique and I'll find what I need somewhere else.

developers can spend more time developing features

IMHO, those are "features" which no one really cares about. Stop messing around with fancy CSS and JS, spend the time developing a simple site that almost naturally works in IE too.

I agree that targeting of Edge browsers is ridiculous since it's keep current, on the other hand for IE and if the site is non-commercial/personal (commercial sites should really try to be compatible on as many browsers as they can) I don't really blame them if they're wanting to use modern web standards. Microsoft has abandoned feature updates to IE, and sadly only made Edge available to W10 users.

Flexbox in CSS is one example. It was made to simplify the creation of page layouts and content flow and includes various features that were sought-after for a long-time that require hacky or more complex solutions otherwise. The majority of its bugs, or just plain missing features are found in IE10-11 (and absent completely in earlier versions). Either creators design the site to entirely compensate for IE and loose that flexibility (pun not intended), find some Javascript polyfill that actually works/fixes such bugs, or just present some message to users for unsupported browsers (not that it needs to necessarily block the page though). It's just one of several useful features that make things far easier but lacks full/partial/any support in IE.

https://github.com/mozilla/togetherjs/commit/ced91da4bb53bea...

Clue: what is the problem with this code?

I filed an issue on the Chromium bug tracker, they assigned someone to look into it, and of course, nothing has been said since.

To this day, and for years, I continue to receive these messages from Google sites informing me to upgrade to Chrome. I've even had them pop-up on Chromium.

Obviously, I don't have Chrome, since my issue is them pestering me to install Chrome. Which I'm not going to do.

On the other hand, if Google wants to prevent their reputation from sinking to the level of "install the Ask Toolbar", one of the Googlers on the Chromium bug tracker will see that it is dealt with.

A large web app is almost guaranteed to run into one of Firefox's many long-open bugs. But the biggest reason in my experience is performance. Gecko's rendering engine is poorly-optimized, to the point where I regularly see a DOM modification take 10ms in Chrome (easily within a single frame) and 1000ms in Firefox (locks the UI and causes the page to flash white).

(We have some enormous architectural changes inbound which should help, but I'd still love to make sure we have a test to prevent regressing)

Here's a product that I'm working on

https://www.ux-app.com/dev/editor?m=trial

In Chrome it's buttery smooth on any decent computer made in the past 5 or 6 years. In Firefox it's usable on a powerful computer, but notably worse than Chrome.

On an under powered laptop Chrome is still very usable, not quite 60fps, but probably 30-40fps on moderately complex designs.

Firefox is a choppy mess on low end hardware.

This is a recurring issue with Firefox. It's just ok for regular web browsing, and it's a hot mess for any web app that needs to do any moderately taxing DOM manipulation.

As much as I love Firefox, it's just leagues behind Chrome in regard to performance.

Having different browsers compete on things like this and then having the better technology become standardized and implemented in multiple browsers seems like a fairly positive outcome.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/21/microsoft_edge_exten...

You mean like when I spent 30 minutes figuring out that text area in chrome is counting new line as 1 letter and firefox is counting it as two ?

They should both count it as one now, for what it's worth.

By most measures, an equal or larger number of people use IE than Firefox.