In 2002, it was much more difficult to support multiple browsers, and not doing so was still (eventually) frowned upon.
In 2017, with the combination of pretty close parity between VM's technology support (even Chakra) and the range of powerful preprocessors, build tools and shims, if you're not supporting multiple major user agents you're an objectively bad frontend developer. This isn't about the cost benefit of committing time to smaller market shares because the cost is negligible. The only explanation can be incompetence.
... or that you're the maker of said browser and stand to gain from actively deprioritising your competitors. I don't know that this is policy at Google, but it's either one or the other.
You're right. I've built pretty complex offline first web applications (using Indexeddb, Service Workers etc) initially on Chrome but when I tested them on Firefox and Edge there was just one minor bug on Edge (Indexeddb expected undefined but was given null in one case, Chrome and Firefox did not complain). So it definitely is possible to build sites that work on all browsers.
Maybe "use Chrome" means "not tested on Firefox and Edge?"
I was referring to primarily text/emoji based, person-to-person apps/platforms (similar to Allo). That's why I listed only WhatsApp and FB Messenger and intentionally ignored the other ones.
It's me, not you, Allo. I loathe communication apps that rely only on phone numbers and won't work without access to one's contacts/address book. My phone number is highly important to me from a privacy angle and I don't give it away willy-nilly. I'd feel a little more comfortable when this works with email addresses alone, which I have many of and use different ones for different purposes.
I think Google is totally lost, because since when centralized communication is a bad thing? They didn't get why Facebook released Messenger as a separate app or why they bought WhatsApp.
This is not about technology, this is about user war. Back in 2011, Google got seriously scared about Facebook growth. So they naively came up with this Google+ idea, which of course died and joined the long list of Google's embarrassing tries in the social networking space.
It is sad to see the negative effects of Facebook, on one side on users and stealing their privacy and data, and on the other side on giants like Google, who used to create cool projects like Gmail back when the internet was a cool breath.
The screaming-monster image and the context-free exhortation to switch to Chrome (no, thanks!) do very little to inform me about what Allo is or why I would want to use it. This does not strike me as a particularly good design.
> Don't have Chrome? Get it
Ah yes, we're back in 2002 again.