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by StevePerkins 2140 days ago
> @blub: "There's no way that a closed source browser owned by a Chinese company is least bad"

You're speed-reading my comment, and getting it wrong. Vivaldi is NOT Chinese-owned. It is a group of European former-Opera developers, who were unhappy about the Chinese acquisition of Opera.

> @outsomnia: "Ffox is super up to date with latest and next-gen web technologies... what do you even mean by "get with the times"?"

A similar argument pops up on Java developer forums, in discussions about the old "Java EE" specifications versus Spring Boot. The devs who have hitched their career wagons to Java EE just cannot process the reality that it died 5-10 years ago.

"But it's a specification! A standard!"

"But Spring implements a lot of those standards! And the other bits are all proprietary API's, that don't have any alternative non-Spring implementations!"

It doesn't matter. The spec is not the standard anymore. For the vast majority of Java shops, Spring has become the standard. Like it or not, that's the reality.

This analogy is even more extreme when it comes to browser engines. More and more of the web targets Chromium, and is glitchy or non-functional with Gecko. 99% of people could care less which specs Gecko has implemented, or how well they implemented the spec. CHROMIUM IS THE SPEC.

1 comments

You in 2005: "The web targets IE6! Firefox should acknowledge reality!"
In 2005, Mozilla was more innovative than Microsoft. And more dedicated to implementing specifications that Microsoft was ignoring.

Today, the argument for Mozilla is that it's "almost as good" as other browsers. That it "doesn't have as many compatibility problems as you might have heard!", etc.

And they're not ahead of Google at implementing standards. They lag slightly behind. https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+81,chrome+87

If the Chromium team starts resting on its laurels like the IE team did in the early-2000's, then I hope they'll meet the same fate. But right now these situations are not remotely comparable.