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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms

Why don't webdevs fight back and put "best viewed on Firefox" pop-ups on their pages (whenever the user is using Chrome).

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Microsoft can and does do this now in retaliation, they own enough web properties that this makes a difference. Firefox doesn’t have a huge web presence though, nothing anywhere on par with Google advertising their browser in their search engine and email client.

Unfortunately, from my experience many third party web developers only test in Chrome, and hence actually encourage Chrome use even when there’s no incompatibility with Firefox or Edge.

If browser market share trends are comparable among webdevs & non-webdevs, a majority of webdevs are still using Chrome as their primary browser.

Perhaps Firefox should invest more heavily on developer tools then.

I’ve started doing this. In the case of CCPA, GDPR disclosures and “do not track” requirements I suggest uninstalling Chrome and all Google software and switching to Firefox with proper as locking software enabled. I think Google is compliant with neither, and if a user is actually concerned about their privacy they definitely shouldn’t be using Chrome.

It would be great to understand the downvotes on this.

Chrome/Chromium phones home, period. Last time I've personally checked this [1] was still true.

It's hard to argue that Google doesn't have an interest on collecting as much data it can. Especially, since their heavy focus on ML, where the algorithms are very data-hungry.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Chromium/comments/3fgabt/privacy_is...

Netscape Now!

Netscape lives on in Firefox.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla

browser is too important piece of everyday computing for the masses to leave in the hands of Big Corp. This is why my family uses Firefox

> Why don't webdevs fight back

Seems to be fairly common to see a “works on Chrome, my job is done” attitude. Especially with SPAs.

I worry that we’re going to see another generation of crappy line of business apps that only work (badly) in one browser because of this attitude.

As someone who uses neither a Chromium-based browser nor Firefox, I certainly would not like that. Web devs shouldn't be deciding what tools users use to view their pages. They should strive to create sites that work on anything.

I don't see how that would be a true statement in almost any context, barring specifically using features that you know Chrome doesn't work well with or going through the chromium bug tracker to find things to do that break Chrome.

If developers use Firefox instead of Chrome you do get some rendering bugs in Chrome. Standard compliance have gotten much better, but at one point in my last project Edge, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox where all doing different things while I was trying to fix an odd CSS issue.

I had something similar, then I dug into it and found that my CSS was not specified correctly. After looking into the spec, I realized that what I thought Firefox was doing wrong, was actually the correct behavior. Chrome and Edge just covered up my mistake is all.

Yes. It's easy to end up being confused by different applications of Postel's Law.

This is part of the reason I use Safari as my default browser

I hope this is a joke. Safari is easily the worst of the big four, and view web standards as suggestions that are to be ignored at any time. My company doesn't support IE anymore, but safari, not edge, is the new hated browser for web dev for sure.

Compared to what, Chrome? It took them how long to get position sticky, backdrop filters, etc? Meanwhile Google views web standards as their property they can willy-nilly do with what they please.

I’m still irritated that only Safari implements tail call elimination as specified in the ES6 spec.

Talking from the user perspective ? The chrome/ram meme are enough to explain the issue And I’m sure macbook owners care about battery more than what you think !

And for the argument of Safari is the hated browser I’m more than okey with that at least they still test for it (I feel sorry for Firefox because the oups we didn’t test blablabla

I use Safari so that someone captures user issues that result from developing for Chrome. Other people on the team use mostly Firefox/Chrome so we have coverage of all the major browsers we target.

Why? Safari is the worst out of all of the current options as far as CSS rendering goes.

So not everyone on my team is using Chrome to view the sites we’re working on.

But also, ime, Safari has the best UX of all the browsers I’ve tried.

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