Unpopular opinion, brace yourselves.
As a web developer, I would love to root for Firefox but they’ve made some really odd decisions regarding the implementation of web standards (which are published on the Mozilla MDN site, oddly enough), async/defer script loading order for example. Firefox is also often multiple years late with implementing new tech, being surpassed by Chromium and even Safari most of the time.
While I love the non-profit style of Mozilla and think competition in the browser space is a good thing. The reality is just that their browser lags behind the other two. Firefox is a large part of the reason polyfills are still used in this world of evergreen browsers, and requires multi-browser testing/tweaking even though I exclusively follow the standards written on the MDN website…
Yeah it lags behind because Chromium is developed by Google, which is the 4th biggest company in the world. And Safari is obviously from Apple which is the largest company in the world. I don’t think the fact that Mozilla lags behind should upset anyone. The fact they can compete at all is impressive I think.
Or maybe, just maybe, it lags behind because Mozilla decided that their priorities are ruining the UI and to remove features.
Yeah, keep downvoting. 50M (and counting) users lost since 2019 are surely a proof of how well Mozilla roadmap for FF is working.
Firefox is behind in some areas, but ahead in others - eg. privacy/tracking.
exactly, and that’s what matters more than anything else. modern websites are insanely bloated anyway; i care more about blocking the 50MB of ads, trackers, third-party cookies and other garbage every site shoves down your throat, than shiny new stuff that arguably is often part of that overengineered bloat.
look at this. it’s fucking beautiful. as far as i’m concerned, websites like these put the modern web and web developers to shame.
I see it the other way around. I have a feeling that FireFox follows the specs while Chromium kind of has its own plan and directly introduce new behavior without much care for standards.
Since Chromium based browsers have the majority of the market share, you have the feeling that FireFox is awkward/lag behind. Now look back at Opera when they still have their own engine and you will see that while they try to introduce new behaviors just like Chromium, their limited market share means that people don’t feel the need to make use of these “innovations”.
You want an even more unpopular opinion? I use WebKit based browsers for web developing because of the clarity of the devtools, performance and Interop.
You can go take a look at the web inspector documentation on WebKit.org to check the features.
So one and only thing I miss from Chrome is Lighthouse.
