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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

It's not really about that -- most shops don't support the latest version of Opera or Brave except by accident since they're Chromium backed. If they introduced a breaking incompatbility there is very little chance we would carry patches for them.

'supported browsers' are browsers that you lose customers if you don't support. You don't lose customers by telling them to switch to Chrome. Firefox's market share is small and the number of people who exclusively use Firefox and refuse to switch is vanishingly small.

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> 'supported browsers' are browsers that you lose customers if you don't support.

That's a great attitude towards your users. No, you, the vendor, adapt to what your users bring.

That is the standard that the web was built around. Lazy developers that only wish to cater to the one browser that they have on their desk and that refuse to recognize that the world is a bit larger than their minimal view (including screenreaders and other accessibility device) should get another job. And if the company they work at is run competently they will (Microsoft apparently is not one of those, but that's not really news either).

Firefox is sitting at 8.3% quota in NA and dwindling. It's reasonable not to support it.

I can’t imagine making the case to anyone at my work that we can/should voluntarily stop supporting 8.3% of our audience.

- 8.3% average globally doesn't necessarily represent 8.3% of your users or market.

- 8.3% is almost much larger than the metric you actually care about -- the percentage of users that will not use Chrome (or your desired set of supported browsers).

Of course, I used that figure because it’s what the poster used. I looked up what it is for the product I work on and it’s actually only 4% — still an order of magnitude larger than it would need to be to consider not supporting it.

The desired set of supported browsers will always come down to metrics.

heck, we're supporting IE11 at great pains with ~4% audience

That number should grow again. It's becoming increasingly obvious what a privacy leak Chrome is, and Firefox is just as good, making it an obvious choice for anyone who cares about privacy.

Chrome attacking the privacy and the choice of its users has been happening for years now. And Firefox keeps dying.

Mozilla (Firefox) management thought that installing a Mr Robot advert extension on people's computers, without asking, was a good move, and defended it until the internet outcry got loud enough. With management like that, I find it hard to trust them. Default-installing Pocket was also not entirely defensible and was probably money-driven.

Essentially, both companies have done anti-privacy and untrustworthy actions, and choosing the lesser evil is hardly ideal.

The difference between Mozilla and Google is substantial. Whenever Mozilla gets this wrong it is usually a goof of sorts, when Google gets it wrong it tends to be policy. See 'AMP'.

Let's keep the numbers in perspective.

The 8,3% (or 9,52%, or whatever) of Firefox users is way, way beyond total Skype users. Firefox has about ~170M users, Skype 4,5M.

If a user brought you Lynx I'm pretty sure you wouldn't jump to support them. Whether Firefox deserves support by default is a question with a different answer at every company.

Twisting this into an absurd discussion does not give you the moral high ground, but fine, I'll bite.

If a browser is standards compliant it should be supported. Note that standards are there for a reason, they create a level playing field. So all you really need to do is to ensure that your implementation is conform the standard, you then still have to test to ensure that your assumptions hold in light of practical applications of that standard on the rendering side. But there really is absolutely no excuse why barring non-standard extensions your website would not work with all browsers with more than 1% market share.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Would be a good place to start for your compatibility testing.

> You don't lose customers by telling them to switch to Chrome

Yes, you do. It might be a very, very small number, so small that you decide not to care about it, but you definitely lose people.

The tricky part is that most companies have no idea how many people they lose and why. It's just marketeers guessing and anecdotal evidence. The number is probably bigger than they think, because generally speaking, marketeers are not the type of persons that about browsers.

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