I get the author's point, but I also strongly disagree that the economy was doing "incredibly well." I think it was fairly obvious even 5 years prior to 2007 that the wheels were coming off. For me it felt like a slow motion accident. Same with mobile; you're only startled by the impact if you were looking the other direction.
Can we at least agree that if we attempted a list of all the Xs a programmer needs to know before doing Y and made it law that nobody could write any software at all?
This is something that the discussion hasnt touched yet, but I don't know that you can assume that devs are omitting the vendor-specific prefixed border radius out of laziness. I'm frequently guilty of coding base lowest-common-denominator CSS, then enhancing the WebKit experience -- not because I'm not aware of the vendor-specific attributes for other rendering engines or because I'm too lazy to type them out, but because only the WebKit rendering is satisfactory.
I'm not entirely certain about this approach though, so what is the real harm in a web where boxes have slightly rounded corners in one browser and not another? I'm also curious if anybody has examples of WebKit-only sites (that don't actually function in other browsers) that don't fall under the heading of "look at this cool new CSS thing that this site exists to demonstrate."
Here are some examples. I have a lot more. It's hard to develop a new browser when everyone has a "must have" site that serves degraded or broken markup to everything except WebKit.
These are just some of the big-name sites that I knew off-hand. At least these high-budget sites usually have some sort of fallback. Some sites just have degraded styles; some have parts that are unreadable. Some provide partial functionality to non-WebKit browsers; others won't work at all (like Bing web search in Opera).
Great examples. I think even the WebKit touch events version of Google Maps is broken, but, not being a Gmail user, I had no idea they were blowing it that badly. I use both Maps and Twitter every single day, but -- and here's another facet of the problem -- always through applications. I encounter Maps embedded in (WebKit) pages only enough to be annoyed by them, and I haven't been to twitter.com in at least a year. This is eye-opening. Clearly we're not just talking about drop shadows.
Developers are ambitious. We want to build better apps now not in 6 years time when the W3C have finally moved on this or that issue. Right now webkit is enabling developers so it wins. Supporting every browser is either economically not viable or not possible without sacrificing features. If mobile firefox wants to compete it needs to step up. If developers are voting with their feet and actually using webkit features in the wild then they are defacto standards. Firefox better pull its finger out or it will die.
In all of the above cases, Firefox actually does support the features used by these sites, and has for a long time (years, in some cases). In most cases the developers would just need to tweak their UA sniffing, or add some -moz properties alongside the -webkit properties in their styles.
Mozilla does need to "step up" -- but work required to fix cases like these is not technical. It's about gaining user marketshare, developer mindshare, and improving the standards process.
It's true, and since everyone upgrades their phones every two years it's not like there's a chance of older versions of a hegemonic browser haunting developers' dreams, right?
Admittedly this is just a guess, but might the Carson velodrome explain Orange County's dominance in this index? There's precious little overlap in the Venn diagram of people who race track bikes (on tracks) and people who ride track bikes because bike messengers ride track bikes.
I work for a very large (Fortune 500) retailer whose customers are overwhelmingly Mac users. Safari users make up just shy of 50% of all of our traffic, with Chrome accounting for 25%.
I'd guess that's as much because Safari is the built-in, default option on OS X and iOS as it is because Safari is just super awesome. The more interesting thing to me is that all of my (Mac-using)coworkers have switched over (mostly from Firefox) to Chrome, despite Chrome's overall jankyness on OS X.
Gruber's assessment is more reasonable, but watching the video, I completely fail to see the controversy. In context, Schmidt's response seems almost humble, and he seems to be addressing two separate concerns raised by the question: 1) The actual challenges for developers (in terms of both the software being good enough to deliver killer apps and the store being able to generate money for developers) and 2) The perceived uncoolness of Android/perceived lack of developer interest
On the first point, he's conceding that Android, up until ICS, fell short. On the second point, he's saying that, whether Android suddenly sparks developer interest or not, it's gonna be on so many devices that developers won't be able to say no (to the fame and fortune). I can't say whether he'll be correct, but I think he could be. It's an honest, if not direct, answer to the question asked -- and doesn't come across as a threat.
> Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years.
Maybe I'm asking to much, but this seems totally unacceptable to me -- both things seem totally unacceptable to me. And while it may still be just true, Firefox suffers worse from this problem than any OS, software or other browser that I use.
> Mozilla can do nothing about you using Firebug, yet still gets blamed for the slowness.
This is how things go in real-world. I remember reading about how much work went into each new version of Windows because of bugs and clever code in existing software. Otherwise people who upgraded and found their old software not working anymore would have blamed Windows instead of their buggy software.
You can't boast about Firefox being extensible and then blame plugins because they break it. At least, Firefox should be warning about troublesome plugins. The more people have to deal with Firefox being slow and unstable, the more Firefox will be getting a bad rep. Sorry, but you can't fight human nature, you know. You can't change how most users think. If you want to increase market share, your software must be as much dumb-friendly as possible.
On my Linux box, Firefox is crashing lots of times a day without giving me any clues about what could have gone wrong. What am I expected to do? To become a Firefox developer? Switching to another browser is an easier path.
By saying this, I hope I don't seem unappreciative of Firefox developers' efforts.
The MemShrink team, having hit all their obvious targets in Firefox itself, are now reaching out to extension authors to help them fix their own memory problems. Firebug, being a major extension used by millions of people, is on the receiving end of this help already. There are several fixes committed into the 1.9 beta branch that reduce overall consumption, and I’m sure more will follow.
I concede that I'm not being completely fair. I actually don't develop in Firefox and only have a few versions installed on VMs for testing, no bookmarks or extensions. And, as I said in another comment, over the last 10 years, Gecko has become like a trusted friend; I know what will work and don't usually test in Firefox until way later than I should.
I was responding to YOUR stipulation that browsing experience degrades the more you use Firefox. IF it does, that seems like emergency problem #1 to fix if Firefox wants to stop hemmorrhaging users. But then, I'm speaking completely out of turn, since I haven't been a Firefox user for years.
EDIT: ...since I haven't used Firefox as my primary browser in years. I use it daily; not as a "power user."
> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.
Yeah, this is false. Gecko is still arguably the gold, um, standard for page rendering.
That said, I dread using Firefox now, for reasons that are completely emotional. There's too much UI, and web pages have an unfortunate uncanny valley thing happening when compared side-by-side with Webkit-rendered pages. The best way I can a explain it is that it's like when you see a photo of a Russian Buran, and your mind goes, "There's something not quite right about that Space Shuttle."
