> point is it shouldn't take nine years to fix an app-breaking bug

It depends on priorities, obviously. That bug was fixed in various cases that were most-commonly hit (e.g. translate-only transforms) much earlier than now. Fixing it in the scale case more or less required completely rewriting how <select> is implemented, and there was always other stuff that needed to get done that was a bigger problem in practice.

I'm not saying this is good, obviously; it would be great if there were more people working on Gecko bugs and triage were not so critical. But there weren't and it was. I'm sorry that it's caused you problems; I'll see if I can get some progress to happen on the option label thing.

> Could you specify some issues you ran into on Chrome that affected user space this directly

Off the top of my head, https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=352144 is a pretty glaring CSS layout bug. Is that direct enough?

Or how about https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=269500 which has been around forever (it existed in WebKit long before Chrome was even announced)?

Or https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=353580

Or https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=286672

Note that all these bugs were filed in the WebKit bug system for a while before I went and refiled them in the Blink bug system after Blink forked off from WebKit. So they are much older than the dates you see on those reports.

Firefox is a lot older so obviously the issues are also a lot older.

You can find the oldest unfixed bugs for Chromium here (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?can=2&q=&so...).

A lot of those issues are from 2008 (that's when Google Chrome launched) and hence means that have been there since the beginning and most of them affect user interaction.

Throwing dirt doesn't help anyone. If you have the skills and time, contribute a browser of your choice.

I'm not expecting Firefox to be perfect, nor do I think it's a particularly bad browser. I'm specifically trying to point out why web devs are generally accepting of Chrome's dominance when they previously rebelled so hard against IE. The answer is it's not monoculture that's the problem, it's the quality of the technology the monoculture is based on -- and I think it's clear that Chrome is by far the best modern browser to develop against. I don't think you'll find anything in that bug list that's even close to the severity of a missing feature that's supported in every other browser as far back as IE8.

> I don't think you'll find anything in that bug list that's even close to the severity of a missing feature that's supported in every other browser

You mean like not supporting high-contrast themes on Windows, literally the first thing on the list at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=92 ? Not a problem for web devs obviously, just for users, which I guess is partly your point.

Or https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2016 which is about XHR not providing progress notifications properly and at filing time was working correctly in Firefox 3 and IE 7?

Or the lack of sane text rendering behavior, having to at best opt into ligature support, if you can get them at all, etc? That's something they finally fixed recently, after 8+ years of it being a problem.

Or missing MathML support? Granted, some other browsers are pretty bad on this too.

Seriously, there's lots of stuff Chrome couldn't and can't do that other browsers can do. They're just much better (not least due to spending way more money on it) at steering web devs to never try the things Chrome is bad at and focus on the things the Chrome dev team has been focusing on...

> I don't think you'll find anything in that bug list that's even close to the severity of a missing feature that's supported in every other browser as far back as IE8.

Yes, you will. Take the border-collapse bug I mentioned: it doesn't affect other engines, to my knowledge. Border-collapse goes back to, like, IE5.

That's not even in the same league as either of the Firefox issues I've referenced. The first is actually app-breaking (in our case users couldn't see any of the select options) the second is just plain IE-level of stubbornness. I'm not saying Chrome is perfectly immaculate, just trying to explain why it's so popular among the dev community in a way FF/IE are not.