Memes

Wanna know what’s funny? I work for a company that develops web application for business use. Officially, we claim to support Chrome, Edge (this was pre-chromium Edge but the terms haven’t been updated), Safari and Firefox.

Unofficially? Most of us only test in Chrome and call it a day. I’m literally the only one in the company actively testing Firefox first, and then MAYBE checking if Chrome works. Because 99.99% of the time if it works on Firefox it works on Chrome.

Now, that has at times brought some problems to light that would have been undetected since from what I’ve understood, Chrome is big enough to start introducing ways of doing things that are not officially part of any standard and just.. brute force their way to make it de facto standard. But each and every time someone tries to get away with using breaking non-standard things, it usually gets caught because I’m apparently the only one left who actually gives a fuck about the promises made to customers, as well as the web diversity. Even if we are a small company with a website that gets used mostly by Chrome users, I’m looking out to that 1% or whatever the most recent statistics for our user base was.

But I did also mention Safari is supported. That’s a different beast and I don’t think anyone in our company tests on that, since it’s mainly windows PCs all around. I had a chance to get a new work laptop just recently but didn’t dare to go for a Mac because our test automation code base might have still some windows dependencies and I didn’t wanna start dealing with those just yet, but next time I probably will. On another, newer project I work on I’ve picked Playwright as the test automation framework which has capability for testing on Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, so that should at least be covered. The legacy projcet could maybe be ported on that as well (currently using selenium on that one) but it’s a big hassle and there’s no way I’ll get the green light from higher ups to do so without proper justification and proof that it would improve something.

But yeah, when ever I test manually and go elbow deep into it? It’s Firefox first and whatever I have time for afterwards. It’s worked so far, can’t see why I would need to stop doing it this way now.

I believe it is because unlike Chrome and Edge, Firefox doesn't have enterprise policies or it's equivalent.

I've heard web developers say that a lot of that is due to Firefox's annoying (to them) choices.

I happen to know HTML, CSS, & raw JS even though nothing at all from the last roughly decade, and I guarantee you that I can, and have, written webpages that work on any browser. More to the point, Firefox does not fully support HTML5 - and while tbf none of the browsers do(:-P), it does lag noticeably behind. Then again, it has made major pushes forward in terms of security... though seemingly at the cost of its basic functionality, to the point where if you want to use some even moderately complex coding framework, then you pretty much have to use Chrome.

So what I do is use Firefox for personal use, and Chrome at work. I then also use Chrome at home for personal use, unless I want to view a commercial site (where ads make every experience not only slower but practically unusable imho). Sadly, that's the only option I have, if I want to be able to "view websites".

In the past, Microsoft used to encourage features that would work only in their shitty-AF browser. But I got the sense that this is not what is happening now, b/c it's simply HTML5 - did Google somehow have some "in" with whoever designed that, hoping to give themselves an edge?

Anyway, I use Firefox, but I wish it was better.:-( I'm always so frustrated with it that I keep telling myself I will replace it someday, perhaps with LibreWolf?

100% feel you on the overall sentiment. I've reached an age these days where I don't do anything other than work stuff on work equipment, which not only helps re-enforce the work/life segmentation, but also absolves me of having to worry about and be responsible for stuff like this. Gotta say, it's very nice for mental health and sanity

Hard to argue with them not wanting to support a browser that only makes up 3.3% of browsers used worldwide. Actually, it's probably not even their decision, but the decision of some higher ups that want to save development or software cost.

You might try convincing them by polling how many people in your company wants to use Firefox, though. There could be a significant enough proportion of you guys that do.

I work for an international corporation and we were told to stop using Chrome and use Edge only as it's more secure. Firefox was out of the question and not even installed.

Same with extensions. “We don’t have any plans for bringing xyz to Firefox.