So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it.
That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail.
Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk.
This is how empires fall.
Chrome is being used on the browser (with a mobile footprint Microsoft never had), the desktop (VS Code, Slack, etc), and v8 is driving a substantial part of the web's backend (Node). Even the smaller use case of web scraping is moving towards Puppeteer.
I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.
And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall.
Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google.
The authors of pages you see perform better in Chrome are indeed not building for the web but rather building for Chrome.
Develop for Chrome first, all other browsers second. Why worry if other browsers don't work when the solution is "download our desktop Electron application :)"
And I have had a few experiences with sites not loading properly in the last few months. Try windy.com for example: on FF 90 with no extensions enabled and tracking protection on 'balanced' I get blue and yellow banding on the map, and the wind gusts graphics fail to load properly. I have reported a few of these instances in the past, but a lot of the time I'd rather just switch to chromium temporarily and continue with what I'm doing.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec...
I do wonder if every user would be aware that the 'Allow site to extract canvas data?' popup can break site functionality though -- its not as though there's a warning to that effect in browser.
A hassle but well worth it to avoid touching Chrome ;-)
But it turns out the difference was the I was running ublock-origin in Firefox and sometimes that was causing issues for some sites..
For me there is - in addition to not wanting to support Chrome - still a few things that Firefox does better.
As for websites that only support Chrome I consider them broken which means I don't use them or if I have to I try to notify the operator.
When you have the time, you should note it here: https://webcompat.com/
At least chromium is open source. The best we can hope is maybe that organizations adopting chromium other than Google can wield more influence over it.
As I point out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222818 human language is not precise enough to write good specifications. Natural language words are polysemic and contextual. See the meaning of "break" for example: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break
Kolmogrov showed that fully specified information distills down to computer programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
The ideal language for a specification might be a mix of natural language and code with a test suit, something like Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or its descendants along with modern pull request based discussions that are tied to version controlled code.
I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
> At least chromium is open source.
That source code is 12-15 million lines of code. They implement literally thousands of specs. Chrome adds 40-70 new web APIs [1] with each release which happen roughly once every 40 days and contain god knows how many code changes.
Good luck deducing "precise specs" from that.
> I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core
That would mean cementing Google's monopoly of the web.
Exactly, it's impossible to describe that in human language which doesn't have precise enough semantics. That's why the spec has to be in code, in the form of a reference implementation and/or test suit.
The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
On the contrary, this implements specs that are defined in a human language. For example, the full semantics of rendering HTML were standardised with HTML5, and now all browsers render HTML the same way.
The problem isn't the human language. The problem is the sheer number of these specs. Hundreds, if not thousands.
However, good luck understanding these specs by reading code or unit tests (and yes, there's a multitude of tests [1]). How do you know what a piece of code encodes? Or a test tests? You really propose to reverse engineer behaviour from code?
Example: here's a test: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/html/s...
What exactly does it test? Why? Is this a correct test for this behaviour? Care to pinpoint the exact precise location of this spec in Google Chrome's code? [2] It's only 12 or so million lines of code, should be easy to find.
> The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
By doing what exactly?
Is this sarcasm? Writing web apps that work the same across browsers is still the most painful part of web development. The underspecified natural language specs lead to subtly different behaviors in different browsers.
Full specs of a complex systems are very complex.
It's not. How HTML is rendered was literally not defined between browsers until mid-00s. Hence the difference in the boxing model, for example.
Bt yes, besides HTML there are hundreds of other specs, and those may or may not be implemented across browsers.
> The underspecified natural language specs lead to subtly different behaviors in different browsers.
You keep saying this, and I don't think you even understand what you're saying.
> Full specs of a complex systems are very complex.
Yes, they are. What you keep proposing though, is to reverse engineer behaviour from millions of lines of code. I'm still waiting for an answer to my question about datalistoptions test.
The technical blueprints are as important than the natural language notes in the blueprints. In software, code is blueprint.
Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.
You forgot mobile, iOS users are big chunk of it and websites want to work on iOS browsers.
IE11 is going EOL "soon" and at that point Safari is really going to be the odd one out. Chromium and Firefox are at least _mostly_ consistent with each other, save for when Chromium adds some crazy new feature that's nonstandard (but at that point only niche websites are usually using the new feature).
I would say as a Chrome developer then.
Being IE only made life a lot easier.
Same today. Some people think it is OK to test only in Chrome. That lets one get away with a lot of bad habits.
Dealing with different browsers is part of what makes one a competent web developer.
I do deal with different browsers, hence why I get headaches from Safari. If I didn't, I wouldn't complain about it.
I've been a web developer for a long long time. I know what a pain IE was, and I'm just experiencing it all over again with Safari, although they've gotten better lately.
Specially since Microsoft has always been on the same boat as Google, remember that such kind of features go back to Active Desktop.
Additionally, everyone pushing Electron apps is basically contributing to Chrome market share.
I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same.
The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).
I strongly disagree with this statement. My opinion is that it's the opposite.
I always get sad when I think about modern Firefox. I loved Firefox dearly before the transition, and I tried really hard to love it after the transition, too. But it failed me and lost much of what I loved about it. Then every subsequent release was just a little worse, excising more of what made Firefox great.
Eventually, I just had to give up on it.
Apple stopped developing Safari for Windows nine years ago.
Safari is a hard sell when one can't install an ad-blocker on it (work on the street is you can but not easily)
Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffers specially when using Google websites.