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The user isn't the problem, the developer is.

If you're developing against Chrome/Chromium, particularly "works in Chrome" instead of developing against the published Web standards, you're support Google & Chrome.



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I don't understand your logic here.

Are the costumers using Chrome? Then devs should test on Chrome too.

Are the costumers NOT using Chrome? Then what is the problem??


Developing against Chrome is exactly "support every browser's quirks" instead of developing against the actual standards (usually Firefox has the truest implementation of which).

AKA the software was not written with that use case in mind.

Just because the way he/she uses software doesn't work well with chrome doesn't make chrome bad software, and it doesn't mean the user is wrong. It just means that it's not a good fit for that person.


It's a well known problem. Chrome pushes tons of features into "web standards" since they have disproportionate power in the space, and then developers use the features because they are "web standards", and now there are websites that only support Chrome.

Because Chrome has bigger market share, webdevs test their stuff only in Chrome, as a consequence their stuff works only in Chrome. Browsers have to be based on Chrome or suffer incompatibility problems, and sometimes even that doesn't help as some sites block browsers based on user agent strings if they detect it's not true Chrome.

The compatibility issue isn't to blame on web developers increasingly testing only on or making their apps exclusive Chrome?

I guess you missed the part where the OP wrote "while Chrome works just fine.", yet his/her coding is to blame.

No wonder people move to other browsers instead.


One problem is that Chrome is not open source - Chromium is. But 99% of people use Chrome, and there is no way to build Chrome from source to be sure what code is running.

We have to take Google's word for it that Chrome is identical to Chromium as regards privacy, and as others stated, Google's business interest is clearly to track user information, not to respect their privacy.


Sad. I have often switched to Chromium whenever a Chrome update was breaking various websites I used. Chromium is lagging a bit behind in repositories; some delay is enough to let the website owners update. Then I can switch back to Chrome for that site once again.

This has been happening more often lately, in my experience. Sure, you could say that the website is broken and not the browser. But from a user’s perspective, it used to work and now it doesn’t. Users don’t care whose fault it is.

But big corps don’t care if less than 0.1% of users are impacted. Even if that means 100,000 people. So it’s ok to break a few eggs.

As a website owner myself, I’ve had to make changes about once a year to keep things running properly in Chrome due to deprecated APIs. This is for a website that has not changed at all otherwise in 5 years, and I built without using any external dependencies so that I can avoid updating things.

Compare this with other environments: Windows apps usually can run for 20 years without issues; Linux apps even more. Not to mention document formats, like PDF, which are pretty much guaranteed to be accessible forever. Adobe got at least one thing right.

The only good thing I can say about this disregard for backwards compatibility is that it gives web developers good job security.


It seems like you are missing the original point. People aren't working around bugs in Chromium, they are (either inadvertently or intentionally) developing apps which rely on the buggy functionality.

9/10 times when I encounter a bug either when doing web dev or just browsing the web, it's because of Chrome/WebKit improperly implementing standards.

It's not Firefox's fault if people aren't testing their websites on both browsers, just like it wasn't Firefox or Chrome's fault whenever people only tested their webpages with Internet Explorer and its mess of exclusive APIs and deviations from standards.


There are some hipster web-sites built by amateurish developers who manage somehow to make them work correctly in Chrome only. I've faced those too and after reporting the bugs (like horizontal scrolling of menus) the reply is usually something along the lines of "most of our users prefer Chrome, so we won't fix it".

It’s rare to see that but almost every time I have looked it’s been because the developer did something which used a Chrome API instead of a web standard. I’ve found it best to develop in Firefox and Safari, because Chrome almost always works the first time you test it and you don’t accidentally introduce a dependency on something which is still being standardized.

It seems like such a common action, I'm surprised a non-Chromium developer would have to report it. I considered reporting it, but too much friction. I need to use a Google Account to report a bug? Why? Eh.

I don't use Chrome, but I installed Chromium to test websites on webkit, and, amazingly, it still manages to crash after a few hours of uptime despite being a fresh, barely used install. It's beyond me how people are using such buggy software regularly.

The same people that work on chrome work on chromium, and both are owned by Google.

Chromium is where this change is originating, not chrome.


Surely, you mean, most developers only care about compatibility with Chrome ?

Although the article somewhat implies it was intentional, an unintentional degradation that severe is still a big issue.

What incentive does Chromium/Google ever have to fix an issue that only affects Microsoft users or non-Chrome users?


I don't see how that would be a true statement in almost any context, barring specifically using features that you know Chrome doesn't work well with or going through the chromium bug tracker to find things to do that break Chrome.
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