[wisniewskit]

As someone working at Mozilla on web compatibility, I'm tired of people excusing Google like this.

I personally spend most of my time figuring out the Chrome-specific quirks that pages rely on which are non-standard, and the Chrome devs almost never fix before conjuring up some new, ill-defined "standard" that they ship to production before others have even had a chance to figure out the last three.

It's maddening, especially when you look at Google's not-so-sterling track record just with major new "standards" like Web Components, WebRTC and Pointer/Touch events, not to mention how often they ignore Chrome's spec bugs until the web is reliant on them, and other vendors have to change their behavior and the spec to match them. Folks always seem to ignore all of the trouble Google causes, and just think "ooh, shiny new toy! Google good!"

Just imagine trying to implement all of those "standards" while Google is constantly changing them, under-documenting everything, have no reference implementation aside from the one they ship that's deeply tied to Chrome, and expect you to work on their time frame. All while not fixing bugs in the last two new APIs they pushed out, while pushing out two more at the same time. You wonder if they're doing it on purpose so no matter what the "standards" say, they just wait for the web to become reliant on their bugs, and then everyone else has to figure the whole mess out for them, like glorified janitors.

And then you look at the backlog of things you'd like to have fixed instead of figuring out the latest interop issue with some quirk that has a crbug open for three years, and the new privacy APIs and features you'd like to push and you start to feel a bit burned out. So you hop onto HN only to see yet another comment like yours, acting like we're doing nothing at all except "chasing shiny baubles". It's enough to make me wonder whether people like you actually care about the web at all or just want more half-broken new APIs to complain about.

[moron4hire]

Ah, yes, well-known defect-free Firefox is being held back by Chrome's bugs. It has nothing to do with the fact that, anytime Mozilla claims it's getting serious, its answer is to make widely and wildly unpopular UI changes. This is the same, dead-end, low-energy excuse that Mozilla has been using since Chrome released. How did Firefox ever claw 30% of the market from Internet Explorer in the first place if it's true that "the incubment's bugs and half-baked featuers hold us back"? If that's the narrative you're telling yourself, it's no wonder Firefox steadily lost 85% of its marketshare over the last 13 years.

I don't hate Firefox. I don't want browser hegemony. But if Firefox is our last, best hope against a Chromium hegemony, then we're doomed. It's been a decade since Chrome surpassed Firefox in marketshare. Not once, in 10 years, has Mozilla expressed any sort of believable plan to turn the ship around. Mozilla is failing Firefox.

[wisniewskit]

Ok, so the answer is clearly that you don't care.

For ten years now we've been watching non-Chromium browser engines die off while complaining about this, with no new one able to really compete because of the gigantic web API footprint Chrome has championed.

But yeah, go on telling me how some UI changes in Firefox are responsible for all that is wrong with Firefox. I'm sure all of the users still who still can't use Chrome-WebRTC apps in Firefox care about that more.

[moron4hire]

It's not my job to care about Firefox. My job is to deploy applications to my users. You make a better browser than Chrome, I can do that on Firefox. I mean, I already do support Firefox, but maybe I'd stop cursing your name when I have to do stuff like compromise on user experience because I can't offload large chunks of image processing onto a web worker because you still don't support 2D graphics contexts off the UI thread.

It's YOUR job to care about Firefox. And as far as I can tell, not enough people at Mozilla care enough about Firefox to make up for going from #2 browser in the world to numbers comparable to (checks notes) Samsung Internet. You complain about having to follow Google's lead. You aren't just following Google anymore. Y'all have to follow everyone.

And don't even talk to me about WebRTC. You folks have had 10 YEARS to get an act--any act--together around WebRTC. Firefox's WebRTC performance has been notoriously bad for that entire time. So, wait, let me get this straight. You complain about having to bend over backwards to appease Google's way of doing things. But now you're complaining about a case where Mozilla steadfastly refused to bend over backwards for Google for a decade? Over the format of the SDP lines. Because that's a hill worth dying on. Get out of here.

[wisniewskit]

Ah yes, the old "it's not my job" excuse. Then why are you here acting like an authority on this stuff, when you very clearly don't have the slightest clue? I mean, is your actual job to make excuses for Google and shift the blame to everyone else for Google's misbehaviour?

The folks who actually care and work on non-Chrome browsers have been telling us for a decade that Google is not being a good faith player, and is creating an obvious browser engine mono culture. And instead of listening to them, you ignore them to defend Google instead.

You're the one who should get out of here, and educate yourself on this stuff first before you talk big about it. Go find out just what a mess WebRTC has been thanks to Google and its ever-shapeshifting "plan B" (and not just from Google's point of view). It helped kill two major browser engines already, and it certainly wasn't because they didn't try to work with Google to figure it out, or spend a lot of time trying to reverse-engineer it as it changed, or even just trying to import enough of Chromium into their own browsers to ship "plan B" themselves after Google remained silent.

And while I'd love to help you with your pet bugs, including such basic web functionality as "offloading large chunks of image processing to a web worker", I'm here diagnosing live web sites to find that Chrome shipped `event.path` before it was standardized, or haven't fixed three year old bugs with `text-underline-offset`: things that are breaking such hyper-advanced and unimportant functionality on the web as clicking on links and underlining text properly.

So tell me again how I'm wrong and Google's bugs don't affect other browsers. And how it's my fault that Google seems to ignore interop bug reports until they become issues on live pages, and then conveniently say "well, the web relies on this now, so you change the standards and your own browsers to follow suit now"? I guess I need to be flawless myself before I have any right to complain about their bad behaviour?

Do go on. Tell me more about your theories about what I and other Mozilla folks do with our time, and how Google and its defenders aren't making it harder for us to do what we'd really rather be doing for our users.

[dblohm7]

Thanks for writing this. 100%