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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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

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