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The Double Edged Sword of the Web

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Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#31

Post by zeveb »

cptskippy wrote: post #10
morkro wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree on this one. I have lots of respect for Nicolás and his work, but I think this article shows a little bit of arrogance towards users who don't use Chrome as their primary user. On top of that he disabled accessibility on Firefox entirely in favour of design preferences. Many developer might not care, but it's an attitude which needs to stop.

It's more than a little arrogance, it's a superiority complex. My jaw dropped when I read the following because it speaks volumes about his mindset. > As such, visitors are mostly privileged web developers using macOS and Google Chrome.

> My jaw dropped when I read the following because it speaks volumes about his mindset.

> > As such, visitors are mostly privileged web developers using macOS and Google Chrome.

Yeah, mine too. I wouldn't think of using macOS & Chrome as a privilege. A cost of doing business, perhaps, but not a privilege.

I'm privileged to have a job in which I'm running Linux and Firefox, and I really do count that as a privilege.

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#32

Post by HugoDaniel »

The browser stats used as the foundation for the post is useless because he does not state how many total users was the sample based and what time frame was it taken at.

At the limit of this kind of "logic" I could equally say that 100% of google search visitors use TorBrowser (out of 1: me in a very precise time frame).

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#33

Post by insin »

bhauer wrote: post #18
Touche wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get this at all from the article. He didn't say that other browsers are stupid, he said that they have bugs; the outline thing is a particularly nasty Firefox bug. It might also be a spec bug if the spec is not detailed enough on how to draw outlines; but it's also definitely a Firefox bug because it looks terrible. There's nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade.

I agree that calling out bugs, especially if they've been reported and ignored, is worthwhile. That said, I think what the parent comment is saying is that Chrome too has bugs and a web developer who exclusively tests in Chrome forgives those bugs as "just the way HTML rendering works." This makes the developer effectively blind to Chrome's defects. A developer who uses Firefox exclusively will have a similar feeling…

> A developer who uses Firefox exclusively will have a similar feeling of privileged disdain for Chrome's bugs: "How can Google ship a browser with this problem? This is unacceptably broken!"

I don't know about its bugs, but that's pretty much how I feel about Chrome's address bar when I'm testing apps in it :)

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#34

Post by devishard »

exceptione wrote: post #3

I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does. It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome. This mindset makes me angry. The same applies wh…

The best part is where you visit the site in Chrome and it still looks terrible. Really, you needed to put an opacity transition on the orange background of each of your comments?

Maybe if the site had a cleaner, simpler design it would be easier to make it work on all browsers.

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#35

Post by Nadya »

exceptione wrote: post #3

I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does. It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome. This mindset makes me angry. The same applies wh…

>....trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does.

It took me finding the bug on the Chrome bug tracker to convince my team that Firefox was rendering things correctly, but because we code/design on Chrome it "looked wrong" because it had been designed to look right in Chrome, which was actually wrong. I can no longer remember the exact bug it was unfortunately - had something to do with positioning elements and flexbox though.

Oh - and font rendering. Fonts are always "too thick" in Firefox because Chrome has a poor implementation of font rendering since like Version 21 (22?) and renders fonts thinner than they should be. :)

Also someone who will never switch to Chrome, but for different reasons. I hack the UI and UX of Firefox to be almost unrecognizable as Firefox and Chrome doesn't allow for that level of freedom. There is no userChrome.css to modify, addons are more limited in what they can modify, etc.

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#36

Post by magic_beans »

morkro wrote: post #4
exceptione wrote: post #3

I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does. It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome. This mindset makes me angry. The same applies wh…

I have to agree on this one. I have lots of respect for Nicolás and his work, but I think this article shows a little bit of arrogance towards users who don't use Chrome as their primary user. On top of that he disabled accessibility on Firefox entirely in favour of design preferences. Many developer might not care, but it's an attitude which needs to stop.

The design he's so wedded too isn't exactly stellar either... I don't understand why he didn't just update his design instead of hacking his way to match the design in FF...

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#37

Post by magic_beans »

devishard wrote: post #34
exceptione wrote: post #3

I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does. It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome. This mindset makes me angry. The same applies wh…

The best part is where you visit the site in Chrome and it still looks terrible. Really, you needed to put an opacity transition on the orange background of each of your comments? Maybe if the site had a cleaner, simpler design it would be easier to make it work on all browsers.

I noticed this too... The site's design is terrible, and I don't get why he has fought so hard to persist a terrible design...

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#38

Post by joshkpeterson »

exceptione wrote: post #3

I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does. It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome. This mindset makes me angry. The same applies wh…

Where do they say other browsers are stupid? You're reading some sort of superiority that isn't there. This is a good list of some cross browser development gotchas -- No need to downvote.

Re: The Double Edged Sword of the Web

#40

Post by dasil003 »

The bugs we have to deal with today are a gift from god compared to the bugs we had to deal with 15 years ago when CSS was just getting traction and then we went through 7-8 years of stagnation due to Microsoft trying to leverage their position to hold back the web. Frustrating as multiple engines is to deal with, it's a small price to pay for the benefits of a true open standard. I've been burned enough by WONTFIX bugs in proprietary software (Adobe Flash I'm looking at you) that I know which double-edged sword I'll put my weight behind.
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