Celebrate the web by using another browser than Google’s Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Celebrate the web by using another browser than Google’s Chrome

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121 pointsAngeloAnolin99 comments

I've happily used Firefox for over a decade now (since version 2.0). The web's changed a little since then, but I think Firefox has adapted well and has been the source of a lot of innovation. I've tried Chrome and other browsers, but never really thought much of them - but I'm very glad they exist! Variety is a great thing to have.

It's disheartening to see developers with the attitude that they only care about users using the same browser as them and it's been frustrating over the years to see services neglecting non-Chrome browsers (example: Netflix + Linux up until recently). What happened to cross-browser testing, progressive enhancement and other best practices?

> What happened to cross-browser testing, progressive enhancement and other best practices?

It is the responsibility of browser vendors to follow the spec, not of developers.

Otherwise, developers would have to test in 10+ different browsers every time they make a change in the code, which would mean madness (!)

Developers need to be aware of differences in browsers and implement their projects accordingly. Anything less is simply unprofessional.

Developers work on browsers, too. It's a two-way street.

Agree.

Just a few years ago this was a common understanding.

It was kind of the hard thing about web development.

If course today the hard thing about web development is to keep the build environment working :-P

I get this sort of thinking, but it assumes Chrome follows specs 100%. None of the browsers do that unless it is a very old spec with no recent changes.

There's WebKit, Gecko and whatever they're calling the engine that powers Edge. I don't see a reason to test 10+ browsers if most of them are using WebKit.

I think there's EdgeHTML for Edge (fork), Trident for IE. Isn't Chrome using a fork now? (Blink?)

Chrome and Opera use Blink, a fork of WebKit, which is itself a fork of KHTML.

> What happened to cross-browser testing, progressive enhancement and other best practices?

My opinion is that in the past, we'd start by throwing some HTML tags in a file and build up from there: adding images, CSS, JS, etc. to get the features we need.

These days we start by running `npm install latest-hotness` and disable what we don't want.

same for me, I switched to Chrome for maybe 1 week a bit after Chrome came out... but I came right back

This article is ahistorical - it was Firefox that first shook IE's dominance. Chrome took over the Firefox niche and finally claimed dominance because it ran so much better, while still meeting web standards.

I develop with Chrome not just because it's the least pain in the ass and has a good ecosystem of tools, but because it adheres to standards. I can't remember the last time I've made a page in Chrome and it didn't work in Firefox or even Edge. It's only weird, non-standard browsers I have to work around.

I've made lots that don't work in Safari though.

Firefox kept the fire burning but Chrome is what stirred Microsoft into action.

Chrome is creepy privacy invading software designed to help maintain Googles search monopoly.

Like Search, Chrome's quality is the honey and we are the flies.

You say "creepy privacy invading", I say hooked up to the only search engine worth a damn and providing trivially disabled features that actually save me time and pain.

If you start using DuckDuckGo for your searches, you can use different commands for different search platforms if you find the DDG results lacking (which I do many a times, depending on the topic/context). For example, !s would search Startpage [1] (a search engine that claims not to track but uses Google search internally), !g would search Google, !w would search Wikipedia, and so on. It takes maybe a few more seconds, but offers a lot of flexibility.

[1]: https://www.startpage.com

The Chrome monoculture among developers is concerning. It's something each and every developer should consider and actively combat by changing their primary browser. The open web cannot flourish when built on a monopoly

There is a reason why chrome has such a large market share and it's not because it's preinstalled. It's simply the best browser experience in many ways.

I'm not gonna dispute that. I've found that Firefox is an adequate replacement, however it is much more sluggish for certain sites specifically those that are javascript heavy.

Like David mentions it's not really about which is the best browser, but picking a browse that isn't chrome as favour to the open web. As a side effects you'll discover a lot of bugs that were likely to otherwise be missed in both your products and others'.

The Chrome monoculture among developers can easily cause a negative spiral were websites aren't tested in other browsers causing users of those browsers to be discontent with the browser and switch away from it likely to Chrome which will work. It's this exact behaviour that contributed to the IE6 situation.

> The Chrome monoculture among developers can easily cause a negative spiral were websites aren't tested in other browsers

If what browser developers prefer to use has a significant influence on testing of anything other than experimental prototype / proof-of-concept work, the problem that needs to be addressed is testing practices, not developer browser choices.

Trying to fix it with the latter won't work, it will just make different projects having different improper testing biases, which will make the web broken in all browsers instead of just non-Chrome browsers.

> If what browser developers prefer to use has a significant influence on testing of anything other than experimental prototype / proof-of-concept work, the problem that needs to be addressed is testing practices, not developer browser choices.

I don't disagree that testing practice as far as cross browser testing isn't quite where it should be. However changing testing practices is a harder problem than creating diversification in developer teams. When I switched from Chrome to Firefox in my team I shifted the balance from 10 people using Chrome to 9 people using Chrome and 1 using Firefox. Running Firefox often surfaces problems in both our product and in those of other people.

> Trying to fix it with the latter won't work, it will just make different projects having different improper testing biases, which will make the web broken in all browsers instead of just non-Chrome browsers.

Striving for a diverse set of browsers used in any developer team helps, but tackling the testing biases is important. At a larger scale reducing the share of Chrome users on the web is a good in itself.

I am gonna dispute that. Chrome is bloated and inextensible.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions ?

The kind Firefox will only have in a release or two?

Firefox is just as bloated but at least it's extensible (for now.) Web "extensions" are Firefox' suicide.

Seems like it's impossible for a modern desktop browser not to be "bloated" considering all the crap they need to support.

"bloated" is arbitrarily defined.

No it isn't. Does your web browser do more than browse web pages? Then it's bloated. When you can log in your browser, start asking questions.

Edit: saw you wrote "in many ways behind". Not sure if it was there all the time or not, if it was the I apologize for my lack of reading skills and the rest of you are free to ignore this comment :-/

And because people tell this story to each other and believe it.

Now tell me:

If it is "simply the best", since when is tree style tabs available?

And if it is "simply the best", since when did it start handling multiple hundreds of tabs well?

If not, can we then agree that it is very good and the one you and a number of others prefer, not "simply the best"?

If not, should we also have a discussion about what car brand is "simply the best"?

I switched to Brave for a week and had to go back because the plugin ecosystem is pretty much nonexistent at this point.

I switched to Firefox for another couple of weeks and had to give up because the developer tools were sluggish in comparison and plugins were frequently out of date and even multiprocessor mode was a massive problem (because plugins could silently prevent it).

I'm on Linux. Neither Safari nor Edge are available, so the only other serious alternative I can think of is Opera. And I'm not going to switch my main development browser to something with practically no market share for the projects I work on.

Chrome is _simply the best_ browser for web development right now. Everything else is second class at best, irrelevant at worst. Also Chrome's extension ecosystem is pretty much what Firefox's used to be at its prime: if there's a browser extension available, it's likely Chrome-first and the Chrome version will be the most consistently maintained one.

I would love to see open source win, but switching my main development browser from Chrome to Firefox would mean working with a massive avoidable handicap.

> There is a reason why chrome has such a large market share and it's not because it's preinstalled. It's simply the best browser experience in many ways.

I disagree that it's "simply the best browser experience in many ways" (because this is subjective, and for me Firefox always trumps Chrome by providing a much better browser experience). One big reason for Chrome's rise can be attributed to the strong advertising from Google, pushing people to install Chrome from Google Search (and probably from other Google properties as well).

It is pre-installed on every android device. It's also advertised(freely) on some of the largest internet sites in the world (Google, Youtube).

One reason I use Chrome as a developer is because of the vast debugging tools available with it (i.e. React has React Dev Tools, AngularJS has Batarang, NG-Inspector etc..)

But I generally use all major browsers, IE included when doing actual application testing.

The fact that a lof of tooling is only available for Chrome is another side effect of the monoculture among developers. I too use Chrome for developing every now and then, but I use Firefox as my main browser for everything else.

I don't think that's the monoculture of developers.

Chrome was based in Webkit in it's rising years - which put it on par with Safari and Android. This meant that you could develop comfortably and do less cross-browser work up front.

Developers got comfortable. Chrome is open source, extendable, and keeps up with web standards.

> Chrome is open source

No, Chromium is open source. Chrome != Chromium. There's still some secret sauce being thrown into chrome that you don't have access to.

> extendable

Only with JavaScript. It bugs me a bit to this day that this is deemed to be sufficient by Firefox as well. We've lost quite a few good extensions with this change.

> web standards

It helps that Google's team pushes most of those web standards, meaning that everyone else is typically playing catch up.

The stock debugging tools are great too. As Ballmer would say, "Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. Developers. ...... Developers. Developers. Developers!"

I can't say for the other frameworks, but React Dev Tools works great in Firefox!

Ironically, Google's Polymer does not need a special extension for dev tools (because custom elements are normal DOM elements with normal attributes and properties) :)

As Firefox moves to WebExtensions all these debugging tools should become just as available. Currently it is difficult for extension authors to support Firefox as well but that is changing.

React DevTools is about to convert. Redux already has a working WebExtension. We are working with Angular Augury right now. VueJS should also be coming to Firefox soon.

I'm making a list and checking it twice: https://twitter.com/clarkbw/status/870609788366934016

This is a problem where I work at too. I had several front end engineers argue with me that the new features they just launched to a live site were "not broken" because "only Chrome matters".

After years of using Chrome I tried Firefox just to try something different and to my surprise it's 90% as good as Chrome and even surpasses it in certain areas:

- address bar history is better, Chrome wants you to google everything, not use your history,

- Firefox for Android has addons, I don't even want to remember life without uBlock... I still have nightmares of vibrating website scams on Chrome.

Chrome is generally better in:

- speed and security,

- interesting Web APIs (foreign-fetch in Service Workers, Barcode recognition on Android).

> - speed and security,

Can you clarify about the security angle? What makes Firefox less secure?

Zero sandboxing for one?

Currently? Lack of multiprocess tabs [0] and native U2F (available though third party addon, not on Android). Personally I also like how Google deals with Symantec issues.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiprocess_Fir...

Ah ok, I already have electrolysis. U2F i agree

I also find Firefox doesn't chew through my battery as quickly.

> You don’t have to be that old to remember the dark days when Internet Explorer strangled the web by its utter domination.

It is not the same thing. Chromium ( upon which Chrome is based ) is open source. If Google abuses their power it is easier to correct course by forking. In fact, many browsers like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex etc are already based on Chromium

> By balancing the browsers, choosing to use not just what’s convenient but what’s lesser used, you can make the business case for monopoly plays a bad deal.

Pass. People should use the best software they can get their hands on

> good folks at Firefox deserve your usage just as much

So contrary to popular opinion on HN, Firefox is not as good as Chrome. However, we must still use it. Consider it an act of charity

I don't think so. Mozilla must earn their user base by making a good browser and marketing it well

>> It is not the same thing.

There are a lot of similarities. The number of websites (especially ones created by Google), that don't work in other browsers, is increasing.

Example one: Google Meet

Honks me off on a daily basis. :(

> It is not the same thing. Chromium ( upon which Chrome is based ) is open source. If Google abuses their power it is easier to correct course by forking. In fact, many browsers like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex etc are already based on Chromium

Even though that's all true, standardizing on a single base implementation for rendering and Javascript rutime is not good for the web.

Why not? I'd argue that a single open source standard would spur development of new features, performance enhancements, and bug fixes at an incredibly fast rate.

> If Google abuses their power it is easier to correct course by forking.

I don't agree with this line of reasoning, the inertia and established name of the browser would be a huge factor in this.

And it's not just about Google. For example, we have DirectTV that will be limiting streaming only to Chrome.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/7/15758274/directv-now-googl...

This encourages a mono culture no amount of forking Chromium can help against.

It's not just about preventing Google from doing "evil". It's about preventing hindering the growth of the web which will happen with a browser mono culture.

I am so disappointed that Opera went to Chromiums webkit/blink engine. I loved the presto Opera browser and used it as my primary for everything. Until it became just a different skin over chrome. I wish there still existed a variety of different browsers, but these days it's still down to only three or four, everything else is just rescinded or slightly changed but still using someone else's render.

"Mozilla must earn their user base by making a good browser and marketing it well"

They are just as evil as Google at this point. They pretend they are not, but even Apple respects users more.

Can you elaborate?

> If Google abuses their power it is easier to correct course by forking

Just like when Microsoft abused their position people immediately switched to non-IE browsers and IE was never heard of again, right?

>> good folks at Firefox deserve your usage just as much

>So contrary to popular opinion on HN, Firefox is not as good as Chrome. However, we must still use it. Consider it an act of charity

>I don't think so. Mozilla must earn their user base by making a good browser and marketing it well

Firefox don’t need anyone to use it as an act of charity.

But you need to stop the underhanded FUD.

Talking like Chrome is somehow better than all other browsers is just as dumb as saying that x model of y car brand is best...

Best for what? A lot of people love Chrome, Mac, Mercedes.

Sure they are good but I dont want any of them.

- I want my tabs to be vertical and automatically nested,

- my browser to support 100s of tabs and real extensions,

- my computer to have different window management and different menus than what is available on Mac OS

- my car to have a handbraķe.

Going on about how chrome is the best browser is only slightly more mature IMO than me as a kid going on about how x was the beat car (just because my dad had one).

In this case it is even worse as people read it everywhere and start thinking it is true.

The car analogy starts to fall apart when you are talking about something that continues to get updates. Sure, they release new versions of cars usually every year, but you are buying an entirely new car, not really updating your old one.

It also starts to fall apart when talking about price. You can talk about browsers costing time, effort, privacy, etc, but this isn't the same as talking about thousands of actual dollars.

> real extensions

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't believe Firefox is going to have those for too much longer: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...

As far as I am aware they are still going to have more extension points than Chrome.

E.g. it seems the vertical tabs extension I use will still work.

>If Google abuses their power it is easier to correct course by forking. In fact, many browsers like Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Yandex etc are already based on Chromium

Will you be able to use DirectTV with those alternative chromium based browsers? I don't know... but I'd guess no.

I was not impressed with the recent google earth (chrome only)... and now here we are with DirectTV.

Uh wait though, isn't this the entire tech business? Get people to centralize on using a technology then build a monopoly/moat around it? Who's going to acquire the sexy startups if we abandon our monopolistic ideas and the massive cash troves that come with them? Is there really another way?

I know, I know, nobody wants to believe this is truly what happens. But let's be honest, big companies control much of what happens on the web now. And then they acquire smaller companies that challenge them. And the government doesn't know anything about tech or not nearly enough to understand that these monopolies probably need to be broken up.

Can you think of an alternative to the system we're in, or does all technology lead to centralization like this?

Why is this a big concern when chrome is mostly open source and you can download chromium? If Google takes a very wrong step, chrome can be forked.

Chromium (not Chrome) can indeed be forked. Yet that won't help with things like DirectTV going Chrome only. Or Google's marketing of Chrome to users of other browsers. Or finding developers capable of maintaining a fork with the current flood of web standards.

Hard pass. I'll just change my user-agent and call it a day.

I have a different opinion. I think this monoculture is great. There are many browsers all based on Chromium: Chrome, Opera, etc. While they offer different views, their core rendering engine and api's are shared with chromium. It makes life much easier as a developer. While having many implementations is great, it is a pain in the ass. For example, I have an app that uses service worker and indexeddb. It has cases where it fails to work on Safari.

The author compares to Chromium monoculture to IE. That is a very unfair comparison. I would compare it to Linux. Both have open code bases that you can fork at any time and contribute to if you want. It works well on all platforms/hardware respectively. Both have corporate goodwill to pay for it. Its wasteful to re-implement things multiple times over.

What is good for a developer is rarely good for the end user. CLIs are great for developers - they're fast and easy to use. They are also remarkably unfriendly for non-developers to try and use.

Dev tools? Useless for a majority of end users. Web Standards? Useful only in getting them the content they want. JavaScript execution speed? Again, only in support of the content.

We as developers forget about the end users too much.

The biggest problem is, they're all still based on Chromium, who's development priorities are determined by a single profit-driven corporation. (Bear in mind, Chrome was simply the natural evolution of Sundar Pichai's work on the Google Toolbar, a way to ensure everyone is using Google Search all the time. Google was increasingly concerned Microsoft would disable or block their toolbar, hence they created their own browser.)

This monoculture not only means all browsers would be vulnerable to the same flaws, but that you are okay with Google controlling the entire Internet platform. (Which is already an increasing problem in many other aspects.)

I do not care about the cup-monopoly, when the providers of water are strangling the pipe.

It's possible to be concerned about more than one thing at a time. Otherwise, could anyone ever be concerned about anything but the fact that they're going to die?

I make sure to test my applications in all major browsers and iron out bugs in all of them, when possible.

So, that aside, I'm too used to Chromium for me to bother switching to something else as my personal browser. Not to mention that it's handy if one uses mostly Google applications (gmail, maps, keep, etc) as it allows synchronization between devices.

Besides, and this might seem a bit incendiary, I see no problem with something that's mostly open source holding the largest market share. It'd be very difficult for Google to attempt any abuse or create a captive audience, or to force developers to not use standards.

Is there a tool that can sync bookmarks and addons across browsers? Especially now that Mozilla is going to support the same addons? Something that syncs things on an ongoing basis, not just once. I think FF is great but asking people to use more than one browser, yet manually sync the bookmarks and addons is asking for way too much. Even just for bookmarks this would be great. The functionality is 99% of the way there (one time sync works). Personally, I just think Mozilla no longer cares if people use its products. If it did, it would make using them a lot easier and more convenient.

the more reliant you become on popular corporate/"non-profit" controlled browsers the more disappointed you will be when the drm comes. but i will bet they will ease you into it to minimize the complaints. long ago someone predicted very early that the web would evolve into tv, driven by "pinheads". i believe he was correct.

anyone remember a browser from nocrew called zen? had framebuffer support. i think it also allows users to add new interfaces. still compiles cleanly today even on non-linux. code is in archive.org, see nocrew.org

have not tried to use it but am impressed that it is from 2004-ish and still compiles cleanly. framebuffer has had some significant improvements since 2004. could be time to revisit.

Do HN users have much to say about Brave? I've been hearing quite a bit about it lately but haven't tried it out yet. I'm figuring that if I switch browsers, it would be to something with some interesting edge like this, rather than going back to Firefox.

I use Brave sometimes. It's nice. But I switch browsers a lot.

I don't use Chrome except for development because Google is invasive.

To me Firefox is superior because of things like Tree Style Tabs. But Mozilla is killing Tree Style Tabs in an incomprehensible rush to become indistinguishable from Chrome. But if Firefox is indistinguishable from Chrome what reason is there to use it?

Firefox Test Drive has Tab Center (vertical tabs) and Snooze Tabs. Tabs in Tab Center are still not tree-nested, but that's a possibility for the future.

That's not why Mozilla are changing how extensions work.

They're breaking compatibility now so they can do it once and then refactor Firefox's internals to make the browser better/faster/more secure without constantly breaking extensions or - even worse - being prevented from making those internal changes in the first place.

I wish I could switch to Firefox, but I'm really dependent on sync features and I just love Chrome OS on my chromebook...

Are there any solid solutions for Firefox <-> Chrome syncing?

Love Chrome. Tried other options from time to time but always go back. I do run on a higher end machine. It is fast and just rock solid.

Dear firefox,

Just take Chrome's devtools and put it in.

I'll switch my browser, all of my extended family (that I provide tech-support to), to firefox.

Thanks, A Developer

Your extended family needs Chrome dev tools?

No -- but supporting them means installing extensions, compatibility with apps when supporting over phone, etc.

All of this is easy when they're on the same browser as you.

Since everyone is talking about Chrome's flaws, why does the font rendering in Chrome still suck?

I would of setting up a browser for my preferences didn't take 1 hour of my time.

Nice try internet explorer

IE was a majority browser while being bad. Chrome is the best browser available (for average joe at least). No plea to use another browser will be heard, until there is an as-good or better alternative.

What makes it better than the other browsers for the average Joe other than being preinstalled on Android?

I was talking about the desktop version. If you want the features chrome provides, the experience is by far the smoothest, fastest and most integrated compared to other browsers.

Don't get me wrong, I hate the RAM usage and the anti-privacy defaults, but if I put idealism aside, Chrome works best :-/.

(And I don't really understand the downvotes. Perhaps I explained my point better here?)

The average joe's Chrome install is loaded up with malicious browser extensions that are installed via the Chrome Web Store (which is unpoliced) at the behest of malicious websites from Google Ads which pretend to be search results. These extensions have full access to the content of people's web browsing to inject content or collect data, compromising everything they do online.

Chrome is the worst browser available for the average joe, and your grandma is better off on Edge, where every extension is manually approved by an actual human.

Your first point applies to any browser which has a large enough user base and allows for extensions. AFAIK, Firefox has the same issue you described and Edge has zero to no addons, functionality and options compared to either of the two.

The second depends on the grandma I guess. The ones I know use AdBlock of some sort and like their pages to work :).

> Your first point applies to any browser which has a large enough user base and allows for extensions.

It doesn't apply to Safari. Apple actually polices the Safari Extensions Gallery.

> But you can stop it. By balancing the browsers, choosing to use not just what’s convenient, but what’s lesser used, you can make the business case for monopoly plays a bad deal. Consider it your civic duty as a fan of the open web.

Internet Explorer was a monopoly because it was the default web browser installed on the most prevalent operating system. It's the same reason Safari has a majority on Macs even while it lagged behind a couple years.

Chrome is convenient, but I'm not about to start using Opera or Safari because Google is making a better browser. I tried using Safari on my phone and navigating was just so rigid compared to the gestures in Chrome. Safari is behind the times and slowly catching up on web technologies, but also has taken some weird side-steps by ignoring standards like "filter: blur()" and implementing their own "backdrop-filter" that no other browser uses. Chrome and Firefox are the leaders in feature advancement and cross-browser standards.

edit: Would like to clarify that when I mean ignoring the "filter: blur()" standard - Safari will remove a background image instead of blurring it.

Use what's convenient so other browsers step it up.

I have no idea what you are talking about regarding Safari ignoring "filter: blur()" - it's supported it since 2012, just a few months after Chrome added it. In fact - I think at the time Chrome was still using Webkit.

"backdrop-filter" is a completely different thing. Rather than filtering the element itself, it filters all elements behind it. This is especially useful with blur. While you are correct that Safari is the only browser currently supporting it, it is part of the standard, although it's not yet finalized. Chrome also supports it if you enabled "Experimental Web Features"

Safari "filter:blur()" is not compatible with background images. Background images on a filtered element will disappear. While "backdrop-filter" is not compatible with any other browser.

You either have to choose Safari (which only has a leading-yet-declining share on Macs) or every other browser to support.

I literally just tried this in Safari 10.1.1: https://codepen.io/chuckhendo/pen/NgGZqg

Maybe it affects older versions of Safari, but I don't recall having run into it.

"backdrop-filter" is irrelevant - it's an entirely different feature.

It works now I guess, but Safari has quirks I've seen time and time again where things don't work as they should.

I'm also hesitant to call it "fixed" considering it happened just last month and YMMV with a one-element pen.

Your post is terribly misinformed.

Firstly, I don't know how you conclude Safari has the majority of market share on Mac.

> Chrome is convenient, but I'm not about to start using Opera or Safari because Google is making a better browser.

Chrome uses far more battery and processing power to achieve the same task as Safari. Safari animates content smoother and scrolls pages smoother. I would conclude Safari is currently the best web browser, despite it being slightly behind Chrome in standards support.

> ignoring standards like "filter: blur()"

This is false.

> implementing their own "backdrop-filter" that no other browser uses

This is false. Backdrop filter support is planned in all browsers except Edge currently. You can enable it with a Chrome flag. I should also mention it is a huge advancement for creating blurs on the web.

> Chrome and Firefox are the leaders in feature advancement

I don't see how you can consider Firefox a leader anymore. That browser is a mess, hopefully they make a comeback.

You are spreading misinformation.

http://zdnet3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/06/18/77931904-cbe...

While of June 2016 - Safari is still among the top browsers I see for my website visitors.

Yes Chrome uses more battery - but Safari also has use of native API's that integrate tightly with the Apple Ecosystem. Chrome has its own sync, bookmarks, password manager, etc. Safari is great if you don't need Gmail or Google Calendar - but Chrome integrates better with it's other product offerings.

> ignoring standards like "filter: blur()" > This is false.

Wrong again. Using "filter: blur()" with a background image will make that image disappear in certain circumstances. Instead Apple implemented its own "backdrop-filter" which is not cross-compatible between features.

Planned or not, backdrop-filter is currently not supported in Chrome by default. Or any other browser. http://caniuse.com/css-backdrop-filter/embed

>I don't see how you can consider Firefox a leader anymore. That browser is a mess, hopefully they make a comeback.

Again misinformation. Chrome and Firefox have the leading browser scores for features supported:

http://caniuse.com/

Battery power matters a lot for thin/light devices (like Macs). There are cases when I'll refuse to use an app that only supports chrome, just because chrome takes up so much power.

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