Sorry but requiring web devs to ignore the last 4~5 years of progress is just unacceptable.

Not that that would fix the situation, there are still rendering inconsistencies between browsers when using stuff like margins floats and tables.

"requiring web devs to ignore the last 4~5 years of progress is just unacceptable."

But this it not for "web devs", but for general UI development on desktops. Given some conventions there are decades old 4-5 years does not sound very ancient in comparison. And for desktop you probably want to trade bleeding edge hotness for tested and tried methods anyway. 4-5 years on desktop is a very brief span of time.

Then do as I: develop in Firefox and if it works there (and isn't a PWA where maybe you get in trouble with Safari?) then it works everywhere.

Less testing, less bugs. Whats not to like?

Contrast to Chrome first developers who often get caught by cross browsers incompatibilities just like they did back in the days when they were IE first developers : )

This is absolutely not true. I wrote a simple flexbox layout in Firefox last year and it was majorly broken when I tried to test it on Chrome, since Firefox and Chrome disagreed on how to compute "min-width" for inline images and other replaced content. In this case, my layout worked in Firefox, but Chrome was the browser that was following the CSS standard correctly, and my code was broken.

There’s plenty of weird cruft in Firefox’s ~30 year old codebase that causes bugs and unspecified behavior. For example, Firefox’s ContentEditable code deletes things “backwards” compared to all other browsers and operating systems (bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735608) - this behavior isn’t standardized in any spec, and Firefox is different from other browsers.

There are plenty of gotchas in layout/rendering as well, where either the standard is under specified, or Firefox has some small bugs. Maybe Chrome has many-chrome only APIs, but the developer will always need to test in Chrome and iOS Safari 13 (or whatever your oldest supported iOS version is).

Chrome and iOS are where the users are, and a good website or app should be usable and beautiful for everyone.

Developing UI components based on ContentEditable is trial and error, with a lot of code held together by cross-browser integration tests where you always have to pray that a browser upgrade doesn't brake something new in a subtle and surprising way...

1/5, would not recommend. (But sometimes there's no way around it.)

> There’s plenty of weird cruft in Firefox’s ~30 year old codebase that causes bugs and unspecified behavior.

Just wondering where you're getting "30 years" from?

That asked, a Chrome-shaped monoculture doesn't help anybody. We need more competing implementations, not less. Anyone feel like collaborating on such?

Netscape was founded in 1994, Firefox is derived from Gecko (1997) layout code code open-sourced from Netscape in 1998. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) for some background. I was thinking 1994 when I wrote the comment, but it’s closer to ~25 years if you reckon from Gecko’s birth year of 1997.

Are you casually asking if anyone wants to start writing a rendering engine?

> Contrast to Chrome first developers who often get caught by cross browsers incompatibilities just like they did back in the days when they were IE first developers : )

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this statement (and comparison to IE). If anything, Safari is "the new IE" rather than Chrome.

MOST (hopefully the nitpickers pick up the caps lock) stuff in Chrome are drafts or standards.

Sure, Google pioneered/championed some of them, but that's kinda irrelevant if developers voted for those features. There's very little Chrome-specific stuff.

Also, other browsers have vendor specific stuff in them too, yet people rarely fling shit in their direction?

FWIW I also mostly use Firefox for dev because I prefer how some devtool features are designed/implemented.

Most of my cross browser issues in FF were "brief" in the senses that they were bugs that got fixed eventual.

> I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this statement (and comparison to IE). If anything, Safari is "the new IE" rather than Chrome.

Some people who either don't know history or willfully ignores it keeps claiming that Safari is the new IE, at one point one even made a webside out of it.

Don't fall for it.

Chrome is the new IE:

- technologically advanced? Check!

- implement a number of things without asking or waiting for consensus? Check!

- will be abandoned as soon as they have crushed every competitor? Well, it is produced by the worlds most famous company when it comes to killing its own software.

I can't believe you seriously just suggested Google is going to abandon Chrome.

Next up, Microsoft is going to abandon Word. Also, Facebook is going to abandon Facebook. This is why no one takes these conversations seriously. All vitriol, no substance.

I wouldn’t be shocked to see MS abandon Word or Facebook (erm Meta) abandon Facebook in the same sense Google would abandon Chrome.

Sure, some piece of software will have that name, but it won’t be aggressively developed like MS abandoned IE a few times.

I also won’t be shocked if Word or Facebook are like Edge where it’s a new different thing with an old name.

IE still had released, but it stopped moving forward after 6 because there was no longer a good reason for ms to invest.

I doubt google would spend much on chrome if no other browser were popular.

But chromium is opensource. Even if google stop devoting to chrome, we can develop it. In fact, I think Mozilla should turn to chromium too like Microsoft, just be aware of keeping the licence open.

Dear Mozilla:

Fork Chromium.

Love, Your Old Users

I do this too, but still run into issues with Safari. Luckily, later Safari 14 versions and Safari 15 are not too bad.

Unless I'm missing something that doesn't fixes the issue, the problem is symmetrical, browser A is different than browser B, so browser B is different than browser A, testing in either of them doesn't guarantee a correct output in both of them.

Chrome - like IE before it - has a number of "features" that only work/ed in Chrome/IE.

Writing for a standards compliant browser like Firefox makes your code more well defined today just as it did back then because you won't get away with the same sloppyness. (This also makes you catch and fix problems in early iterations over the problem instead of after QA calls to complain so it saves you time and context switching too and if you are good you might look like a cross browser superhero almost for free ;-)

Earlier on not every basic thing was supported everywhere, many people here will remember the ACID tests. Younger devs won't remember them as we stopped talking about them after every browser became compliant. Today every mainstream browser has comprehensive test suites to cover everything we need from CSS I think.

Testing on ~~Chrome~~ Firefox would save you from accidentally using Chrome-only features, but that's only part of the problem, caniuse.com kinda works better for that as you get data about other browsers too.

>Testing on Chrome would save you from accidentally using Chrome-only features, but that's only part of the problem,

How?

> caniuse.com kinda works better for that as you get data about other browsers too.

caniuse.com is nice but unlike using a standards compliant browser it requires you to be mentally alert and aware of it.

Using a standards compliant browser means you'll see the result of sloppy css immediately on the screen.

>>Testing on Chrome would save you from accidentally using Chrome-only features, but that's only part of the problem, >How?

Sorry I meant "Firefox" and "Chrome-only" there.

In general though it's not like Firefox is spec compliant and others aren't, pretty much every browser works a little different in some areas. Just for the sake of saying something verifiable: no browser is spec compliant because the spec mandates a precise maximum length for strings and each main browser has a different, arbitrary (= I have the RAM, they just won't let me use it), lower limit on that.

> Sorry but requiring web devs to ignore the last 4~5 years of progress is just unacceptable.

No it's not. "Web dev" is one of the things in my toolbox and I still clicked on this well-knowing it was likely not truly cross-platform and keeping up with bleeding-edge features.

Truth is all development is about tradeoffs and Electron is one heck of a blob to ship to users... in a lot of applications a lighter weight artifact may be desirable where the trade off of the last 4-5 years of browser advancements may be perfectly OK.

Is it unacceptable? Sure - if your application needs features out of the last 4-5 years of browser advancements... but that's not most applications. If you need a bleeding-edge solution that's truly cross-platform then Electron clearly still is your choice as you're just shipping around a fancied up Chromium.

The last 4-5 years of "progress" have been pretty unacceptable.

But you won't be developing a web app, you'd be developing a desktop app, much like with React Native.

Having web developers learn C++ and Qt instead would be much more unacceptable.

By this logic requiring web devs to write ES3 code should be acceptable too.

The platform changed significantly, improved significantly, in the past few years, some of these major advancements can't be ignored just because a browser doesn't implement them.

Nope, you can compile code back to whatever ECMAScript version you like with tools like Babel or TypeScript. So the devs don’t even notice that they’re compiling to 4-5 year old ES.

That's actually not true in general, tell me how to compile Proxy and regex lookarounds to ES5 or whatever version that doesn't support these features. In fact tell me how to polyfill these features in any way at all.

There's a proxy polyfill. And if you really wanted there's at least one pcre2 wasm build you could wrap to make a polyfill, lol. Barely anyone uses lookahead/lookbehind even in pcre, though.

Proxy polyfill: assuming you are referring to this [0], since I haven't seen anything else like this, then I'll paste here what the readme says:

> The polyfill supports just a limited number of proxy 'traps'. It also works by calling seal on the object passed to Proxy. This means that the properties you want to proxy must be known at creation time.

i.e. that's not a polyfill for Proxy. It's a polyfill for a subset of the thing, maybe that's useful for somebody, but it's useless for the use cases I had for Proxy so far.

Shipping an entire regex engine with your app: right, that's the only way to do something like that. Not that that's actually the same thing though, I can't just load this and use lookarounds as normal, i.e. it's not a polyfill.

For all practical purposes these features are not polyfillable. If your idea of a polyfill includes not actually polyfilling the entire thing or shipping an entire engine with your app then sure, anything is polyfillable, you could even run Java in the browser.

[0]: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/proxy-polyfill

>Shipping an entire regex engine with your app: right, that's the only way to do something like that.

You mean like shipping an entire 100+ MB browser and rendering engine with your app?

Electron does not weigh 300+ MB for starter, and one means basically statically linking your app so that it ships with its own dependencies and works more consistently, while the other means shipping a language because the one you have to use is not implemented properly by the platform, pretty different things when you look at them. I'll give you though that in both cases you are shipping a big engine with your app, so it kinda sounds like the same thing.

What advancements do you have in mind?

A lot got released in the past 4/5 years. I don't have a list of favorites off the top of my mind. Many useful things got shipped though.