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
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.
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.
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.
The kind Firefox will only have in a release or two?
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 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.
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).
But I generally use all major browsers, IE included when doing actual application testing.
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.
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.
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