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Comment by FractalHQ | Hacker News Reader

As much as I hate monopolies, I hate having to write apps for 5 platforms at once even more. If my app works on Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, Android, and Edge, and I have to jump through hoops and litter the code with if (isSafari) workarounds to get it working on iPhone, the last thing I want to do with the remainder of my time is start from scratch to fix all of the bugs or missing apis so Firefox can run it for 1% of users.

I understand the risk of a chrome monopoly, but boy do I feel a the conflict of interest when these conversations come up…

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From my experience, if things work in Chrome, they will likely work with Firefox too, excluding very new apis, it isn't much of maitenance burden. With Safari every project I work o I discover new Safari quirk or bug. If you can make it work in Safari you can make it Firefox too.

1% is an interesting number [0]

Instinctively it feels small, but in practice increasing your CVR on your registration page by 1% is usually a big deal. What kind of other costs in ads or marketing would you pay to get a 1% increase to your user base ?

For most company I worked for, a bug affecting 1% of the users would be a critical show stopper.

[0] Setting aside if you really have 1% in firefox vs more % in Brave or Vivaldi,

why checking for specific browser rather than using feature detection to properly handle different browser capabilities? ( Good docs at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes... )

For safari, I used to run into a lot of graphical bugs, (especially when pushing things into layers on the gpu with transforms). The second big category would be things that are performant on low end android phones with chrome are not performant on older iPhones and vice versa.

Semi related, I was suprised just how many bugs Safari has with animation timing while using Web Animation API. You can't possibly feature detect that, Motion one lib even disables GPU acceleration for them in Safari. In that case parsing user agent is the only option.

https://motion.dev/guides/waapi-improvements#webkit-bugfixes

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