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by vic20forever 2760 days ago
> This will be especially true when Firefox inevitably shutters it's in-house efforts in a couple of years due to the amount of sites that won't work with it, and starts using Chromium too.

Watching Mozilla align Firefox's extension API with Chromium's, I'm a little surprised that they haven't already made the move. If browser evolution continues along the current path, I predict Firefox will switch to Chromium within 3 years.

> Staring into my crystal ball tells me Firefox will become "janky" in the eyes of users on account of how many sites don't load on it like they do Chromium (because developers will only test on the most popular browser, because THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS LITERALLY EVERY TIME).

It's already happening. Until a year or two ago, the only time I ever opened Chrome was when a page using some sort of experimental API ran slowly or not at all on Firefox. Now, the number of mainstream websites I see with serious glitches in Firefox is increasing by the month.

4 comments

I use Firefox as my primary browser and I don't find mainstream websites glitchy at all.
When I find a glitchy site in Firefox, I try chromium. Usually turns out it's glitchy there as well.
Same. I have found one boutique e-commerce site that wouldn't let me complete a purchase on Firefox, but mainstream sites all work fine.
Do you mind listing mainstream sites that have serious glitches on Firefox? It's my main browser, and I can't remember one single mainstream site that glitches on FF.
I just ran into a somewhat important website that didn't work right in Firefox. I tried creating an online bank account with Discover. The register account process only worked with chromium. Once I had an account, though, I could use it through Firefox.
New gmail is pretty awful in FireFox.
I'm not sure it counts if it's a Google website working better in a Google browser.
Of course it counts if you use Gmail.
It counts, sure, but frankly there’s too many competitive reasons for a non-search Google property to not work well in Chrome. An example of this being that Gmail doesn’t work particularly well in desktop Safari, nor in Edge. Chrome though, no problems...
Not mainstream sites, but I do seem to come across more sites that I have to open Chrome for.

I used to put it down to my plugins, but there are some sites (which of course I cannot name) that don't work, even with noscript / ublock disabled.

more sites than what?
i'd bet my money (not all of it, though) that firefox actually adopts servo as its rendering engine instead of chromium.
9/10 times when I encounter a bug either when doing web dev or just browsing the web, it's because of Chrome/WebKit improperly implementing standards.

It's not Firefox's fault if people aren't testing their websites on both browsers, just like it wasn't Firefox or Chrome's fault whenever people only tested their webpages with Internet Explorer and its mess of exclusive APIs and deviations from standards.