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Comment by eyegor | Hacker News Reader

There are several web apis that Mozilla refuses to support, for example webhid or webusb, which all chromium browsers have had for years at this point. Same for little css features and some bits in the webaudio and webrtc implementations.

Mozilla refusing to support webhid in any way: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webhid

Chrome adding it to stable in 2021: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-chrome-89/

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I doubt your average user cares about whether WebHID or WebUSB are implemented. What popular sites (popular enough to cause significant browser market share disruption) use those APIs? (For the record, though, I fully agree with Mozilla's rationale behind not implementing them.)

Not sure what little CSS features you mean, but I haven't found any mainstream websites that don't render properly in Firefox. It's possible that the website maintainers have to do extra work to get them working in Firefox, but regular users don't care about that.

I do recall some things missing from WebAudio and WebRTC, but in practice I'm not sure I've run into any issues with Firefox's implementations. And, again, if website maintainers are doing extra work to make things behave properly with Firefox, regular users aren't going to notice or care.

I use webusb every time I power on my modded Nintendo switch. Only works in chromium

You really do not want to enable WebHIB, WebUSB, WebGL, WebRTC, canvas, `blob:` nor any of Google's 8 APIs for privacy and security reasons.

This is Google's attempt at our privacy thru Embrace, Engulf, and Extinguish strategy.

https://www.creativebloq.com/features/google-apis

The second E is usually Extend. Where'd you see one about Engulf?

That's a Microsoft strategy.

This, they refuse to implement it claiming privacy reasons.

The sad thing is, if FirefoxOS would still be a thing they wouldn't bat an eye.

Can you defend the proposition that Firefox isn't a viable browser for lack of these APIs by listing popular websites that won't work without them?

Serious question, because I can't think of any.

https://suite.trezor.io/web/

https://pixelrepair.withgoogle.com/

Are 2 that pop in to my head

Trezor is... a crypto hardware wallet? I can't imagine this sort of thing is popular enough to block firefox from mainstream adoption.

The pixel repair site is an interesting example, but AFAIK, Pixel phones have about 2% of the US market share and this website is only useful to a small number of those users (those who encounter a serious error) and isn't something even those users would be using often. If I had to use this website and couldn't get my phone fixed another way, I could install and use Chrome (or I presume another Chromium browser) and use it for this single purpose. It would take me only a few minutes/hours(?) and then I'd be done with it. Why would a site like this keep me using Chrome permanently? I just can't imagine that.

I think this is pretty typical of these niche web features. Like most users have no need for web midi and most likely don't even own a midi device that it would work with. But niche websites can find great value in the api being available and offer sites to users which bring them value without having them install a native app. Also I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give people a reason to install and use a competitors browser.

I don't think either of these are examples of websites that might plausibly be holding Firefox back from mainstream adoption. I was expecting something like "[popular feature] of facebook or youtube doesn't work"

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has Chrome installed as a backup, just in case I run across a site that doesn't work right in Firefox, or if I just suspect such a problem exists. Having an alternate browser installed is trivial; it's not like using a different OS.

Never heard of those and I doubt 99% of the population have either.

Not being compatible with those sites is definitely not the barrier to widespread adoption of Firefox.

That excuse from Mozilla for webusb is ridiculous. You already need to setup udev rules to access a device via webusb

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