[shadowgovt]

> If they don't, the website is broken.

The Internet is a network with social effects. Whether "this didn't work" means "the website is broken" or "the browser is broken" has always been more about end-user experience and the wisdom of crowds than a more concrete definition.

A website broken only on Firefox works for 96.5% of users. I have personally had to make the hard judgment call (as a fan of Firefox!) to not spend 25% of our engineering debugging time on a problem only 3.5% of users encounter.

[dingleberry420]

Right, so you accepted that your website was broken. That can be a valid business decision, but that doesn't not make it broken.

Try this analogy: Most people have functional legs, so why install a ramp? 99% of your users can access your property, so who cares, right?

[karpierz]

> Most people have functional legs, so why install a ramp? 99% of your users can access your property, so who cares, right?

People without functional legs can't simply decide to walk up some steps.

People use Firefox can simply decide to use Chrome.

To be more direct; what's your definition of "broken"? Is it that it doesn't work for you in the manner that you'd like?

[robonerd]

It seems as though capitalism has little room for craftsmanship as a virtue. The only value becomes the dollar value, people see no shame in shoddy workmanship so long as it's profitable.

[shadowgovt]

The way I see it, Firefox's reputation for craftsmanship is unearned. The only time it crosses my desk as a site developer is people filing browser-specific bug reports for it. Its engine does not, in general, benchmark as performant as either Chrome's or Safari's on our site. It's certainly not beating them by enough percentage points for me to suggest people switch to it for performance.

Mozilla has had more time to work on this problem space than their competitors, and they don't have the technical advantage to show for it. They may have been the technologically better choice in the Browser Wars era of Internet Explorer, but nowadays? They're falling down on the technical merits, not just the network effects.

It's free and it's widely available. If they were better than the alternatives more people would switch to them but they're not.

[my69thaccount]

That's too bad. If you didn't make that call it would probably have larger market share. What you've done actually feeds in to the problem.

[shadowgovt]

But that's the issue. It's not my problem. My problem is maximizing the user experience for most of my users, and that involves squashing usability bugs common to all browsers and adding features that have been requested, not keeping up with the Gecko quirks-du-jour.

(Speaking of "quirks-du-jour", the problem eventually "solved itself." The next major iteration of Firefox fixed a rendering regression and resolved the bug. We "solved" the problem spending zero eng-hours on it; you can't beat that for efficiency. But that's the challenge Mozilla faces as an also-ran: burden's on them to keep up with the competition and make their rendering agent on-par with other agents for both performance and strangeness, because they lack the market clout to make developers bend to their flaws and oddities. No matter who the front runner is, there are always flaws and oddities.)

[paulryanrogers]

So a tragedy of the commons?

See it is your problem to offer something to the general public then serve only the defacto monopolist instead of web standards. Because with each small compromise we each contribute to the problem until it reaches a breaking point. All the while those on the margins suffer, some with no real alternative.

For ex in poorer areas where they cannot afford a computer that runs Chrome (which has no LTS/ESR).

[robonerd]

Some people simply have no sense of community or civic duty. Everything is all about them, all the time. If they stand to profit from antisocial behavior, they won't hesitate.

[shadowgovt]

the disconnect, as I see it, is the assertion that supporting Firefox is supporting "community" or "civic duty."

Most of the Firefox alternatives are standards-compliant also (specifically, the two big ones definitely are). And I don't see as many rendering regressions with them as I do with Firefox. So who truly benefits if I devote my team's engineering resources to chasing down Mozilla's bugs?

There might be some benefits to an engine multiculture; with so many engines derived from Chromium or Webkit, one could make a technical argument that maintaining Gecko as third choice has merit. I find that argument to be weak. Gecko has been around for longer than the other two and it isn't remarkably better (and seems to fall on its face quite often relative to alternatives). What if it's just a tech stack whose time has come and gone? How many resources are we wasting propping up an old stack that could be used to build, perhaps, a fourth option? Or solve existing problems in the other two? There's this vague hand-wavy assumption that Firefox represents "the open way of doing things" (odd when it's also maintained by a corporation, like the alternatives), but I don't see it as particularly more open than the other options.

I don't think I'm doing a disservice to the community by refraining from using jQuery and I don't think I'm doing a disservice to the community by refraining from going out of our way to support Firefox.

[paulryanrogers]

The monoculture is ruled by Google. Well funded forks are rarely breaking from upstream. So in practice supporting only one browser, or even just Blink / WebKit, yields more control and power to a single company.