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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Respectfully, I don't care that you have two backlogs. Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer.

I'm already sick of how much I have to kowtow to large companies because they treat developer time as costly, but user time as free.

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I think FF users need these sites more than the sites need them. There's little motivation to support a browser with relatively few users, and a big motivation to get users to switch to their platform.

I think you're right, but not supporting firefox leads more people to use chrome and suddenly we're living the exact definition of a vicious cycle.

FWIW I'm not a firefox user myself, but I am not a fan of Google hegemony in browser tech.

I guess many people are in your situation. If they used Firefox, maybe it would help the "Google hegemony in browser tech" problem?

I use Safari so for now I don't consider myself part of the problem.

Though I do launch Chrome to use Teams (because Teams is mandated by my org and I am too shrill and opinionated to install the desktop client).

> I use Safari so for now I don't consider myself part of the problem.

Got it, I misunderstood your sentence above!

> Though I do launch Chrome to use Teams (because Teams is mandated by my org and I am too shrill and opinionated to install the desktop client).

Yes, it doesn't help that companies don't give a damn, either :)

That works in reverse though: they can do that to people that they're happy to lose as a customer. In case of ff nightly, number of users are a rounding error. It's entirely possible that cutting them off is worth having a smaller backlog.

I think you're looking for "kowtow", however much I enjoy "cow-toe"

> Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer.

Respectfully, a lot of developers don't care about losing a small percentage of users. They will get to focus their effort on Chrome users and increase the service quality for them.

That's fine. If they can't manage to make a service work using appropriate web standards then I don't think I trust them with hosting a service, my data, or to create adequate products anyway. -- I mean, what other corners are being cut?

It's quite probable that they are not cutting the corners that make them money and they're cutting (or might cut) everything else. After all, Firefox Nightly's share is a rounding error for Teams (and its users probably not Team's target anyway)

Yes. but things like backups or security will not make them money either. So I can’t assume that they're protecting my data.

Seems like a strange business decision to give up a a percentage of the market to the competition like that.

The percentage of the market that holds a strong opinion about a nondefault web browser with already minuscule (and consistently declining) market share, and will actively avoid you for not supporting it, almost definitely costs more to cater to then to ignore. (Testing time, engine specific bugs and code, etc.)

That small percentage will be extremely loyal to whichever services will cater to them though. A small percentage of users all choosing to use your service can still be quite a lot of users if there is no real competition in the segment.

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