The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. This in turn results in more users flocking to the browser as their favorite Web sites and apps no longer work elsewhere, making developers less likely to spend time testing on other browsers. A vicious cycle that, if not broken, will result in most other browsers disappearing in the oblivion of irrelevance. And that’s exactly how you suffocate the open Web.
When it comes to promoting this mono-browser culture, Google is leading the pack. Poor quality assurance and questionable design choices are just the tip of the iceberg when you look at Google’s apps and services outside the Chrome ecosystem. Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as they do, or you are called out for being a laggard.
Without a healthy and balanced competition, any open platform will regress into some form of corporate control. For the Web, this means that its strongest selling points—freedom and universal accessibility—are eroded with every per-cent that Chrome gains in market share. This alone is cause for concern. But when we consider Google’s business model, the situation takes a scary turn.
An excellent article on just how dangerous the Chrome monoculture has become to the open web. I switched away from everything Chrome recently, opting instead to use Firefox on my laptop, desktop, and mobile devices.
So aside from the fact that — as far as I can tell — the author doesn’t seem to have any special experience in the field beyond that of any other web developer; they don’t do a good job of supporting their case that Google’s quality control is bad, or worse than their competitors. Maybe it is, but it is a claim they need to back up.
There is a critical flaw in this claim — Safari is the “other platform”. iOS only runs Safari so developers must test against Chrome and Safari. Safari has enough share world wide, and interestingly, enough web developers running MacBooks that those two platforms get the attention.
From a web user point of view, we don’t really see many ‘compatibility’ problems. I think it’s Firefox that’s losing out in this battle. Now that Microsoft is basing Edge on Chromium, the end is nigh for Firefox. Had they chosen Firefox, then that would bring back a healthy cross-platform testing base.
Maybe the bigger irony here is that we are in the same spot we were in 10 years ago with IE. But this time, real users like Chrome. Developer gripe will not change this. IE 6-8 was a bad user experience.
Firefox needs a dominant patron like Samsung to survive.
Safari is not really “the other platform” for 2 reasons:
1) It uses roughly the same rendering engine as Chrome. It is Firefox that is really different. (JavaScript is more different)
2) Safari is only influential on iOS, not on MacOS. If iOS is important to you you make an app, not a website. Safari on MacOS has a smaller marketshare than IE
So yes, it is FireFox that is losing out in this battle. People only test on Chrome and assume it will work on other browsers while it is most likely to not work on FireFox. Basing Edge on FireFox wouldn’t have made any change in this because Edge had barely any marketshare.
Firefox already has a dominant patron…It is Google! (used to be Google, became Yahoo, now Google again*
src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing and no more recent info after 2016 and https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/
Yea, Desktop Safari is most certainly a second class citizen on the open web. It’s my daily driver, and it’s always finding bumps in the road.
> If iOS is important to you you make an app.
This really depends on what you’re doing. If you _only_ care about iOS, yeah, make an app. If you care about running on anything, you make a website and make sure it runs properly in Safari on iOS, because it’s a whole lot easier than having to write a dozen different front-ends for your application on different platforms.
“Dozen”? Nowadays it’s just apps for iOS and Android, and maybe a website that works on Chrome…
Firefox is just as bad as Chrome,maybe even worse. Have you had the misfortune of encountering the latest version of this browser and the way it screws up things on your computer *WITHOUT ASKING FOR YOUR PERMISSION TO DO SO*
And yes I’m talking about the way it disables extensions and other things without bothering to ask first.
I also think this author has a weak point. Making a secure browser is very difficult job. I certainly don’t want Firefox to go away, but Chrome is not IE. IE was closed and poorly written and widely hated. Chrome is open, well tested and very well written. You can look through the extensive design documents to understand why certain choices were made, and what other options were discarded and why.
In addition, Google is not the only company with an interest in Chrome. Opera, Vivaldi, and Microsoft care about the browser technology. There are numerous companies using Electron to build apps, a platform which was developed by and is still driven by a company that is not Google.
Big companies are generally run by selfish people and generally can’t be trusted to do anything but make money. (And sometimes not even that.) On the other hand, they have massive resources to invest in improvements to systems that can have far-reaching benefits. It is good to have a balanced view, but this kind of FUD and it’s conclusions are not helpful.
Agreed. There’s a big old category mistake in this. There is something to the idea that we should have more than one actively developed platform implementing a standard, and we’ve seen similar conversations about Linux and POSIX. But somehow, the browser landscape doesn’t get compared to Linux, which is the more appropriate comparison. Linux dominates in its space(s), and Blink in its. Linux is not Windows, and Blink is not Trident (on which IE/Edge is based). I love Firefox, but I’m not kidding myself – it’s like using FreeBSD when everyone else is using Linux. And really, that’s fine.
Gotta say, I’m not sure where the Firefox hate (I know you said you love it, but see the rest of my comment – also others had some negative comments) is coming from. As someone who has used both Linux and FreeBSD and many others, I definitely wouldn’t put it on the same level of disparity as that which exists between first-rank Linux distributions and FreeBSD (no disrespect to FreeBSD meant!). I like Firefox since the Quantum release, though I understand it has some bad history before that. Every now and then I’ll want a plugin that only exists in chrome-based browsers, but I can fire one of those up easily enough.
Maybe I’m just not using enough fancy, modern browser features – but I can watch netfilx and amazon video in Firefox more easily than some Chrome-based browsers on Linux (Chrome itself is usually fine).
I’ve used Firefox since it replaced Mozilla, and I used Mozilla since it replace Netscape, and I used Netscape since it came out. I’d really be pissed to no end if FF went away. I’d probably just use one of the FF forks, like PaleMoon or Ice Weasel.
The issue I have with those forks is that in many ways they are woefully behind on some very core Gecko components, and I find it quite hard to believe that they are comparably secure to modern Firefox. It’s true that Pale Moon tends to backport some security fixes, but for instance their SpiderMonkey version (the JS engine of Gecko) has fallen quite far behind, and they are using older versions of many core Gecko APIs that are required to update.
Pale Moon is basically a nice coat of paint on an increasingly outdated (and very likely increasingly insecure) Firefox, without any viable path to improve the internals.
As a long time Mozilla user, I can testify I developed a love-hate relation with their products, there are parts I do like and parts I do absolutely hate. I would definitely be sad to see Firefox die, but I can also understand such a death is deserved (is death sentence when an app annoy and disappoint its users).
“FlyingJester
The issue I have with those forks is that in many ways they are woefully behind on some very core Gecko”
You’re an idiot. The people who are abandoning Firefox in favor of PaleMoon don’t really care about such things. They care about the fact that extensions they’ve been using for years have be deliberately sabotaged by morons like yourself for no real reason and without any real concern about that will affect them..
Are your really that surprised that you’ve have been basically told to f*** off by the arrival of the PaleMoon forks?
You shouldn’t be.
I think that the author does not realize that web applications are becoming increasingly complex, while budgets do not grow at the same pace (if they grow!). Hence, time for testing is scarce and that is why, IMHO, many developers choose to test the web applications that they do only on Chrome.
It is not only that Chrome has the largest market share, but also: (a) The packed development tools are the best and (b) The fact that many web development frameworks promise cross-browser compatibility, and that usually does happen.
On top of that though, if something works correctly in Chrome and isn’t using bleeding-edge API’s, it probably works already in just about everything else except IE, Edge, and Opera Mini with either no modification, or near zero modification. The same used to be the case with Firefox before Chrome really took off, and it wasn’t unusual then to see people develop for Firefox, and then just take the time to get it working in IE without breaking it in Firefox.
And of course, there’s also the simple factor of market share. More web developers use Chrome as their default browser, therefore more developers use Chrome as their primary development platform.
Hey moderators: can we delete this spam comment?