Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mtVessel 947 days ago
There was a period of time when sites pretty much worked everywhere. In the last five years or so, the number of sites that only work in Chrome was risen precipitously. It's either malice or incompetence, and I have no trouble believing either.
9 comments

Maybe a counter point here, but I've doubled down on Firefox only, even at work. Things like hangouts and many other Goog services seem to have started working more at parity compared to Chromium at least I've found, in the last year or so.
Same for me. Teams didn't even allow me to join about a year ago, but a few weeks ago it just worked. I can't even remember the last time I encountered a site that wouldn't work in Firefox tbh. Am I just lucky?
Teams will let you use chat and join meetings in firefox, but as soon as you try to make a call you'll get the "fuck you" popup.
Even Microsoft’s GitHub has all kinds of glitches unless you’re using a chromium browser.

The general push towards a single engine is just undeniable at this point. Whoever controls the browser, controls the web.

> Even Microsoft’s GitHub has all kinds of glitches unless you’re using a chromium browser.

What are some of the glitches? I'm curious if I've ran into any of them.

Given how bad the current Github UI is (and how sloppy the rollout was) I'm quite content to attribute it to incompetence rather than malice, but:

Type a long blurb into a text input widget e.g. a comment on a pull request. The text just bounces up and down as you type. I've noticed this with whatever the extended support version of Firefox (macos 10.14) is and with the current Firefox (macos 14.1). To be fair GH renders widgets partially off screen with whatever version of Safari comes with macos 10.14 There is no more static text on GH so if you go back further than that (or have javascript disabled) nothing renders at all.

There's no issue tracker (because why would there be?) but there was a discussion thread. Last I saw someone posted detailed steps to reproduce a search bug and the GH response was to lock the discussion thread.

The star repository button sometimes doesn’t work in Safari and you have to toggle it twice (which is lol, you had one job)

Repository settings have a whole lot of knobs and toggles that don’t save or remain disabled unless you manage them from a chromium-something.

I agree that while it doesn’t need to be targeted at specific agents, the fact that they don’t spend the time to test their things on other agents is saying enough.

ctrl-/ doesn't work in firefox for me (the shortcut for "Focus secondary search bar")

But all things considered that's pretty minor

Same, never found any glitch.
> The general push towards a single engine is just undeniable at this point. Whoever controls the browser, controls the web.

I fear you're right. Evidence: IE6. But eventually we will come out the other side.

There was never that time.

1. At first it was “works best with Netscape Navigator”

2. Then it was the same with IE

3. Now it’s Chrome.

There was a step in between #2 and #3 where web developers all used FF while non-technical users used IE6, so supporting both was unavoidable. Chrome didn't become dominant until a decade later.
And web developers then ignored Safari from 2001-2007 before the iPhone came out…
I'm with you on 2 and 3, but was Netscape Navigator similarly anti-competitive in a way that is analogous to Chrome or IE?
Yes. They added all sorts of proprietary extensions that didn’t go through a standards body. Thad’s how we got the “navigator” object in all browsers.
I've been using Safari on MacOS for the last 3-4 years (switching from Chrome), and I can't remember a single site that wouldn't work properly.

With one notable exception of Google Meet, which consistently tended to fail on anything but Chrome.

I reckon it's more webkit rather than Chrome. I think Mozilla is the only major non-webkit browser now.
Chrome isn't really WebKit anymore, though—it's Chromium.
When Google decided to fork Webkit we should have all seen this coming. Safari and Chrome being on the same engine was great, now we are seeing more divergence since we have 3 main engines and more and more are only testing on Chrome.
Wouldn't it be the opposite? When Safari & Chrome were more similar you could get away with testing only one. Now you have to test on at least both Safari & Chrome, and anything that works on both of those is more likely to work on Firefox than something that only works on Chrome.
No one targeting an American market would be crazy enough to ignore Safari because of iOS’s market share.
I wonder why I have not encountered any; it has been well over five years since I last used Chrome at all!
Really? Could you point me to one of those sites?
Gotta protect that ad revenue some how...
Gotta protect your ad revenue some how...