Is there a reason why? Less funding? Web devs don’t make the pages Firefox friendly? Since the user base is smaller, they just don’t care?
Hmm, do you mean in the web console?
I know Firefox has a bit of a reputation for being rather precise in how it handles web standards compliance. So, it’ll show comparatively many warnings and errors, if you don’t keep to the web standards.
This is actually quite useful for web devs, because it means, if Firefox is happy with your implementation, then it’s relatively likely to run correctly on all browsers.
Yeah, if that’s what OP means (though that’s unclear), I’m not sure why OP thinks it’s a bad thing. It’s a good thing.
Or maybe OP means Firefox crashes more or something. In which case I can only say that hasn’t been my experience.
My experience has been, however, that Firefox is quite usable on a Raspberry Pi 4 while Chromium is far too resource hungry to be usable on that platform.
Anecdotal, but I’ve never once had a problem with any function of Firefox in the decade I’ve been using it. On the contrary it’s been the most stable browser I’ve had the pleasure of using, orders of magnitude more reliable in all situations than Chrome or Opera ever was.
This post smells of astroturfing. There’s been an awful lot of “why is Firefox so shit?” posts recently, now that Google is proving itself untrustable.
The only time I’ve ever had issues with errors or ads is while using it on iOS, because it’s not possible to add extensions. Otherwise as you said, it is by far the best and most stable browser I’ve used in the last decade
Back in the early days I found Firefox to be clunkier and slower than Chrome, which was the reason for my using Chrome for well over a decade. But since Chrome became Google’s My Little Spyware, I’ve moved back to Firefox and it’s so much better. More stable, better customization, and way more privacy focused.
Someone else said it but yeah, this feels like astroturfing.
I don’t think I’ve experienced this. Do you mean some pages not working in Firefox, but working in Chrome? That’s mainly because of parts of web standards that are ambiguous or undefined, and Firefox and Chrome have different behavior. Some web developers (read lazy web developers) don’t test in Firefox, so they write bad code. Both Firefox and Chrome follow the standards, so if web devs just stick to the standards, everything should work.
Not a dev, but I work with them. It’s often the product manager that pushes an ignore everything but chrome so we can ship more features. I’ve seen devs argue and lose on such things.
it’s like how something like 99% of computer viruses or tailored for windows. most of the people that you’re going to be pulling revenue from are using Chrome, so optimize for Chrome and then ship
Once in a while I’ll get the odd webpage that supposedly isn’t supported on Firefox or doesn’t render completely well. I always assumed web developers just made their stuff for the largest audience, which is Chrome users. Back in the day it was the same with IE…
I work in web and app development company and we don’t check Firefox anymore, because it’s the only outlier and has not many users. But mainly because we wouldn’t have to do it for any other browser specifically and Firefox is not special in any way. The errors come from it being more strict, which might sound good, but it’s actually really just inconvenient. The errors go from image alignment issues to apps not working at all. We don’t fix any of that.
If you’re developing software for one client who only uses a specific browser, I can see this being okay, but several times I have chosen not to buy things from websites that were broken in Firefox. I don’t bother to check whether they’d work in Chromium, I just buy it elsewhere.
The number of people who act like me probably isn’t large in absolute terms, but how many customers have been lost because of a broken website that you didn’t even know about because they just left without a trace?
This might not apply to you, but it’s some food for thought whenever Web developers decide to be sloppy and not check compatibility for a browser that still has significant market share.
Same. I’m not bothering with broken web sites.
I’m not in the US though, so I don’t get many of them.
The number of people who act like that is negligible. We tested for that.
We don’t see it as that we are sloppy but that Firefox is not a good browser. We came to that conclusion because no other browser acts like that.
We don’t see it as that we are sloppy but that Firefox is not a good browser. We came to that conclusion because no other browser acts like that.
Your views seem to be very narrow despite being a developer.
There are many misconceptions in your short sentence.
I want you to point them out.
That my view is narrow and that developers somehow can’t have narrow views.
That my view is narrow
Yes. Your view is narrow. You do not care about the technical details and just label Firefox as “bad/broken” because you do not know how to work with it. That is a pretty narrow view. You do not care about the idealogical reasons that people bring up in here either.
and that developers somehow can’t have narrow views.
I am expecting a person that is talented enough to be a developer to not have narrow views.
Funny enough this ‘slop’ is compliance, but hey you seem to think you’re mega dev supreme so I’m sure you already knew that
I never said anything about me. I only said I’m pragmatic.
We tested for that
Genuinely curious—how?
Ah. You pray at the altar of Google with the mantra: “It only works in Chrome or Edge. Why not upgrade your browser?”
What could possibly go wrong with giving all the power to one browser engine? If only there was a precedent to learn from…
Haha, no. We don’t pray. We make web apps to make money. Catering to a negligible users who for some reason want to use the single browser with issues, that’s up to them.
I use firefox exclusively, on both my laptop and my phone. It works perfectly on any website I throw at it. I work for a startup which makes video call apps, the web client works perfectly under Firefox, and there’s a grand total of 2 devs working on it.
All this to say that if I come across your website and it doesn’t work under Firefox, AFAIC it’s your website that has issues, not Firefox.
As for the reason, you might be fine with a single megacorp dictating the way the web works, but for many of us who remember what it was like in the IE hegemony days it’s a serious concern.
Again, I’m not a soldier for any software. I don’t care. It’s a pragmatic business decision.
I guess my point is, you should :)
I would, if there wasn’t for my personal experience of using Firefox, when I had to switch to other browsers for some websites I used.
Its because of that, that when we decided to ignore Firefox, I wasn’t against it.
It’s a question of
How much effort (man hours which ultimately translates to $$$) versus how much revenue lost (people not buying because of Firefox bugs)
In my experience this depends on your specific application. Sometimes there are weird bugs or behavior where you have to really hunt down what’s going on. Other times it’s as simple as changing a few css lines or something.
It’s almost impossible to calculate revenue lost, but as much as we tried, it was 0 or almost 0.
Again, we don’t even check anymore.
