cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3376057
I held off on Windows 10 for as long as I could until my job required it. Now this nonsense. I hope this isn't the start of them joining on the web DRM bandwagon.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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As a developer with 7+ years industry experience this is a very weak excuse to not support browsers.
Differences in features are usually down to bleeding edge stuff and I don't think your example of sort would apply because the end result is the same.
I know Adobe are more prone to using newer browser features but there really shouldn't be anything that's not simple enough to assure support across all browsers. Especially for a company as big as Adobe. It's inexcusable. We rarely have to use polyfills now, that was more a problem when I was starting out, mainly due to IE11 still holding out.
Sure, but it's a common excuse.
The company I work for doesn't test on anything other than Chrome because we have a relatively niche audience that uses corporate-provided computers, and Chrome is available on all machines. The app seems to work fine, but we don't spend any QA resources on it.
The last company I worked for was the same way, but with a little more diverse userbase. Testing on Firefox would increase our QA time, and very few customers cared, so we only supported Chrome. I would occasionally fix things for Firefox, so the app mostly worked fine, but at didn't spend any QA resources on it.
And so on. I'm guessing that's the case here as well. They don't want people complaining about things not working if it works fine on Chrome. Firefox may work fine, but they're not willing to spend QA resources proving it, and they don't want the support overhead from customers complaining if something doesn't work properly with Firefox.
Yeah sure, fine for the SME sized business and I've done it in the past for features like offline web behaviours (wasn't public facing). But tbh it's a shitty excuse even at that size and outright inexcusable for Adobe. I wouldn't get away with this at my current place which has significantly less resources than them. Don't make excuses for Adobe and it's a weak excuse at best.
I'm not making excuses, I'm describing what companies already do today. If they can get away with it, they just won't support multiple browsers.
If we had even one customer that used Firefox, I would be adamant that we support it at my company. But we don't. We know who our customers are because we're in a B2B relationship and we lock out everyone else (we make a niche product for a niche market in a niche industry; total users are in the hundreds).
Adobe doesn't have that excuse, but they have the brand recognition that people will go out of their way to use their products, so they can get away with not supporting Firefox. It's still stupid, but it's a viable strategy given their position in the market.
That's all I'm saying. I'm not saying it's good to target one browser, I'm saying it's practical, so a lot of companies do it. My response is to not use services that block me out, and to recommend alternatives to friends.