[evmar]

I was thinking about this comment and I thought of the perfect analogy: accessibility.

Everyone in the abstract would like to make accessible websites. Some people at Google are really passionate about accessibility and advocate for it, while others don't know as much about it or overlook it when building their product. There's surely some organization-level guidelines like "make sure your product is accessible before launch" that have likely changed over time as different people in power have prioritized different things, and with uneven enforcement when it comes time to launch a given product a given team will make a random judgement call as to whether to delay their launch or cut some other feature in order to make the product accessible. (Inevitably someone will protest here with "it's not that hard to make an accessible product, just do X Y Z and test configuration Q, and it's really important". That is true but doesn't change the reality that it has a cost that takes away from other work.)

Now substitute "Firefox compat" for "accessible" in the above and it all still applies pretty much perfectly.

I don't believe there's an anti-Firefox (or anti-accessibility) conspiracy at Google, but rather just that Firefox/a11y compat is not a hard blocker for launches. The net effect is the same, of course, in that it's as if every product somehow discovers a way to break a11y/Firefox, but it's actually just how entropy works -- unless you're continuously watching out for and verifying your a11y/Firefox it's inevitable you'll break it.

(disclaimer: I worked on Chrome but I wouldn't know either way if there is any higher-level conspiracy; as an engineer who has built multiple products in different orgs I have seen a general lack of specific guidelines/requirements for a11y/Firefox)

[cm2187]

Even for smaller websites, I don’t think any web developper doesn’t test how the website renders on Firefox and Safari. Not doing so during the development process seems like a deliberate decision rather than an omission from engineers that do not know better.

[statictype]

Plenty and plenty of developers never tested on anything more than IE. And today on anything more than IE and Chrome.

And plenty of developers test on IE and Chrome and Safari For iOS and call it a day.

Its very much not obvious that this is a deliberate decision and not an omission.

[nindalf]

This is an excellent analogy.

Personally I'm surprised by Google's attitude to a11y/Firefox because all their products have millions of users. 10% doesn't sound like much, but 10% (Firefox market share) of 50 million is more than the population of many countries.

I guess they rationalise it by saying "our product is new, with 0 users right now. Let's focus on the largest segments of users (Chrome, non-a11y) and ship an MVP. If it sticks, let's expand to Firefox, do the a11y work etc." If I was in that PM's shoes, this makes sense to me. As a user ... it feels wrong.

[gregknicholson]

That's market forces for you.

If you just chase money all the time, you always end up with shoddy crap — there's no incentive to be any better than barely adequate, so you're constantly riding that line.

We only end up with nice things when someone dedicates time and effort _despite_ market forces. Mediocre businesses and their besuited human avatars spend so much time insisting they're “passionate” because even _they_ know that giving a shit is the only way you get anything other than crap.

[brainwad]

I think the incentives to not support accessibility/minority platforms grows as the number of users grow, since the potential benefit of the features you would not implement because you have to work on a11y or Firefox support is multiplied by your number of users.

[jefftk]

> 10% (Firefox market share)

Market share, across all platforms, is closer to:

* Chrome: 60%

* Safari 20%

* Firefox: 5%

* IE: 5%

* Edge: 2%

* Other: 8%

If you just mean desktop, though, then yes Firefox is about 10%. But mobile web is serious traffic these days.