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by zaarn 3023 days ago
>Targeting the most common platform for applications deployment is common sense.

If I recall, people used to say something very similar about Internet Explorer. Of course Chrome isn't as awful as IE back then but still...

IMO it makes the most sense to support two independent implementations, especially for browsers.

>Currently it's around 5-6% and has been for awhile. Saying FF is making a comeback is disingenuous to the actual stats.

For desktop FF has about 10% marketshare. 5-6% includes iOS and Android, the later comes with a preinstalled chrome with little incentive to switch...

With the upcoming ESR 60 release, I also expect (and heard) a lot of companies will switch to Firefox, atleast in the german region (where marketshare increased from Dec to Jan). Some Linux distros might switch over from the previous ESR release and a lot of users could potentially reevaluate.

>I've found my roommate's Gentoo laptop in the fridge doing a full Chromium build more than a few times.

Chromium is not Chrome, it's Chrome with all the Google Binaries ripped out. Chrome itself is, to my knowledge, not open source, only Chromium is.
1 comments
earenndil 3023 days ago
Linux has ~1% market share, though, and probably alreay has a pretty large proportion of firefox users. I doubt linux will affect anything much.
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zaarn 3022 days ago
Linux has 2.3% marketshare (counting ChromeOS and not accounting for users blocking scripts, which is also disproportionally large on linux)
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earenndil 3021 days ago
It may be disproportionately large, but it's still small enough to not have useful effect on such statistics.
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zaarn 3021 days ago
Do you know this wouldn't have an effect or do you guess it wouldn't?

In the end, support chrome is simply supporting another Internet-Explorer-era. Maybe not as IE but it would be very similar.

If you or your company only develop for chrome you're not better than any of the websites that proudly state they will only work under IE6. End of story.

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peterangular 3020 days ago
> In the end, support chrome is simply supporting another Internet-Explorer-era. Maybe not as IE but it would be very similar.

IMO - it is foolish to put Chrome and IE in the same box.

> If you or your company only develop for chrome you're not better than any of the websites that proudly state they will only work under IE6. End of story.

I don't think anyone is going to make an argument to only support Chrome, there's clearly other browser tech out there that we as devs must support. I will however say that you should prioritize supporting the most popular browsing platforms (browser, screen, device, OS, etc) when building applications and/or during testing.

Since you're touting Linux utilization - I will say that I better have a helluva testing budget (time and money) if I'm going to even touch on the long-tail platform combos (anything < 5%). The only reason my apps are heavily tested in Linux is because they're developed on a Debian Jessie box =D

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