diversity – Dan Q

People complain about Firefox. The most recent grievance is the addition of AI features in the browser, and they will tell you they’re switching to another browser as a result.

I’m here to tell you not to do it.

At best, that person switched to a fork of Firefox, which still depends on the same browser engine. But the worst case scenario is a browser based on Blink and Chromium.

Firefox is the last major independent browser engine¹. The web is a vibrant commons because of browser engine diversity. Multiple engines serve as a check on power and support the wide review process that underpins standards work on the web.

…

Ramkumar Shankar, in Use Firefox

Ramkumar is right. This is a drum I’ve been beating ever since EdgeHTML got pulled out of Edge, which effectively represented a one-third reduction in real-world browser diversity. It’s more-important than ever that Firefox continues to be used, continues to exist, continues to thrive.

I mean: it’s a perfectly good browser too! I use it as my daily driver on all of my devices and I love it. But even if it weren’t for that, I’d still be pushing people towards Firefox because the Internet needs it to exist. If it stops existing, or even reaches a level of technical irrelevance, then Google gains an unprecedented level of control over the direction of the Web… which – even despite their monopoly abuses via Google Search and other integrations – they’ve shown they can’t be trusted with: consider how they (yet again) exempted themselves from their own privacy controls this week, or else look back over technologies they’ve strongarmed onto the Web, benefitting themselves at the expense of the Web, like FLoC and AMP, or else look at the gradual enshittification of their browser – which no longer supports deep integration by adblockers – or of the Android operating system – which you’re getting locked-out of this year.

So yeah. Use Firefox. You can keep a Blink/WebKit-based browser for secondary purposes, like for when you’re saving battery on a MacBook (I’d use Safari) or for when you want to use a badly-implemented application that thinks it requires Chrome (I’d use Edge). But making Firefox – or failing that, a fork of it that meets your needs, maybe Waterfox or LibreWolf – your daily driver is one of the single easiest things you can do to help keep the Web free and open.

And you get some cool perks on the side, like mobile plugins (uBlock on mobile… yes please!), better tab management (and adding Multi-Account Containers is life-changing!), stronger privacy protection, lower RAM usage, etc. So yeah: use Firefox.

The elephant in the diversity room – QuirksBlog (quirksmode.org)

false

Although there’s a lot of heated discussion around diversity, I feel many of us ignore the elephant in the web development diversity room. We tend to forget about users of older or non-standard devices and browsers, instead focusing on people with modern browsers, which nowadays means the latest versions of Chrome and Safari.

This is nothing new — see “works only in IE” ten years ago, or “works only in Chrome” right now — but as long as we’re addressing other diversity issues in web development we should address this one as well.

Ignoring users of older browsers springs from the same causes as ignoring women, or non-whites, or any other disadvantaged group. Average web developer does not know any non-whites, so he ignores them. Average web developer doesn’t know any people with older devices, so he ignores them. Not ignoring them would be more work, and we’re on a tight deadline with a tight budget, the boss didn’t say we have to pay attention to them, etc. etc. The usual excuses.

…

Peter-Paul Koch (QuirksMode)