[jpochtar]

We had a good conversation about this before down at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468276.

tl;dr: would you like the Electron app instead? It's available at https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/

It was tough for us, because we're big believers in the standards-based web. We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

Our editor was almost electron-only, but felt it was better to launch with Chrome + Electron than just Electron. Our editor isn't a normal webpage; it's doing all kinds of crazy nonstandard things webpages shouldn't do. It's only in the browser at all so we can re-use a web engine as our editor's rendering engine, since we occasionally show you snippets of compiled code.

I'm personally really sorry as an engineer that we don't support Firefox, Safari, and other browsers yet. It's on our roadmap :)

[WhitneyLand]

Do you mind sharing some of the primary reasons this is required by your editor?

>all kinds of crazy nonstandard things webpages shouldn't do

[jpochtar]

- until recently, there wasn't a universal cross-browser API for pinch zoom support. Not sure if that's still the case.

- we do a lot of work with the selection/focus browser API, which doesn't always work the same / have the same APIs

- until recently, Firefox had a different opinion about where an outline should go wrt positon:absolute children

...and what seems like a million more little things. We decided it was more practical to do Chrome + Electron (basically the same) than try to cover every browser where the standards don't exist or aren't met, since we're touching a lot of surface area and weird corners of the browser.

[WhitneyLand]

Thanks. I think it’s a good decision, it seems like a classic example of needing to recognize sometimes going against conventional wisdom makes the most sense given particular circumstances, like gaining critical mass in a start up. As to where the right decision might be different for a later stage company.

[cryodesign]

Hey thanks for explaining and like I said - I get it's early stage - was just curious what was missing in FF.

Anyway, will try out the Electron version and definitely be keeping an eye on this one...