Re:You probably don't want to run Firefox Nightly any more
by paulryanrogers on Friday March 23, 2018 @08:24AM
(#16657230)
> There's also sites that "only work on Chrome" just like they once "only worked on IE".
IMO, this is the heart of the matter. And the only evidence I've seen that Google is pushing that agenda is their "works better with Chrome" and bundling campaigns.
But even if Google didn't do that the problem of only-works-with websites would likely remain because of website makers. Supporting only one browser is cheaper. And it's likely there will always be one dominant browser.
My guess is the only way a responsible yet massively popular browser could prevent the only-works-with problem would be to drop the user agent identifiers. Long term it may even need to sometimes spoof behaviors of its competition. Of course Google being the dominant search crawler they could also use that to leverage a more standardized and interoperable web.
IMO, this is the heart of the matter. And the only evidence I've seen that Google is pushing that agenda is their "works better with Chrome" and bundling campaigns.
But even if Google didn't do that the problem of only-works-with websites would likely remain because of website makers. Supporting only one browser is cheaper. And it's likely there will always be one dominant browser.
My guess is the only way a responsible yet massively popular browser could prevent the only-works-with problem would be to drop the user agent identifiers. Long term it may even need to sometimes spoof behaviors of its competition. Of course Google being the dominant search crawler they could also use that to leverage a more standardized and interoperable web.