[dmart]

I wonder if people realize how low Firefox marketshare has fallen, or if people are stuck in a 2010s-era idea of what the web browser landscape is like. I also think the prevalence of Firefox among the (overall tiny) desktop Linux demographic tends to warp developer perspectives.

It's under 4% - for all intents and purposes a dead browser. I certainly wouldn't devote any engineering hours towards supporting it.

[the_biot]

Firefox's marketshare is hardly the point here. As bob1029 said, there's no earthly reason why you wouldn't just build a standards-based site and have it work on any modern browser.

[zarzavat]

It's a bank. If a customer uses Firefox and loses money because of a Firefox bug or incompatibility, who do you think will be liable? The customer? No way. The bank is on the hook because it's their website that resulted in the loss.

So the bank has to test in Firefox, they can't just put all their hope in web standards that may or may not represent reality.

When Firefox falls to a certain marketshare it makes no sense for the bank to keep testing on Firefox.

[MrWiffles]

> If a customer uses Firefox and loses money because of a Firefox bug or incompatibility, who do you think will be liable? The customer? No way. The bank is on the hook because it's their website that resulted in the loss.

> > So the bank has to test in Firefox, they can't just put all their hope in web standards that may or may not represent reality.

Thanks to the open nature of the web, i can modify the request/response, JS that executes, etc right in the browser. So for your argument to be valid, the bank would literally have to fully trust client side directives and do next to zero validation of the users input. Even banks aren’t that stupid…

And if you know of a bank doing that, please share! I’d love to print myself some free money!

Security issues somewhat withstanding here, but even that argument is bullshit because Chromium/Chrome has just as many bad security bugs as FF, sometimes even more and/or worse.

So no, this is bullshit. The reason they’re doing this is so they can reduce development costs while more likely than not engaging in surreptitious activity surveillance, given FF has some of the strongest protections against that crap that have ever existed. Coupled with recent-ish reports that credit bureaus want to let your browsing data impact your credit score, they’ve already got several big fish on the line willing to buy. And with little to no isolation for client side storage per domain in most of those browsers, i can see no other incentive for them to do this.

[Nextgrid]

I really can't think of how you can lose money because of a browser bug unless you put so much intentional complexity in what is essentially a CRUD app that a browser bug could trigger disastrous failure, in which case the fault is on the developer for overengineering rather than any browser bug.

[haswell]

Yeah, this seems like a red herring at best.

I understand an argument against continuing to test, even though I find it insufficient, but liability doesn’t make sense here.

[handoflixue]

"It makes no sense to appeal to 4% of the population" seems like a bizarre claim, especially since that 4% is likely to be programmers in the top 25% of income.

I'm also not sure what error you're expecting? If browser bugs are a serious risk like this, you should surely be able to cite a few example lawsuits from the last year or two?

[fbrehwerha]

This argument seems bizarre to me considering the volumes of money banks work with and the lack of programmers who only use banks that take Firefox. I'm not sure what you're expecting, that banks are just doing it to spite Mozilla?

[handoflixue]

I really don't believe the return-on-investment for a major bank to support Firefox is negative. Quick Google napkin math says a customer is worth $500/year, and a decent programmer is easily available for $50/hour. You only need to stop one (1) customer from leaving for every day of programming this costs. This thread is at +89 and has 32 comments, so it's probably worth at least a programmer-month.

If you can't make your website Firefox compliant in a month, you have some very deep design issues. Firefox compliance is so trivial that most websites achieve it without even trying, because Firefox follows basically the same standards Chrome does.

[kbelder]

Yep, but the people making the 'technical' decision to support Firefox only see the gains from reducing the labor.

The loss from not supporting Firefox (which I agree, is probably more than the savings) will show up on somebody else's balance sheet. IT saves a bit of money by siphoning indirectly out of Customer Retention, and the details get lost in the noise. It's the curse of large organizations.

[Spivak]

4% of desktop web traffic is Firefox is not at all the same thing as “4% of desktop users also don’t have access to or refuse to use a Chromium based browser and will switch banks because it”.

[fatneckbeardz]

not at the bank i work for. they have some sites that only work in chrome, some that only work in edge, some that only work in internet explorer, and absolutely nobody cares except for some pedantic nerds like me. fixing the problems would cost more than any potential errors they might have.

[neodypsis]

In my country it is the same or worse. Not only banks but the public institutions in general, force you to use outdated browsers (IE, old Firefox) and Windows, coupled with installing sketchy plugins and unsigned .exes transmitted over unencrypted HTTP

[rlpb]

In most industries increasing your reach by 3% is worth doing.

[shultays]

You are not losing all that 4%, most will just launch another browser to for your site if they have to

[hedora]

Or user agent spoof, then blame the bank if it blows up.

(This is what I do. No problems so far…)

[Cameri]

Seems like you forgot what it was like when Internet Explorer was the dominating browser.

[sph]

Sounds like they're actively working towards recreating that world.

I really have no sympathy for a $100/h web developer that has no time to check with Firefox every once in a while that their Chromeism works over there as well. It's not like Firefox is a buggy browser that requires tons of work.

It's pure laziness.

[pipeline_peak]

Not to mention, the core development team has been cut.

Mozilla is rebranding itself into a “Social Justice For Tech” marketing firm.

There are two significant platforms left Chromium and WebKit. I hope that isn’t the future, but browser dominance is such an obscure, indirect problem to the industry that no company would bother touching it.

[vord1080]

Not sure where you got the idea that the core development team has been cut, Firefox development remains strong. For example, here's a 1,000+ line patch that just landed two days ago. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779952

[pipeline_peak]

I shouldn’t of said cut, but they did layoff 250 members 2 years ago and among those were the Servo team.

https://www.protocol.com/amp/mozilla-layoffs-2646950077

[Twirrim]

That's not the core dev team, at all. Servo was a research group, building an experimental browser engine, parts of which did end up transitioning across to Gecko.

[iggldiggl]

Some senior core developers were definitively let go, though, e.g. David Baron (who is now working for Google on Chrome instead).

[devwastaken]

Look at the tech Mozilla produces, all of it is non portable, exclusively for FF, and is not particularly great.

Chromium can be extended in many ways. V8 can be used anywhere and is what spawned node and the idea of JavaScript server and client side.

Firefox is more like a product that's source available than an open source project made to benefit the ecosystem.

They would do better to finally pony up, reskin chromium, and stop playing catch up.

[pipeline_peak]

They really should rebadge Chromium, then they can frolic with Rust UI changes and focus more on what they really seem to care about.

[satellite2]

Falling market share in a growing market doesn't necessarily mean falling total usage.

Additionally, the market FF serves this days is educated, rich and ahead of the curve. Not a market you necessarily want to ignore.

[archerx]

> the market FF serves this days is educated, rich and ahead of the curve.

That’s some weird projection that made me laugh. I used to use firefox everyday until it became too annoying and I moved on to another browser and never looked back. Firefox used to be great but those days are long gone.

[ajvs]

I don't think there's anything I'd exchange for having to suffer more ads, but you do you.

[kbelder]

Generally demographic makeup of FF traffic is more affluent than Chrome, similar to Safari. IE is closer to Chrome.

It can vary by the field or nature of the site, of course.

[lemoncookiechip]

By this logic, no one should bother supporting Linux.