Its great that everything just magically seems to work so well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular browsers.
I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend engineer than frontend these days.
However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about.
but behind the curtains it took additional effort from
the developers of websites you visit to make it so
This is true, but in my (limited recent) experience often it's because Chrome implements some rando de facto new "standard" thing they cooked up so of course they are out in front of the other browsers.
So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX controls work in IE but not Firefox.
Yes absolutely! Also why I tagged on that call-out of Safari and other browsers.
And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.
okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.
> okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
That depends on what you are referring to. No there is not a one size fits all answer. For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API that Mozilla is still debating on because they see it as a security issue. You can agree or disagree but there reason is still something other than "we don't have the resources to do it"
For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API
that Mozilla is still debating on
This also highlights the vastly differing goals of the various parties.
Google explicitly wants two major things from Chrome.
One, they obviously want to track as much personal information as they possibly can, because they are an ad company.
Two, they want "the web" to essentially be a full OS replacement, with filesystem access etc. Because Microsoft is one of their primary rivals (or frenemies, if you will) and they can't leave themselves to the whims of others' platforms. They need their own platform.
These goals are... well, let's say divergent (to put it mildly) from what "the web" means to others. HTTP was originally supposed to be a human-readable way to publish and link information, not an OS replacement, and certainly not a PII-siphoning tool.
And yet, some folks still default to simply assuming whatever Google decides for the web is right, simply because they seem to be moving the fastest.
Yeah, they're usually moving the fastest, but people should think about where they're heading and why.
I feel like each feature has it's own story (and it's own party to blame, when some browsers support it but not others)
If FF is lagging behind Safari on a particular CSS feature that certainly points to FF being behind the curve.
Sometimes it's FF or Safari simply being slower than Google. Sometimes it's a matter of the Chrome team creating an implementation of feature XYZ and getting it minted into the standard so of course they have the only implementation for a while.
Sometimes the FF and Safari teams have specific objections to a feature, often because unlike Google they actually consider user privacy a core part of their mission. Although, of course, with CSS features... that's not gonna be a privacy thing.
Not sure how much of this is living in a bubble or selection bias of negative experiences in common but my own impression of the firefox userbase is that a significant portion of it are using firefox as a "least worst" browser, rather than one they are actually very happy with.
This was me for a few years after the revamp, even after the loss of important functionality after extensions were neutered. But eventually, I couldn't take it anymore and bailed on FF entirely.
I'm pleased to see others have good experience with FF performance, but for me, the performance simply became unacceptable.
That nails me. But that is also the impetus behind my use of almost every single product I use, from my house, to my car, to my food, to my computers, to the os and other software on them. I don't think that is indicative of anything very specific to FF.
I get what you're saying: I'm the same for most products, though I do go out of my way to find and use things that are exceptional and in some cases I've actually kinda succeeded in finding that.
The issue here is that this wasn't always the case, or at least wasn't always this bad. While Firefox has always been far from perfect, there was a time when mozillazine consisted mostly of praise and evangelism, and not all of it naive fandom. Also, as a former Opera user, there was also a time when the landscape as a whole contained a higher quality set of options in general. There were numerous browsers then better than the current least worst.
Even recently, Firefox has inspired hope & interest with Servo, Quantum, and even things like the amazing webextension migration effort: controversial and unpopular with many it was nonetheless a greatly successful engineering effort, and has borne fruit in the recent furore over v3 manifests, with Firefox coming out ahead. It's also got cool added APIs that makes sense for the traditional Firefox community but are still standards compliant and interoperable. But all that progress is now already waning with Servo dev cut, progressive popular distinguishing features like MAC being relegated to APIs & UI removed from core.
There's precious little left to distinguish Firefox from Chrome, and nothing new on the horizon.
Same here. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for 20 years now. There was a period where it would have some issues, but it's been run great and smooth for the past few years. I don't get the hate.
Even the fully local translation is really usable now <3. I don't use chrome for anything and it's not even installed on my daily driver anymore.
Ironically, the only time I have had issues, overriding the user agent to look like chrome or edge fixed it. So those websites were deliberately broken with Firefox, not Mozilla's fault but pure malice and dark patterns. Office 365 is one of these sites by the way.
Imo out of the box it needs extensions to get it to be worthwhile. Its generally worse on battery than say safari, only being comparable when you factor the savings not having to render ads with ublock origin. I catch firefox processes all the time using 15% cpu with no tabs left open, restart it and it drops back to 3% like safari, so something weird is certainly going on. Sometimes I use firefox over an x11 connection and its like a new circle of hell (not what x11 is really for but its uniquely bad for a gui app on that imo, considering some full on gui ides are useable).
no print feature in over 5 years. How can a browser not implement print? (on android) They removed it, then claimed they were working on it, and shut down every single github issue about it
This one got me recently, and the workaround that saved me was the save-as-pdf option hidden behind the "share" icon. Thankfully it uses the print stylesheet specified by the website.
every year i try using firefox again, because the dominance of chrome bothers me and i want there to be a good competitor. and every year i inevitably run into some issue that makes me give up and go back to chrome. I think last time it was a themeing issue with ubuntu's default built-in dark theme. a previous year it was a sync issue.
with their continued slide in marketshare to what is essentially an irrelevant portion of the market, i'm guessing this isn't just me.
Android was a keyboard-only Blackberry clone before it gained touch support. This is why soft keyboards have always been modular since they are a bolted on substitute for physical keys.
The word "first" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and has jackshit to do with it supporting it. Why? Because the overwhelming majority of Android users aren't using a keyboard and are using a touchscreen. You could even extrapolate the woeful state of Android tablet UX, because there's far more Android tablet users than there will be keyboard users because hey, most Android devices only ship with a touchscreen and are cellphones.
An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first device.
A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one input at a time.
Why? It's not an accessibility feature, and desktop OS versions of Firefox still exist. Choosing a hobbled Android device and expecting desktop-class experience is a user issue.
Will it drive worthwhile value? No.
Are there more pressing matters? Yes.
With that said, it's open source. Why don't you implement it yourself? Meanwhile the rest of us have long since moved on from Firefox.
Samsung phones can do things like wireless beam a desktop over to a TV. You can then use a bluetooth keyboard with it fine with Chrome, but not Firefox.
