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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

Painful as it is to admit, even Firefox is not worth testing. In our B2B site, more people are using IE11 than FF.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share at ~3% of overall share / 7% desktop-only share it's hard to justify putting extra effort.

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It's not just about the number of your users who are directly using Firefox; it's also about ensuring your code isn't inadvertently depending on non-standard Chrome quirks, and promoting standards compliance, portability, robustness, and such-like goodness on the web.

(Test IE11 as well, by all means, if it's relevant to your users; but it's much less relevant to the future of the web.)

i’m just being silly when I ask this, but if you have data that most of your users, use Chrome, who cares if quirks that work in chrome don’t work and other browsers, if your users aren’t using those other browsers??

Well, that way you don’t contribute to making more difficult for people to change browsers.

Maybe most of your users use Chrome because they don’t have a choice, i.e. the website is broken in other browsers.

Every time they bump into something they dislike about Chrome, they’ll remember who is forcing them to use it. When an alternative comes along and works in their browser of choice, they’ll switch and advocate for it.

Do we REALLY want a repeat of IE?

We should learn from what happened with Internet Explorer. It had a much larger share than Chrome has now, and a lot of people designed for IE first. The consequences were too many to write down in this comment. Let's just say there were some regrets :-)

We don't know how the situation will look like in the near future. If a large enough portion of the users switch to a different browser, it quickly becomes an issue.

It is in my opinion part of what companies should include in their risk assessments. Looking at the general trends, I would not be surprised if at least EU governments and institutions will ban Chrome due to privacy and data security. That will probably lead to others switching as well.

Quirks that only work in Chrome may stop working in a future release. Things that work on Chrome and FF are more likely to continue to work.

Ideally, you'd have reliable usage numbers by browser and platform, as well as a threshold of usage that demands testing. Maybe that's 1%, 5%, 10%, 20%? Aggregate up, so if FF desktop doesn't hit the numbers, maybe FF in general does, or maybe 'other browsers' does. Or maybe commit to testing the top N platforms over 1% usage.

Lower on the usage scale doesn't need to be pixel perfect or pretty at all, IMHO, but major site features should still work.

Maybe they are not using Firefox, because your site is broken in it, and they have no other way to tell you this?

This. There are some websites that I have to login that are completely broken when using Firefox. I login with Brave on those and am on a constant lookout for competitors that work on Firefox. As soon as I find them I jump ship and take my money elsewhere.

Survivorship bias!

Yes, this is something I've experienced directly from end-user perspective as well as debugging/user-analytics perspective.

Yep, it's the classic self-fulfilling prophecy. Even a lot of non-techies are aware that there are multiple browsers, and will just switch to whichever gets the job done. So if you're seeing less % of any specific browser than the overall web your site is probably broken on that browser. If it's not obvious by now, that means you need to do more testing in that browser, not less.

Exactly this happened at the company I work for, and their move to only support Chrome was hailed as a revolutionary time-and-effort saving affair.

grrr

I gave up on Firefox and went back to Blink (via Qutebrowser) in part because of Mozilla's countless recent breakages, regressions, and inexplicable decisions, but in other part because of exactly this problem. So many sites just break in mysterious ways on Firefox, and the reason why is inevitably some exception raised 50 frames down the stack in an obfuscated bundle of $FRAMEWORK_DU_JOUR goop I can't even begin to debug.

It's a nice idea because I think the web is much healthier if we don't have a single dominant browser/engine driving it, whether Microsoft's or Google's or anyone else's. Unfortunately no data I've seen in years says it's actually happening. Every web product I've worked on recently is built on standards first so this has nothing to do with deterring Firefox users because things don't work. There just aren't a lot of people using it any more. The only big browser that isn't running the same engine as Chrome is now iOS Safari.

It's around 3% of my pageviews as measured by javascript (e.g. statcounter) but it's 15-20% of my pageviews as seen in my server logs. Now, we might say that the server stats are wrong. But it could also be that the javascript stats are wrong, since firefox comes with tracker blocking. I don't know how to tell.

Or bots disguised as firefox.

Honestly, the best way to tell is to create an api endpoint that just returns a 1px gif. Add that as an img tag on your site. Then look at the server logs for that endpoint. A curl-bot probably won’t call the endpoint, only browsers that are actually rendering the page. There are bots that actually render the page and run JavaScript, but you can usually look at the request’s ASN to help determine that.

Possibly Firefox is making it very easy to block your statistics gathering. Besides, 7% is still quite a lot to throw away.

I can imagine how IE11 gets a higher proportion in traffic in B2B. In B2C, particularly amongst some niches, I'd guess Firefox is still proportionally popular. For example, I'd love to see browser stats for HN.

(Disclosure: I am still very much a Firefox user, so this might be projection.)

These numbers are problematic for two reasons. 1. This comes from client side tracking scripts which are now likely blocked in ff than Chrome.

2. Unless you're running a very low traffic site, it's not like 3% of users don't matter. 3% may mean millions of users.

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