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Comment by ezconnect | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't work on Firefox

This was tough for us, because we're big believers in the standards-based web. We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

Unfortunately, while most of the editor works in all browsers, getting full support is really hard. We're doing a lot of things that get pretty deep in the browser, so we wanted to lock things down as much as possible.

We almost were electron-only to ensure consistency, and can still give you the electron app today. We felt it was better to launch with Chrome + Electron than just Electron for an optional installation-free experience, which is why we only support Chrome.

I'm personally really sorry as an engineer that we don't support Firefox, Safari, and other browsers yet. It's on our roadmap :)

As a basically-everything-except-Chrome user, I'm increasingly skeptical of excuses this. There's almost certainly some feature(s) that you've spent a lot of time on that provide less value than having the app working in Firefox and Safari.

As soon as I saw it was Chrome only, I closed out.

On the other hand think of it from their perspective if you want your odds of success to be higher you have to focus on the biggest user base, simple 80/20. I doubt that an additional feature vs friefox support is a fair comparison.

As someone who also made this difficult decision to launch a product with only Chrome support: don’t feel bad, and don’t feel responsible for haters. Supporting other browsers, even those that are standards compliant, is a nefarious class of technical debt: from verifying scrollbar sizing to performance degradations, you add a tremendous amount of overhead to ongoing QA - especially important when you have a small team without dedicated QA resources or processes, and a clientele with an eye towards aesthetic detail. We owe it to our respective missions to focus on what matters.

For my part, I look forward to trying the product!

For anyone else looking for the electron app mentioned above it’s at https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/ BUT only in Mac and Linux versions

Windows versions are also up now! Please let us know if you run into any issues.

> We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

By supporting only Chrome, you're showing that you consider Firefox/Safari/Edge as second class citizens, making it harder to trust that you will keep supporting non-Chrome browsers in your generated code.

Doesn't work on Edge, Firefox, or even Safari. I am sorry, your first sentence "big believers in standards" is just a lie. It is just developer laziness for supporting non standard stuff and doing User Agent sniffing.

Rule #1 is do feature detection not user agent detection. What are you doing that is "pretty deep in the browser"? NaCL? Experimental Chrome features?

Also doesn't work on Safari. The "error" message tells you to use Chrome instead (or ask for an app download).

Safari doesn't support fancy pants features like telling which mouse button is held down (event.buttons on MouseMove, works everywhere else since IE9), which makes it a total pain in the behind for any kind of drawing app.

If I could drop support for it completely I would open up a bottle of champagne. It truly is the new IE of the web.

Exactly... But curiously Chrome is receiving all the hate instead...

We just released a v0 of our Electron app. Will upload Windows links shortly. Check it out at https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/

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