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Comment by jazoom | Hacker News Reader

As a web developer I'd rather develop for Chrome than IE/Edge. It's pretty much just that simple.

That is exactly the attitude web developers had toward the IE/Netscape situation around the year 2000.

I think that as web developers we have the responsibility to consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences. If not us, then who?

It hardly matters; the Edge teams said that any differences in behaviour compared to Webkit are bugs[1], so they've given up their position as an alternative.

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mo...

Once Safari and Edge stop giving me headaches I might be more sympathetic to their cause.

We still have new browsers popping up, like Brave and Vivaldi. We still have Firefox, which is decent.

I don't understand what your concern is in this context.

The Edge and Firefox teams already spend large amounts of time being bug-compatible with Chrome so websites, especially mobile ones, continue to work.

That time would be better spent elsewhere.

(Note that Brave doesn't have its own engine, it's Chromium. Unsure about Vivaldi - is it Blink based or Presto based?)

Sure. But until someone comes up with the magic wand to fix this I'd prefer one set of bugs to deal with rather than 4. I don't believe the open web is hurt by this, which was the whole point of the original comment.

Thing is as long as web engines evolve you can't have this. There was a moment say 3 or 4 years ago when some people, including key jQuery devs, were saying that Firefox should just switch to WebKit and that would solve web development because there'd be only one engine to target.

What actually happened is that Android phones got stuck on several outdated WebKit versions, Safari on another, and then Chrome forked WebKit into Blink.

So instead of one engine, you now have...like 5 or 6, realistically.

Trying to target standards compliance instead of relying on browser quirks is still the best strategy, both for devs and the ecosystem. It was in 2002 and it still is in 2017. Without it, we wouldn't have iPhones, Android phones or Chrome, for crying out loud.

Vivaldi is an Electron-based wrapper for Chromium - thus it's Blink, not Presto. Since Opera moved to Blink a while back as well, I'm fairly certain no extant browser uses that rendering engine, and I believe its development has ceased entirely.

I understand your point and I actually make sure that my websites target IE10 and up, but it usually happens after I'm done in Chrome.

Have you worked with Edge/IE? The pain starts with, as a Mac user, having to boot up a VM and ends with the, in my opinion, horrible development tools compared to Chrome or even Firefox. In this state Edge will never be more than an afterthought.

"as a Mac user, having to boot up a VM"

So are you a developer, or a Mac user? Do you develop for Mac users, or users?

For users. Yet I happen to be a developer on a Mac like many others. As mentioned before I'll make sure that it works in IE/Edge, but having to jump through hoops to do so will never make me treat the process as more than a checklist item close to finishing the project. Of course I don't expect Windows developers to see it any other way with Safari.

This is a non-issue for cross-platform browsers.

If a large percentage of your users have IE/Edge you might want to tests these early on, or even develop with them.

I do the same.

Only IE, Chrome and FF and their mobile versions are relevant on my daily workflow when working on web projects.

Then I get hold of one of our pool Macs and iDevices and check Safari for a few hours.

>I think that as web developers we have the responsibility [...]

I'm all for being idealistic, but you can't expect developers to use a software that lacks in performance, features and security. I'm talking about Firefox by the way, because if you really

>consider the health of the entire ecosystem, as well as long term consequences

that is the obvious choice, not Edge.

These things are somewhat self-reinforcing. Many sites feel slower with Firefox because they've been developed on Chrome and avoid the slower sides of Chrome, yet won't take advantage of the paths in Firefox that are faster than Chrome.

This has been especially evident on some Google properties like Google Docs, or the incident where Inbox couldn't support Firefox because it implemented a function correctly where Chrome didn't.

That said, I hardly notice any performance difference on most sites, and IMHO Firefox behaves much better with a large amount of tabs. Security is the main issue, but Firefox sandboxing is starting to roll out.

The rendering performance difference is noticable on almost every site and it doesn't matter at all how they've been developed. Even sites developed in FF with no regard for Chrome features render more smoothly in Chrome.

Then there's the developer tools that slow everything down even more in FF, to almost a halt/crash on some sites, while on the same sites they have no impact on performance in Chrome at all.

That is with an i7 and a mid/low range GPU.

I swap between Firefox and Chromium (yes, -ium, not -e) when developing web-related stuff - one day FF, the other day Chromium, recent versions of both browsers. Development is done on... a 2004 vintage Thinkpad T42p. With a whopping 2GB of memory. If it works on that, it should work on anything. I swap between these two to avoid developing towards one specific rendering engine and to get a feel for how things will work in 'the real world'.

While Chromium does beat Firefox in speed in several individual tasks the overall experience does not differ all that much between the two. Chromium is noticeably more memory-intensive than Firefox, this can go so far as to have the system slow down to a crawl with only two or three tabs open. With Firefox this is much less of an issue, it handles dozens of tabs without a hiccup.

Development tools are more or less on-par between Chromium and Firefox+Firebug (or Aurora). I do not notice the slowdowns you mention when using the developer tools - at least not when comparing between FF and Chromium - even though my system is much slower than yours (1.8GHz Pentium M, 2GB, ATI FireGL Mobility T2 + 128MB). Of course things just are slower on a system like mine so maybe I'm just used to waiting those extra few milliseconds here and there?

In my opinion Firefox has a much better user interface than Chromium, partly due to the fact that Firefox uses GTK (and as such looks (or can be made to look) like most other applications where Chromium comes with its own toolkit.

Once I'm done I test whatever I made on Safari on iOS (the 'new IE6'...) and prepare to jump through some hoops to work around the problems which invariably crop up.

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