zerosleeps

Since 2010

The State of Web Browsers

This is a depressing read. There’s no point in adding my own comments, because the middle section of this article reflects my feelings much more eloquently than I can:

I root for Firefox’s success. I have been doing so since they made the first crack in Microsoft’s IE dominance and have been doing ever since. Not because I think they have the best browser, instead because of sentimental reasons: they are the only independent browser, guardians of an open, shared web. They have superior, human values compared to the rest. I want them to do well.

Increasingly I’m seeing sites, code experiments, all kinds of things not working well or not working at all in Firefox. And nobody cares. The behavior of seeing Firefox as an unimportant browser is slowly normalized. The question of whether Firefox is relevant is already answered: it isn’t. The only question is how irrelevant it will become.

The sad, sad kicker:

When choosing between convenience and principles, most people pick convenience.