small group of lazy front-end people? i think you actually mean a small group of chrome developers single-handedly deciding how web should work, while having the vast majority of the market share to push those decisions.
web should be able to be viewed in any browser and get the same document.
If there are sites that work on Chrome but not Firefox, it just seems to me that either:
- Chrome or Firefox must be breaking web standards
- Web standards must be unspecified for that use case
I have no idea the fix though, the web is so massively complex now, that I don't even know what specifying standards for every use case would involve.
Chrome/Blink has exclusive APIs, that often are not on track to be a standard.
This makes Safari (Webkit) and Firefox (Gecko) look bad, because they end up having to implement the same APIs, and then, maybe, it's standardized. Browser extension APIs come to mind.
I wish the situation was more neat and tidy, but it's not.
I've seen them putting all effort on eye-candy while ignoring that the page only works on "retina" display and then only on Safari.
What happens when you put a percentage height on a row in a table. What happens when an element has a margin that doesn’t fit in its parent. How does adding display: flex effect how text is laid out inside an element.
These are things that Gecko and WebKit/Blink handle differently. Some of them are defined in the spec and have tracking bugs, but some of them just aren’t addressed. I don’t think it’s maliciousness or laziness on anyone’s part, but the web is too complicated for there to be multiple perfectly compatible rendering engines.