Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.
My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.
I've heard this before...
Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.
But also - it's not high up the priority list given Firefox's marketshare. In most cases, you'll get the support by default, but I don't really see many US managers being tasked with allocating resources to support UC browser, or Opera, and those are both in the same space marketshare-wise.
My management is actively discussing EOLing several Firefox products because we have basically no real paying customers on them, and Mozilla is unpleasant to deal with in the extension space (genuinely - https://www.neowin.net/news/ublock-origin-lite-maker-ends-fi...)
I recently finished a 7 year stint at a company where I was CTO. I always made it clear that we needed to be testing functionality in more than just Chrome because, apart from anything else, a good chunk of our users would be on mobile, and many of those on iOS (i.e., using Safari). I used Firefox as my main browser for probably 4 - 5 of those 7 years, and I suggested engineers do the same because it tends to hew closer to web standards than Chrome does (meaning that if it works in Firefox it'll almost certainly work in Chrome, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold). That gradually bled through the development team, with a number of the engineers using Firefox as their main browser. That's really all it needs is a few people using it for their day to day work.
I made the change on principle because I could see the way the wind was blowing and - even then - Google were doing plenty of things I didn't like. I like to think that influenced the team as well but, reality check, they probably did it to avoid me moaning at them about bugs running in Firefox all the time.
What I have seen is developers do it wrong to start, then tasks to fix it get low priority due to market share based priority.
The basic mechanic is that the off brand browser has to work hard to be compatible whereas the dominant browser works hard to be incompatible. If you develop Firefox first (have some really ideological devs) you'll find Chrome related bugs eat up 1% of your time if that. If you develop Chrome first you'll find supporting other browsers is a bear.
(In the early 2000's when IE was dominant I was afraid it wouldn't be possible to browse the web with Linux. I worked at a library that would have deployed Sun Rays as public computers if we could get Mozilla to compile on Solaris but we couldn't, even with the help of Sun support. I developed Mozilla-first and then Firefox-first and helped keep the flame alive back then.)
The system I work on now works on both because I develop Firefox-first. There's one screen that loads up 40,000 rows (crazy you say?) worth of data that performs fine on Chrome and is laggy on Firefox, but otherwise the site spins like a top on both of those. Once in a while we run into a serious headscratcher on mobile Safari that burns up some dev*weeks.
Firefox's performance engineers are eager for bug reports! You can record a performance profile [1] and file a performance bug report in Bugzilla [2]. It helps if the slow page is accessible to Firefox engineers for testing, but your performance profile is a big head start.
[1] https://profiler.firefox.com/
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp...
At the time I hadn't thought to go back to tech support and ask somebody there to simply try it with Firefox. Then Verizon would have been pointing fingers at themselves.
Any Verizon developers here? I'd love to know the real story.
Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa).
For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in unison. Until then, developers (should) keep track of whether the syntax they're using is supported by all major browsers. Or, develop just for Chrome, which seems to be favored by most.
As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at first (e.g., uBlock Origin) but, after trying various workarounds, I realised the site would only work in Chrome. It’s not OK.