[ablankst]

> Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this.

Thousands of developers from HN make websites. If they switch to Firefox, at the very least, the websites they make will support Firefox. This won't necessarily make Mozilla commercially viable, but if people are really that concerned about it, they can donate to the Mozilla Foundation.

[wcummings]

I am horrified by the number of developers who only test in Chrome. At my last gig I found glaring UI bugs (whole menus not responding to mouse clicks, for ex) in FF. Sad.

[irrational]

At my job I work in Firefox, a coworker works in Chrome, and a third person works in Safari (to be honest we don't bother checking the site in any Microsoft browser). That way we are able to do cross browser testing fairly easily.

[braveo]

that's purely a business decision.

[wpietri]

Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones.

But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it will get tilted toward that company and away from the rest of us.

That may not be bad for any given business next week; these things take time. But for anybody building a serious business, you're going to have to worry about the long-term, large-scale stuff. Google's been going 20+ years; Microsoft and Apple, 40+; IBM, 100+. They didn't get there by only thinking about the next quarter, and you won't either.

[2bitencryption]

if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you.

but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.

[wpietri]

One of those words that is often a tell is "just". That's where people sweep a lot of things under the rug. Including here, where you've hidden the fact that you made an unsupported assertion that assumes an answer to the question we're discussing.

I'll note that it's a different bad argument, one about consumer choice, than the one I was addressing, which was about business choices. But consumer choices too always have implications. That's why, e.g., boycotts are a thing: small decisions add up.

[braveo]

I'm going to have to agree with 2bitencryption here.

Everything is a "moral choice" when the person demanding the choice feels strongly about it, but that typically means you just lack perspective.

At the end of the day we're talking about browsers and websites, and while people may not LIKE it, when a business writes software it's a business decision as to whether or not they'll target all browsers or a subset.

[wpietri]

By all means, keep on asserting things without demonstrating them and ignoring arguments and examples to the contrary. It doesn't actually convince, but I'm sure it makes you feel better.

[hinkley]

Firefox got big in large part because they had good developer tools long before anyone else did. I worked several places where management would say things like, "don't waste time, we only need this to work in IE". The developers would nod and go right back to creating in Mozilla and then fixing it in IE after, because it was faster.

In that way there was a quiet revolution toward cross browser support.

[realusername]

I can confirm this, everyone I knew at the time was coding on Firefox even if no-one required any compatibility with it just for that reason, it was just much easier to code with.

[hinkley]

When I shared my observations with coworkers, they would nod and say they had experienced the same thing. Same with peers I knew outside of work. Either we were in a very large bubble, or that was happening everywhere. And I think the rise of Mozilla aligns with those observations. It 'just worked' because everyone quietly made sure it did, even when people told them not to.

[braveo]

And yet, the decision to target a specific browser is STILL a business decision.

[Vinnl]

Our business decision is that Firefox needs to be supported as well. The fact that most of the developers use Chrome as their daily driver, however, results in a lot of bugs being seen and caught early (or at all) there.

[ionised]

Maybe your business decision should be a socially responsible one.

[blazespin]

It is a business decision, and the right decision is not to allow for monoculture to develop.

[wutbrodo]

This is just flat inaccurate. Given the GP comments' premise of optimizing only for the business's direct interests, the expected value of your contribution against monoculture is so negligible that it won't balance out changing damn near any habit that you had already chosen. It's a pretty basic collective action problem; if you're optimizing for yourself and your business alone, ignoring the wider picture is still the optimal decision.

The actual argument against (which others are making and which I'm sympathetic to) is that one shouldn't optimize only for direct bottom-line business interests, that businesses and people have a social responsibility, etc etc. But that's entirely different from what you're talking about.

[braveo]

That's not at all what I said.

It's a business decision.

That's it. I didn't say we should optimize for direct bottom-line business interests. I said IT IS A BUSINESS DECISION.

It is not the decision of the developers unless the BUSINESS GIVES THEM THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE.

And even in THAT, it's a business decision.

That's all I said. The business that pays for the labor and chooses the direction they go in.

This idea that a business targetting a specific browser is some horrible social problem is silly. If I'm making a product that's meant to sit in a kiosk running Chrome OS, I'm sure as shit not going to pay for FF and Edge support. If I get it on accident, fine, but if something breaks in FF I'm not putting any effort in fixing it.