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Comment by DarthGhandi | Hacker News Reader

How many of your production end users are using firefox? Low single digits?

I am my own favorite production end user and I use firefox.

Do you think those numbers have anything to do with the fact that there's an encroaching browser monoculture right now, hearkening back to the IE6 days?

"Chrome isn't becoming IE6, Chrome is actually good" ~ A person who didn't use IE6 when it was new.

If memory serves, IE5.5 was actually a belter of a release and came at a point that Netscape Navigator (*spit!) was beginning to really cause trouble.

Still didn't mean I'd've been happy with a monoculture, no matter how swear-inducing things got.

Strange for me to think al these years later that my beloved Firefox came from the ashes of Netscape!

I have memories of a Microsoft evangelist in the 90s. He told us "IE4 is good but everybody uses Netscape." IE4 wasn't that good IMHO, IE5 was probably better than Netscape (the company was starting to collapse) and IE6 was the better browser by far, until it stagnated and Firefox appeared.

If your attitude had been prevalent in 200x we had still been stuck with IE6.

The reason we aren't is because we "old" devs fought against it and got lucky that Microsoft forgot IE at the same time as Firefox became really good.

Today Firefox is getting good again (edit: see added footnote [0]) and Google only needs to do a couple of mistakes, and that includes the one which they already seems pretty committed to - or maybe get some IMO really well deserved punishment for anti competitive behavior - before things become more competitive.

But that still depends on us fighting to keep the web cross browser compatible until then.

[0]: for my and many others purposes it was always better, I actually tried toblike Chrome back when it was the underdog and it just never cut it for me

I am using Firefox, and I find that attitude among developers infuriating.

If not enough users are using a platform, let's actively sabotage for that platform by making it less viable, further justifying your own laziness? Is that it?

As someone who has gone from Amiga, to Mac, to Windows PCs, to FreeBSD and now Linux (not to mention the smart-phone story!), I take pride in my work being portable and cross-platform friendly. I have absolutely no desire to go back to the mono-culture days of MSIE.

If you put it on the web, it should work everywhere, otherwise you're just being lazy and/or incompetent.

Being portable and cross-platform doesn't mean you can't take advantage of things unique to a subset of platforms to provide a better user experience on those platforms. You just need to check for support and provide fallback on those platforms without support. One could easily argue that just using the lowest common denominator across platforms is in fact the lazy and/or incompetent option.

Also you mentioned in another comment there being 2 browser-engines. There are in fact 3 major browser-engines.

> Also you mentioned in another comment there being 2 browser-engines. There are in fact 3 major browser-engines.

Fair enough. I was thinking in terms of browser-engine families (WebKit-based, Gecko-based) and tried to keep things simple, because I didn't want to overcomplicate my comment.

You're right though that there's Google WebKit (Blink) and straight WebKit and that does make a difference which matters in this context.

> If you put it on the web, it should work everywhere, otherwise you're just being lazy and/or incompetent.

Everywhere? Do you support IE6 users too?

Most of what I put on the public internet supports IE6 just fine.

It might not look as pretty but if nothing else (TLS etc) stands in the way it should Just Work (TM) thanks to the magic of generating the content on the server side and also careful use of CSS.

...and what if it is in the low single digits? 1% of 10000 is still a 100 (potentially paying) users. Should we abandon accessibility efforts as well because of the low single digits users?

What kind of thought lead to such questions even being asked in this community or presumably intelligent people ?

I can understand the down votes but it's an interesting question nonetheless. I'm a Firefox user, but my customers? 5%. I'm still surprised by this.

> I'm still surprised by this.

What you are observing is the same thing that got Microsoft in anti-trust trouble back in the days, but which is now being done web-scale instead of desktop-scale by Google.

Also, Google is/was bundling Chrome as a drive-by installation with lots of other popular downloads, so less competent users got their (other) browsers replaced by Chrome, possibly without knowing.

HN users are probably offended by this comment but the truth is outside of devs very few people use FF. What I see around me is that people use either Chrome or Safari, but mostly Chrome.

Personally, I tried to use FF a couple of months ago but it didn't work for me.

Very dangerous position and self-defeating.

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