Hacker News Reader

Comment by NullInvictus | Hacker News Reader

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites.

As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to figure out what happened: The developer wrote his code, tested it on chrome alone, and then called it a day. No one booted it up in another browser and even smoke-tested to see if basic use-cases work as intended.

If developers are genuinely concerned with browser diversity and not handing the Web over to Google and whatever they deem to be the next IE6, it starts with having a test plan for other browsers. Testing on only one platform is tantamount to having official support for one platform because you only guarantee your product to work on that platform in so many words. Officially supporting one platform is pressuring your users into a vendor-lock.

They - even the tech savvy ones - can't even begin to make vendor choices when the products they use accidentally lock them out left and right.

View on HN

If developers are genuinely concerned with browser diversity and not handing the Web over to Google and whatever they deem to be the next IE6, it starts with having a test plan for other browsers.

I'd say it starts with dialing back the "new feature/change fetish" that a lot of web developers have. Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HTML and CSS will do the job fine, then so be it; and even if it needs to use JS, it likely doesn't need to be latest-browser-only JS either.

The constant "X is bad, use Y; no, Y is bad, use Z; no, Z is bad, use..." churn and that "push the web forward" trendchasing seems to be so entrenched in "modern" (there's another buzzword) web dev culture that I wonder if Google/Chrome is responsible for cultivating and propagating it, because it's not quite as endemic in other areas of software and also helps Chrome keep its monopoly, since it keeps the target moving and beckons at others to "catch up".

I think web developers need to adopt a more "do what you can with what you have"/demoscene-ish (for lack of a better term) attitude and not the silly "I could do it with just X, but I'll use Y because it's newer/better-but-I-can't-explain-why-and-everyone-else-is" that really just assists Google's monopoly. In other words: Writing a webapp that could work over 20 years of browsers may not be as hard as it sounds (I've done it --- and I'm not even a web developer --- which might be the reason why...), and you will definitely help browser diversity that way.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps. A vanilla HTML site might be good enough in some cases but often you really need to push the envelope of what’s possible the web and that’s hard to do and also support niche browsers on a tight development budget.

You can install a “progressive web app” as a native Android app now. There’s been a big push to develop PWAs on the heels of react and single page apps for a couple years now - google is doing a good job trying to support the web as users move so aggressively to mobile. Facebook basically has its own browser in-app(iOS and Android), i bet that browser has more traffic than Firefox.

Google is a bit schizophrenic though.

You can watch IO talks from Android, Chrome, Flutter where the presenter eventually throws some jabs at other competing stacks as if they aren't from the same employer.

All large companies are schizophrenic to some extent.

Where I work, departments bill each other. Sometimes, two departments develop competing tools that are third department could make use of. Instead the third department use an off the shelf tool because the "license" for the internal tools is too expensive.

At these scales, companies are almost like states. A group of entities with shared services but otherwise working independently.

The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps.

Only for certain things. A lot of web browsing is still pure information-consumption. The "native apps" are also turning into effective webapps, thanks to Electron and the like.

Even this site, which is interactive, doesn't require JS to use (it provides some enhancements, but the site is still quite usable without.)

Google's practices pushing web non-standards haphazardly are so heinous that even Electron can't usually handle general web apps, like WhatsApp (especially) because it depends on Chrome-specific, not even Chromium, features. Many others are the same way.

Can you cite this? I'm collecting a laundry list of reasons Google has degraded the web, and this is certainly evidence.

If you go back in time far enough, Google has improved the web exponentially more than it has harmed it.

This is a bit hard to say, right? Google is also responsible for the normalization of aggressive user tracking and the creation of the ad-ridden tire fire that is the modern internet.

I wrote up one example that was particularly frustrating when I realized it [0].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ar1qj1/_/egl52...

> The problem with this is that the web is competing with native apps.

No it isn't. Competition with native apps is the completely wrong way to think of it. The web should complement native apps.

> Yes, I know some things simply can't be done without a JS webapp, but not all and probably not even a majority, so if HTML and CSS will do the job fine, then so be it; and even if it needs to use JS, it likely doesn't need to be latest-browser-only JS either.

Sticking to HTML and CSS won't necessarily get rid of this - new stuff is being added to CSS all the time, in particular. And browser support is just as patchy.

How much new css do you actually use though w/ patchy browser support?

There are many essential css properties that Firefox doesn't support, e.g fit-content

https://caniuse.com/#search=fit-content

All browsers seem to have bugs with it. I also don't understand how it's essential.

But when a browser doesn't fully support a CSS feature most of the time is your site just looks a little wrong. Unless it's a major feature, the site will probably still be functional to the user.

The flip side of this is that many new JavaScript features can be either transpiled to ES5 syntax, or polyfilled. It will be great when we don’t need to anymore, but I’m always pleasantly surprised by just how much modern JS can be used in, say, IE11, just by having Babel be part of the build step.

CSS unfortunately doesn’t work that way, so apart from graceful degradation you’re out of luck.

Webdevs don’t seem to have much of a user-centric view of the sites they develop. The vast majority of use cases on the web are “I want to see a list of options then fill in a form”. All the tech needed to shop online or bank or pay bills or book travel or whatever existed 20 years ago (SSL being the last piece of the puzzle, all the rest is just plain HTML).

Fully agree, plain old cached SSR with a little sprinkle of JavaScript when it really matters.

The thing is too, anyone can do that. HTML forms are easy, generating HTML is easy. There just doesn’t need to be any webdevs, the dedicated role doesn’t need to exist. No amount of trying to rebrand themselves as “full stack engineers” will save them when that realisation dawns on the people paying their over-inflated salaries!

As long as the web is a viable software distribution platform, the world will need "webdevs". 2019 is still a chaotic time for the platform, and winners and losers still haven't really shaken out, not even at a basic architectural level. There are profound questions about what computation gets done where, what side-effects happen where, which in turn influences everything about how software is built, tested, distributed, and run, and yet they aren't really answered so much as philosophized about.

If form controls like select lists and checkboxes were style-able and compose-able I think it would reduce the need for JS in many cases.

Multi select in particular feels like it's stuck in the 90's.

Also select's lack of consistent search capabilities is painful.

Sorry, I'm not convinced that UI elements need to be "style-able" by the site. Every site ends up being slightly different from others as a result, because it feels the need to reinvent its own custom UI controls with their own behaviour inconsistent from the OS or even the browser's UI. (I have the same gripe about "native" Electron apps.)

Yeah, good luck with that. Every company wants to stand out. There's no money to be made from conformity.

Searchable select is now a thing (for 90% of users at least).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da...

Select elements are pretty decently style-able nowadays [0], though the options in the dropdown don't seem to be supported (at least in Firefox).

https://www.filamentgroup.com/lab/select-css.html

I'm certainly no CSS guru. And as you said, CSS doesn't cover everything. However, you can do quite a bit with CSS that most developers don't bother with:

https://bradleytaunt.com/dynamic-checkboxes/

https://bradleytaunt.com/easy-custom-radio-inputs/

https://normform.netlify.com/

> I'd say it starts with dialing back the "new feature/change fetish" that a lot of web developers have

I wonder whether this phenomenon is driven by HTML, CSS, and JavaScript being such lacklustre tools for building applications?

Many things that are completely reasonable to deal with in any “native” stack (animations, local storage, offline access, hardware access, accessibility just to name a few), while usually possible with a web stack, are often unnecessarily difficult or awkward.

Things are improving fairly rapidly because of the insistence that everything should be web based these days, and I could totally see that driving people to the bleeding edge.

I mean hell, I do it myself. I’m a web developer, and when reading about shiny new features I’m often eager to start using them ASAP — especially when it would replace a bunch of kludgy JavaScript I’d been relying on previously.

As a web developer, I love using new features. 90% of the time though, the new features can easily be covered by a polyfill, and there is no excuse not to use poly fills.

From my experience, JS is relatively portable, at least if you stay away from some corners. CSS (and some aspects of HTML) are a much more likely reason for strange differences between browsers. Another common culprit for browser-specific bugs is simply using browser-specific CSS extensions, because sometimes it is simpler than fiddling with standard CSS until it looks right.

Yes, I think that they should do back all of that "new feature/change fetish" as you say. It also would improve compatibility, to not do such messy stuff, too.

Most web pages will not need any JavaScripts, although some might need it. And in some other cases, optional JavaScript might help, such as to auto-fill or validate a form, in which case the form will still work with JavaScript disabled. (Also note that, for example, Lynx does not implement JavaScript.)

For some of that, my idea of a <widget> element might help a bit. It would improve performance, allow better user customizations, allow enabling some functions that would previously require JavaScript even though JavaScript is disabled, and is compatible even with browsers that do not implement <widget>.

CSS is also overused, although even if you use it, you should try to also allow working without CSS in cases where such a thing makes sense (which it often does, although not always). (CSS styles often just make stuff worse in my opinion anyways; that is why I put in my own CSS codes for stuff.)

I think, the end user need to have enough ropes to hang yourself and also a few more just in case. The entire control of the interface should be controlled by the end user.

Also, these web pages and HTTP(S) are rather overused anyways. There are other protocols, such as Gopher and Telnet and SSH and NNTP and IRC, which are better for some things (and worse for some things, too, I suppose). (But multiple protocols and multiple interfaces can be offered if wanted, anyways, I suppose.)

I use Firefox all the time and use it for web development.

But modern frontend stack - with the whole pile of transpilers, uglifiers, and what not - is almost unusable with Firefox, because source maps don't work with Webpack.

https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/1194

This put me in a position where I had to choose between switching to Chrome for development or not using Webpack that comes nicely integrated into the web framework of my choice.

I went with ditching Webpack, but it's hard.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55669725/require-module-...

Developers will not use Firefox if FF dev tools are inferior to Chrome.

Some comments from devs:

> Can we please fix this? I don't want to choose Chrome as the browser only coz of this issue.

Mozzila took notice of the issue after 4 years...

Source maps don’t work well on Chrome either. :/

Your linked issue says that certain types of source maps will work with Firefox. Can't you just use one of the working options (e.g, "eval-source-map" works but "cheap-source-map" does not).

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest.

Also a full-time Firefox user. This is fascinating because I quite literally cannot remember a website for which I had to switch browser so it would start working.

What kind of websites are these? Have you noticed any pattern about them? Perhaps it's a certain type of site that I usually avoid.

For example's sake, try opening payment/billing setting pages of Google products. For example, pay.google.com doesn't load on FF latest on MacOsX latest.

Thanks, though it works for me on Linux and Firefox 68.0.2.

Loads for me - latest Safari, latest macOS. Maybe it's a specific page?

I know for example I can use FF everywhere but specific Google apps (new sites) don't work well in FF, though that's improved lately as well.

Skype Web is an example from the top of my head, but I don't run into them a lot either (or don't notice that they are only broken in Firefox, because I rarely care enough to try another browser).

I do see quite a few sites that apparently never have been tested with ublock or privacy badger, but they break on all browsers where those are enabled.

Skype web works if you switch user agent

I had trouble with imgur on firefox mobile. it doesn't allow uploads until you request the desktop version (which fakes another useragent string).

Maybe it’s the combination with ad blockers, but there are a lot of times I get stucked in the payment part.

And then I have to redo all the ordering process on Chromium.

It for long failed on Visa 3D secure (so not website dependant) until I found why with Badger blocking it.

But often when the payment system is included in the website it fails (and that’s really annoying)

Blocking fingerprinting can cause anti-fraud to think you’re a bot.

As it turns out in recent news, credit card companies sell weakly anonymized information about cardholder purchases so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I solve this problem by having a clean profile with only uBlock that I can open up when I want to make sure a purchase is going to work. uMatrix has a glitch where even when you enable something it sometimes won't work / load even when you refresh the page multiple times, but I don't think I've encountered problems on many pages with just uBlock.

I have never had payment fail in Firefox.

Sounds like tracking protection blocks some elements.

For instance, my bank (Lloyds) has a login screen where you have to select letters from three long drop down lists containing all letters and numbers.

With Safari or Chrome, I can select the dropdown (by clicking it or navigating there using the keyboard) and then enter the letter or number on the keyboard.

With Firefox, I have to click on the dropdown, scroll down looking for the right letter/number and then select it with the mouse. It takes at least 10 times as long as with other browsers. So I'm not using Firefox for that site.

Of all the interactive sites I use regularly about 10% have some sort of bug when visited with Firefox. And this is getting worse at an alarming rate.

I think many mainstream sites not created by actual tech companies have simply stopped testing with Firefox.

(I don't use ad blockers, just browser default settings)

This used to work on Firefox as well with Lloyds, I don't know what changed but it stopped working about a year ago.

I think it's some sort of anti-keylogger pattern that Lloyds are using. The select options all look like this:

  <option value="&amp;nbsp;c">&nbsp;c</option>

I suspect the nbsp is what blocks the usual keyboard behaviour on Firefox but not on Chrome.

This is quite strange, because it could mean that the anti-keylogger feature only works as intended with Firefox but not with Chrome.

Interesting, that could be something not too complicated to change on Firefox, I'll try to contribute when I'll have a bit more time. At least that's the first time I see something I could realistically improve.

I'm not sure whether Firefox should actually be changed. It looks like Firefox may be conforming to the standard and Lloyds devs may have intended to use that standardised behaviour to thwart keyloggers.

Only they seem to have forgotten to test whether it actually does block keyloggers, and it only does so in Firefox.

So my grand example for a website not working well in Firefox may be just the opposite - Firefox saving my money from getting siphoned off by thiefs. Very bad choice of example on my part! :-)

Here's what the HTML 5 spec says on the <option> element's text content:

The text IDL attribute, on getting, must return the result of stripping and collapsing ASCII whitespace from the concatenation of data of all the Text node descendants of the option element, in tree order, excluding any that are descendants of descendants of the option element that are themselves script or SVG script elements.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-elements.html#th...

nbsp is not ASCII whitespace and so it should not be stripped. I can't seem to find anything specific on the autocomplete behaviour in this case, but arguably autocomplete should use the text content without further normalisation. Perhaps this is where Chrome and Safari devs would disagree.

In any event, this raises a bigger question. What if a site is actually broken in Firefox, but it's not Firefox's fault? Should Firefox then be changed to non-conforming behaviour, aping any Chrome bugs? That would put a huge question mark on all the work they put into making their own rendering engine instead of just using Blink.

> In any event, this raises a bigger question. What if a site is actually broken in Firefox, but it's not Firefox's fault? Should Firefox then be changed to non-conforming behaviour, aping any Chrome bugs?

I can remember one case of such a thing happening before: css box-sizing.

Before the attribute existed, the spec said content-box was correct, and all browsers except IE implemented it that way. IE implemented border-box, going against spec, but it turned out to make so much more sense it was eventually added to CSS, and nowadays is the recommended way to go (but still not the default value).

As inconvenient as powering through this bug might be, switching to Chrome to use this site just reinforces their choice. Perhaps emailing them to report the issue might also be beneficial for all?

As it’s a bank I suspect their devs have to use IE6 and have recently upgraded to IE8 and thus change in behaviour.

I changed bank - I had an account with a bank (RBS?) in the late 90s / early 00s, couldn't access it from linux, yet I could access HSBC, so RBS lost my custom.

My current bank (Smile) works in Firefox on linux, so that's fine. If it didn't, they'll be losing my custom.

Sometimes I am astonished by the life other people apparently lead. For example when they'd invest the energy to switch their bank (and all that is attached to that) over using a different browser to access a singular website.

I do not understand. It boggles my mind, in the most curious way.

Sometimes the way it fails gives the impression of a less-than-comfortable level of competence with technology. I also almost switched banks when my first was acquired by another, its webui was so much worse.

Please see the sibling thread (to your comment) for why I'm not going to do that. This "glitch" is probably intentional.

Also, I have actually tried to communicate with that bank about a far more important issue. It was frustrating and pointless, starting with the fact that they don't have a customer support email address.

Also full time Firefox user. Most of my issues are either blocking related so that is on me or apparently sites bugs. At work I use chrome for beyondtrust because I cannot get ff to automatically download and launch rdp sessions. Apparently the content type is wrong in downloaded file so ff will not associate an application with the file so adds several steps to launching rdp sessions. Easier to keep chrome off to the side around for that task.

The other issue is that it does not use Windows ca store for certificates. When company uses internal certificate authority for internal websites this requires users to manually update the browser cert store. Chrome and Edge will use windows ca store on windows. My it dept will not automate this but will manage the windows ca store.

>The other issue is that it does not use Windows ca store for certificates

By default. But can be configured to use the cert store [0].

> Apparently the content type is wrong in downloaded file so ff will not associate an application with the file

If it is consistent that shouldn't be a real problem.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/AddRootToFirefox

Just now I came across an info table [0] for some game that should allow sorting by columns, but doesn't work on my Firefox, only Chrome. Yeah, its just some fan site for a game and thankfully doesn't happen that often to me, yet. But I feel like those many smaller sites, that I'd prefer to exist over all content centralized on a few giant platforms, are especially susceptible to not testing on many clients. And yes, I'll try to contact the author, but probably hadn't if not for this discussion today.

[0] https://oni-assistant.com/database/elements

Interesting, this is the only example given that I was able to confirm does not work. I'm glad this discussion is making you consider contacting the author. I feel like we've dug ourselves into an IE-shaped hole all over again and this kind of grassroots action is very important for getting out.

As an aside, immediately upon seeing the website, I had a split-second thought of the content reminding me of Don't Starve. Amusingly, the website turns out to be about Oxygen Not Included, another Klei game. :-)

As a (mostly) full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs and some are unusable in FF. What I find fascinating is that every time I mention this on HN or elsewhere, somebody also chimes in with this "doesn't happen to me" message and demands to know which sites.

Every damn time.

You mentioned your anecdote multiple times, but expect others to only mention theirs once? Not to mention it was likely a different person responding to you each time. It seems like a very natural pattern, not surprising.

It seems like this is a good thing since at least one other user said this thread prompted him to contact the site developer.

One of the two bike registry websites only worked in Chrome, with some JS error in Firefox. Some function was always defined in Chrome but never in Firefox by the time somescript tried to use it. Wasn't addon-related. Seems fixed now.

Was going to say much the same thing. I've been a full-time Firefox user for 10+ years. I've also worked on web apps and tested against Firefox, Chrome, IE (and later Edge), for 10+ years.

In all that time, I don't think I've ever seen a Firefox-specific bug or layout issue.

I saw them on IE all the time (obviously), sometimes in Edge, rarely in Chrome, and never in Firefox.

Me either. When something doesn't work it's almost always because of Privacy Badger. If I'm really curious I'll whitelist it to see if that does the trick. Otherwise I might report the bug to the site, but typically there's just not enough time in my life to waste on broken web sites.

People hold on to this belief that Google is infallible because they're rich and they put together a marketing campaign some years back to convince people that only smart people work there. I believe the truth is exactly the opposite.

Also a full time Firefox user.

Another bug that I believe is actually Firefox doing the right thing: if you make an event handler function but give it no parameters, Firefox will have no local named event. Chrome will create an event variable for you. Caused several "Firefox bugs" in our app.

The behaviour you're referring to is actually a global property `window.event` [0]. Although it's part of the DOM spec, it's only there for historical reasons and should definitely be avoided.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/even...

One of the biggest issues with Firefox for me has been the U2F support - because they came so late to that party and so many of the web sites that do support U2F gate it by user agent instead of feature detection, because Firefox was so slow on the uptake, they made a lot of problems for everyone and set back one of the better security standards.

I also have a big issue with their handling of webm/webp. There was one single guy at Mozilla killing that for years - may still be - despite heavy demand for support.

Both were really disheartening because it showed that Mozilla had lost its fight and had become so complacent that it didn’t even feel the need to match its competitors much less try to lead.

On the flip side Chrome has now become so comfortable with their position that their users are more of an annoyance, which lets them do very unpopular things like pinching off all of the ad blockers. This is where Mozilla could make a comeback because I think a lot of people (myself included) would take another look at Firefox if that is what it took to keep ublock and ghostery functioning.

I don't remember many times that I encountered Firefox-specific web bugs.

I've had bugs where the site doesn't work in Firefox but works in Chrome, but as far as I can tell, those were always caused by the aggressive privacy settings I use in Firefox (whereas the Chrome profile is mostly default).

I'm not particularly concerned with the article's complaint about onboarding. The problem is that Firefox is simply slightly worse (less polished, often slower) in many, many aspects.

On Desktop, Firefox is quite usable, even if it is a bit less polished than Chrome.

On Mobile, it's another story. The only thing saving it is the fact that Chrome doesn't let you install extensions, so you have the choice between an ad-filled web on a browser that runs well, with the ads slowing you down (with Chrome), and a clean web in a slow browser with an unpolished UX and infuriating bugs that don't get fixed (with Firefox). So far, I'd say the two experiences are comparably annoying.

Well here is the well-documented YouTube slowness with Firefox: https://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-...

Or you can install brave and not deal with anything

This does not help prevent the blink monoculture though.

I don't have this experience at all with mobile firefox. I find it faster and with better UX.

> As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest.

You can report sites broken in Firefox (or other browsers) at https://webcompat.com/. Mozilla web developers will debug the broken site and either file a Firefox bug report or try to reach out to the site developer.

Mozilla even has a convenient Firefox extension to make reporting broken sites quick and easy:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webcompatcom-...

Mozilla does have some way of dealing with bugs in sites. They're maintaining a site/database which Firefox consults for workarounds. More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cd1lob/how_firefox_...

thanks for the heads-up - `about:compat` and its enabling "Go Faster Addon" was news to me: giving a channel for concrete action following an opinion piece. Feels like a vendor distributed greasemonkey. It is called user-agent after all.

How about a chrome plugin for developers which somehow on a press of a button replaces the chrome rendered website with the firefox rendered one within chrome? Or like every second reload or something it uses firefox rendeder instead of chrome's. Or uses headless firefox and somehow in the background compares the current chrome website state with the firefox one. This could work for multiple browsers at the same time and would be a must have for web devs.

> I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues.

I don't know if meeting online counts: I'm bothered by Mozilla having a partnership with Google. I'm bothered by the fact that Mozilla maintains an official Facebook container but the Google equivalent is left to the community, I can't help but think that the reason why there isn't an official Google container by Mozilla is that Mozilla and Google have a commercial partnership which apparently provides most of Mozilla's income (as per link provided in the article).

Interesting. I'm a full time Firefox user as well and honestly can't think of an example where this happened to me. There have been a couple times where I was warned my browser wasn't supported, which is stupid, but it usually works fine anyway.

I've definitely had sites where FF doesn't work properly with LastPass. I've already had sites that plainly don't work at all with FF. I've never blamed the browser for that though. It's the developer responsibility to make sure I can access their site or I go elsewhere.

To me, if the site doesn't work on Firefox, the site is broken. End of story.

Exactly, at my place we have about eight front-end developers. Guess how many (excluding me) use Firefox? None. When I started I found a tonne of little bugs just because no one thought to test in Firefox.

There is definitely a vicious circle here. For many web sites/apps, the browsers that matter are Chrome on desktop and Chrome and Safari on mobile. There is now a huge gap between the number of people using those and the second tier browsers, which in most contexts are IE, Firefox, Edge and (desktop) Safari. That inevitably leads to development and testing resources concentrating on the 80% with the other 20% often being an afterthought if they are considered at all. But then there are more bugs in the second tier browsers, which just opens the gap wider.

But not testing Safari I can understand since it's only officially on Mac. Sure you can kind use it via Epiphany and Midori but a lot of features, like Service Workers for instance, don't exist and therefore can be tested with a download. For me, even after wasting time trying to build from source, it didn't seem like the feature flags worked.

But Mozilla cannot enforce idealism on the developers.

They do already a great job with documentation, but they could and should improve on the dev-tools.

Chrome dev tools are now in a state, that I only use them for developing and debugging. Built in code editor with autocomplete. And I can debug ... and change code while debugging. And it works great (mostly).

Firefox dev tools on the other hand barely work for me to do some debugging and it is no joy. So no wonder more and more developers skip it alltogether, given the low market share of firefox.

I personally prefer firefox's dev tools to chrome's ones.

Boy, I am with you on this one. Full-time FF user too. The whole CSS grid thing is very well done and useful.

Well, I don't really work with CSS much, but js. Are you consider the debugging tools well done as well? And do you know chrome dev tools? With its elaborate performance tools etc?

I currently work more with CSS so I find the debugging tools on both good enough for my purposes. I do know the chrome dev tools and find them to be good, just happen to prefer the FF dev editions ease with layout.

Yeah but it's somewhat laggy compared to chrome's.

To write and debug code?

I mostly use Console, Network and Inspector tabs and I rarely debug (in general.) Especially Network tab in Firefox's dev tools is much superior to Chrome's one, IMHO.

>I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues

This is a game of reducing friction incrementally, not big ticket bothered by it

Or just develop on Firefox. Some of its dev tools are better than Chrome's. Mozilla should keep working towards making Firefox better for web developers.

Web developers can help by using and endorsing Firefox in their coding tutorials/videos/screenshots.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

The solution is simple. If you are a developer, then use Firefox as your browser. And make sure that other people in your organization test for Chrome ;)

Could also be down to extra testing costing more $$$ to test and fix within a tight deadline to get the product shipped. I don't think the dev would have agreed to test on just a single browser - more likely a management decision.

Also buggy firefox extensions that will crash firefox or eat up resources.

Is Firefox able to identify misbehaving extensions at runtime? And alert the user?

It’s likely that we visit vastly different corners of the internet. As a full time Safari user I can’t remember the last time I had such an issue.

Any site that uses WebGL2

"As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest."

And guess what? Sites that appear to have bugs in FireFox, when I switch the user agent, suddenly render just fine.

Example: Before FB rolled out the FB Live feature to everyone, it was "Chrome only" until I figured out that a simple UA switch made it work.

No, I won't trust you to say "It doesn't work in FireFox" because one of the biggest companies on this planet said the same thing and it was an outright LIE. If you're actually coding to real standards, and not the crap Google dictates, your shit will work right down to Lynx (because you'll also be following best practice for the disabled.)

Good job demonstrating that you don't really know how to make a web page.

The thing is, chrome follows the spec. If the website breaks with Firefox, then maybe the problem is with Firefox (a bug, an unimplemented feature) itself rather then Chrome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com