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Comment by lionkor | Hacker News Reader

Ah, yes, the web: Infinitely cross platform and portable, except "this website will only work if you run the js with this specific js interpreter, and also we dont know how to do css so we used very platform specific css, and also our html is not complaint but Chrome doesn't care, and also... but its cross platform. Its the web, it runs anywhere!"

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This isn’t a very scathing point when it comes to hobby projects where someone has limited time to test in multiple configurations, so they recommend the one they use when they developed it.

They chose to publicize their hobby project and put it in front of a bunch of people it doesn't work for, they can expect criticism from people doesn't work for.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to admire the work that has been done here while also critiquing the mess that is our web.

Besides, it's not like this is a website anyway.

Yeah, exactly. They're not being assholes they're making minor suggestions. They requesting minor wording changes and how the thing says it doesn't work outside a chrome. If people aren't allowed to say that then people just aren't really allowed to say anything.

I would rather everything people make that runs in a browser work in every browser but I get that there have to be limits and that I'm not entitled to someone else's labor.

If 98% of your content works everywhere but you've only tested 100% in one browser, I think "highly recommended" is perfectly valid.

They didn’t publicize it, someone else posted it. They didn’t even know about it until they got a notification from Vercel from all the traffic. Check out the creator’s top level comment. It was just a hackathon project that got some unexpected attention.

But who is to blame? I, the one who has amount x of time and wants to reach the maximum amount of people? Or the browser vendors for just doing the bare minimum to be compatible with each other but nothing more. The browser vendors do have a lot more manpower (and money) than me…

Firefox is the libre alternative struggling to compete with the Google behemoth which adds things to its browser even faster than they appear in the standard. Safari is the underfunded child of a corporation as wealthy as Google. It is mainly the first that motivates web developer solidarity.

Its struggling in part because it decided it needed to do a bunch of non browser things.

Firefox isn't really making enough in donations to maintain a major piece of web infrastructure. So it gets search revenue from Google, which people complain about (and may not be long term sustainable). So they go make other paid for things looking for revenue, which people complain about.

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

It's a little more nuanced than that.

The complaint is about manhours.

Maybe the search money dont pay the bills but they definitely squandered their improvements

If the user donations aren’t enough, surely their main revenue source—the 100s of millions of dollars they get from Google—is? Or do they need billions just to maintain a competent browser?

Unless it's due to Firefox not supporting some reasonable standard, it's Google's fault.

The only thing one can possibly blame on the developer is the wording.

Who was to blame for the Internet Explorer monopoly? This is just the same thing again.

How difficult is it to test your site on the 3 major browser engines? I have done some web development before and when I'm on linux, I just test my site with chromium, firefox, and epiphany.

I think the onus is on the developer to use standards that are well supported and to try to avoid standards like webUSB that are niche. To use semantic HTML and such so that the website fails in a more useful way to the end user when the standards aren't supported.

> How difficult is it to test your site on the 3 major browser engines?

Given that one of those 3 requires sending thousands of dollars a year to Apple, I'd say "very".

Also, given that Google is a monopoly, I do place the onus on them to at minimum warn developers that they are deviating from well supported standards.

Epiphany uses the same rendering engine as Safari. It is FOSS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web

Mac mini is less than $500. And you can use it for years. Thousands of dollars a year is this around 10 times too high a figure.

$500 is a lot of money even for a west coast SWE and prohibitive in many areas.

That's true but the comment I replied to talked about thousands/year when in fact it is hundreds/year.

Alas, broqs3rs are unable to do what every other universal run everywhete tech cannot do either.

this 100%

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