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RodgerTheGreattoday at 7:20 AM3 repliesview on HN

I stand by a policy that if a feature in one of my projects can only be implemented in Chrome, it's better not to add the feature at all; the same is true for features which would be exclusive to Firefox. Giving users of a specific browser a superior experience encourages a dangerous browser monoculture.


Replies

digiowntoday at 3:54 PM

I say the following as a firefox+ubo user:

There are many useful things that can only be implemented for Chromium: things like the filesystem API mentioned in this post, the USB devices API used to implement various microcontroller flashing tools, etc. Users can have multiple browsers installed, and I often use Chromium as essentially a sandboxed program runtime.

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OhNoNotAgain_99today at 10:19 AM

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charcircuittoday at 10:36 AM

Firefox is only a few percent market share. You are hiring your users for not improving their user experience because it's not compatible with one of the a web browsers on a few percent of people's computers.

Chrome add these features because they are responding to the demands of web developers. It's not web developers fault if firefox can't or refuses to provide apis that are being asked for.

Mozilla could ask Claude to implement the filesystem api today and ship it to everyone tomorrow if they wanted to. They are holding their own browser back, don't let them also hold your website back. In regards to browser monoculture there are many browsers built on top of the open source Blink that are not controlled by Google such as Edge, Brave, and Opera just to name a few of the many.