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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

PDF support in Firefox is one of the most important additions in recent years. My gripe with Mozilla was they're pursing all these side projects when they really should be targeting feature parity with Chrome. That's the only way people will ever switch.

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> My gripe with Mozilla was they're pursing all these side projects when they really should be targeting feature parity with Chrome. That's the only way people will ever switch.

A bit off topic from the post at hand, but my gripe was the opposite. The relentless pursuit of parity made them indistinguishable giving users no reason to switch (and taking dev time away from distinguishing features). Granted the pursuit of users instead of principles is its own folly that's hard to overcome when money is needed.

I'm curious what you notice is missing in terms of feature parity. I'm mostly a back-end developer (not diving into devtools very often) and switched a year ago. I'm much happier and haven't looked back.

I just want support for APIs, mainly. I get websites from time to time that just refuse to load. E.g.

* blank pages when trying to load an imgur gallery on v68 (esr).

* image uploading not working right on instagram and various other sites, either producing blank images or ones with weird lines.

* several teleconferencing / video meeting websites just don't work properly, whether it's not detecting hardware properly, etc

I have to keep chromium installed so I can use these sites properly.

Please file bugs for these. Also, to the author of this comment: please file bugs for these. (I work for Mozilla and yet I'm pretty lazy about bothering to file these.)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Web%20Com... if you're on desktop.

Can I just say, for the record, thank you for the work you and all the devs put into Firefox.

This kind of problem also happens when developers only test on Chrome. Or if they are using Chrome-specific features and don’t properly handle failover.

> feature parity

Like PDF support?

That’s what OP said yes. That features like PDF fill is essential while things like Pocket are basically non-core side projects.

On rereading I agree with your interpretation, but it's easy to read "all these side projects" as referring to the PDF reader.

Pocket is an acquired company, the integration with FF has been minimal (it does less than the Chrome extension ;)) and I'm pretty sure it pays for itself.

Exactly. He meant this is the sort of thing they should be doing. Not Pocket and WebXR.

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