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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah a lot of these demos say the features are widely available, but they don't actually work in my browser (Firefox on Macos).

Makes me wonder if these demos (or the browser support tables) were made by LLMs. They clearly haven't tested the demos in firefox.

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Firefox is pretty irrelevant nowadays. They've dragged their feet for years when it comes to implementing new stuff, and now web devs don't even bother checking Firefox. Because devs know it won't work on ancient browsers, no need to confirm.

My personal trigger events were when Firefox didn't optimize DataView for the longest time, initially refused to implement import maps, and couldn't get WebGPU support done. At that point I lost interest in supporting it.

It's 2026, the most useful stuff was implemented over a decade ago. Stop trying to make the web platform do everything when it wasn't designed for that.

It doesn't matter what it was designed for 30 years ago. Computers also weren't designed to be put in your pocket, yet here we are. Things evolve, and browsers that do not keep up will eventually stop being used.

"widely available" has a precise meaning that includes Firefox (both desktop and Android). it might be irrelevant for some, but let's not twist industry definitions

Based on marketshare, Firefox can easily be excluded from "widely available"

This website says certain features work on firefox. But they don't. You can disregard firefox if you like. But if this "Modern CSS Code Snippets" website explicitly tells me their snippets work in firefox, I expect the snippets to work in firefox. Many of them do not.

again, "widely available" should not be intended in the general sense but as a much more precise industry term. "Baseline widely available" is defined[1] as a feature which has been available on all the core browsers (Chrome desktop and Android, Edge, Firefox desktop and Android, Safari on Mac and iOS) for two and a half years

[1]: https://web.dev/baseline

I don't really care about someones phony definition of widely available. If it runs on 90% of user's browsers, it's widely available. I'll gladly make a web page that puts this definition online so that you can also reference it in discussions, if you want.

Firefox could (should?) be better in several aspects but it seems excessive to say it is pretty irrelevant.

It has 4.5% market share in Europe, 9% in Germany (statcounter numbers).

It is the browser that got the Google Labs folks to write a Rust jxl decoder for it, and now, thanks in part to that, Chrome is re-adding support for jxl.

You can be unhappy with Firefox (I often am myself), and Firefox HAS lost relevance, but can you really say it has become pretty irrelevant?

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