What browser do you use for development?

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Not sure if this has been talked about, but I would like to know. What browser do you use and why do you think it’s better than the others in your own opinion?

I have personally used FireFox for many ages and tend to keep it that way. I’ve used FireFox for web development and I find that most of the development tools are very helpful. I’m not sure if Google Chrome, IE, Opera, and other browsers have this feature, but FireFox has a feature where you can set the screen to a certain width & height. This is a very good feature if you want to create responsive websites.

Going way way way off-topic

Also, aside from developing using FireFox. I have this hate towards whatever company doesn’t follow their main goals. I feel that companies like Google are pain in the behind because they seem to be expanding where they have no expertise in. Now before you call me a hater, I already know that big companies like Google hire people with all sorts of professions so I cannot judge. But what I can judge is that they have fallen really really far from what they truly were supposed to be.

Example of what I mean. Back in the old days when the internet was just a baby and Wikipedia was not trusted, Google was the big hit of all hits for search engines. I remember people used to use search.com as an alternative to google.com. I believe that is where they began (as far as I remember). Fast forward some odd decades later, Google has expanded to web browsers, emails, social media, .etc.

I believe that they are threatened by some other companies and they want to try and up their game which isn’t wrong, but I feel like they have lost their main goal which is search engine. I believe Bing is actually beating them now in search engine.

More examples of what I mean by threatened.

When Facebook became the big hit for social media, I remember reading or hearing that Google actually tried to offer Mark Zuckerberg a substantial amount of money to buy out Facebook, but Mark said no. Later that year after Mark’s “no” proposal to Google, Google came out with Google +. How are they not threatened if a really popular and big company said no to them and the same exact year, they came out with a platform that is related in that area?

Another example. Web browsers. Back in the old days, it’s either Internet Explorer or FireFox. In the year of 2008, Google releases Google Chrome to compete with FireFox. How is this not being “threatened” if 2 big companies were the most talked about for web browsers?

tl;dr?

I would go to my grave still using FireFox. I just honestly don’t like Google based on their actions (web browser wise and product wise). Yes, it’s really important for a company to expand, but I feel like where Google is threatened, they try to expand in that area.

I mean, I don’t know a lot of programming language and I would love to learn more, but if someone was more successful than I am in that language or area, I wouldn’t actually want to compete with them because I know nothing about that area. I would totally make a fool of myself if I did that.

Call me a hater, I just don’t like Google Chrome nor Google itself even though they are pretty big.

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Actually, chrome beats ff here hands down with its full blown mobile device emulation mode, including swiping, touch events etc. Apart from that, I’m a ff devotee too, especially since their developer edition (mostly gimmicks maybe, but still a nice touch). Objectively, chrome is certainly better suited for development though.

As for google, well you may think of the company what you want, but they developed angular, the V8, chrome etc. and all freely available, if not open source. Great stuff. And you really shouldn’t disregard technology just because you don’t like the company – especially for development.

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Firefox is way behind the other browsers regarding development tools. The others all had all the development tools built in back when Firefox required that you use an extension to add them.

During development you at least need to check in all of the popular browsers just in case there is a browser quirk - less common now than they used to be but still possible).

I tend to only run minimal tests in Firefox because it is so slow compared to all the other browsers and it tends to run the same as Chrome/Opera/Vivaldi except a lot more slowly.

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I see. I have never used Chrome for development before, but I did install it to get the feel of Chrome. I haven’t gotten used to it yet so I tried to stay with FireFox.

I see. Yeah, I don’t disregard the technology at all. I just don’t like the company itself. I actually haven’t used Chrome ever since I uninstalled it. I’ll think about it and maybe try it again.

Ah I see. I’ve used Opera before, but I don’t like the idea that one of my mouse clicks will go back a page. Like I think it’s the right mouse click. But I see. I’ve never actually saw it that way before because I’ve always stuck with FireFox for so long.

I like FireFox’s new update though. It allows you to turn audio off for that tab right on the right corner of that specific tab. Makes it less of a hassle to go into the actual tab to turn off the audio.

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Okay sorry, my bad! Anyway, what exactly don’t you like about chrome then?

I concur with both points, but how is this relevant for development?

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Aside from using FireFox for so many years. I don’t like Chrome because to me, FireFox has a lot of pretty cool features for tests like about:config. I usually toggle Enable/Disable Javascript so I can see where if someone had Javascript disabled, I can lend them a helping hand by using <noscript></noscript>.

Well, nothing really. Just the functionality helps enhance the experience. Think of it this way, I remember when I was trying to use audiojs, and I tried to make the audio auto play and loop. But for some reason, the audio overlapped itself. So there were actually 2 + of the same audio playing at the same time when I expected 1 audio. So this feature is neat if I want to turn off the audio and test to see why it was overlapping.

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far fewer than any other popular browser unless you add a dozen or so extensions to bring it up to the equivalent of what the other popular browsers provide as a default setup.

The current version of Opera is almost identical to Chrome - for a lot of the old Opera functionality you need Vivaldi (which still runs on webkit just like Chrome and Opera do but which has added a lot of the functionality that was available in Opera running on Presto). Vivaldi allows you to choose what all the mouse and keyboard options do from within the browser settings so there is no mouse button that goes back a page unless you set one.

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You see, chrome has such a feature too right in its dev tools (just like ff). I can fully understand that you like the browser better which you are more accustomed too (as I mentioned above, I like ff too… if admittedly for no particular reason); I’d just like to encourage you to try other browsers as well, because these might have cool features too, and maybe even more (mobile device emulation)! :slight_smile:

x-post

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I guess my old days are older than yours :older_man:
For me it was either IE or Netscape

For me “development” as far as testing with browsers usually means JavaScript.
(though I did play with JScript for a while)

Over the years I have tried quite a few different browsers. And at first I used to use a lot of alert()s to debug code.

Now that browsers support console,log() things are much better

The JavaScript I write nowadays is

  • for site pages
  • custom userscripts
  • custom extensions

Opera 12 had “out of the box” support for many things that other browsers required addons for. I havve often wondered why Opera never became more popular.

I am more used to using Firefox, so I tend to feel more at home using Firefox’s Dev Tools, but Chrome’s Dev Tools are equally impressive and other than the UI details I have seen no major differences in my use.

.

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I see. I must of enabled something then that made the right click go backwards. I’ll have to re-install it again and see if I can work around it.

I’m not the bandwagon type. I don’t just like something for no reason or I just don’t copy what others do because it’s the “new” thing. Although I do agree that FireFox is behind other browsers. I’m simply not going to permanently change browsers because someone says I should. I’ll most likely use a few browsers and throw them away in my junk files. I’ve already used Chrome, Safari, Opera, FireFox, IE, Edge, Netscape, Avant, and many others. A lot of them are derivatives from IE.

Now it is my turn to ask you the questions.

  1. Why do you use Google Chrome for development?
  2. What “cool” features does Google Chrome have that FireFox doesn’t?

I see. I will have to test Chrome and compare it to FireFox Dev Tools wise. I don’t know either. Honestly, I think the only 2 actual browsers I used a while back for testing was FireFox and Opera. Just that Opera did that thing I was telling @felgall and so I had to uninstall it because it was getting annoying when I triggered that button.

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The browser that used to behave differently from the others was Internet Explorerr so testing in that browser during development used to be mandatory if you wanted to make sure the pages worked properly. Testing for JScript in IE8 is still necessary if you want to support that browser. IE10 and 11 mostly behave the way other modern browsers do and now that Microsoft have announced they are going to discontinue support for all versions of IE soon (they have already discontinued support for 10 and earlier) testing in that browser is not going to be such an issue.

Windows 10 defaults to Edge as the web browser (and changes back to that default when the OS upgrades) so testing in that browser is a good idea (even though it should behave the same as other browsers).

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As mentioned above, the mobile mode is a winner. You can even visualise media queries; so for testing responsive design chrome is just way better. (The responsive design view of ff is a bit of a joke IMHO, since you can achieve the same with just expanding the dev view accordingly.) Check the link in my first reply. Also, you can edit JS files on the fly; a feature that doesn’t exist in ff AFAIK (it does have its scratchpad which is also nice, but you can’t modify existing code with it).

That is not to say that ff doesn’t have its unique features too, of course. But I can tell you from my experience that as a primary ff user, I sometimes have to resort to chrome for certain features – never the other way round.

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On your “off-topic” remarks (can it be off topic if it’s in the OP? lol):

I have a big problem with your blanket statements about all of Google’s expansions being because of it being “threatened”. I have no good idea of what you mean by that. How can a company’s social media platform be “threatened” if it doesn’t exist yet? How is a company threatened by another company which works in an arena that Google is not in yet?

What I have seen Google do, objectively - whether you like the company or not - is react to trends, and in some case set them - just like any good Internet company should. When they saw the global shift into social media, they tried to use their bulk to create a platform - and most would agree that it was a less than successful effort. They’ve also released and shut down several other tools. Google Wave, Google Reader. And they released others and grew them to ridiculous proportions - Google Maps became the predominant (and for awhile, the only) smartphone map/directions tool of any use, and outstripped competitors on desktop. Google Chrome started with nothing and is now one of / the best browser in existence. Gmail - no explanation needed. Etc.

I am not so sure I like Google as an entity. But to scathingly write off their business practices is silly, in my book - their strategies? The ones where they recognize trends and build apps to try out on the public?

They’re working.

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I’ve always used Firefox (with the web developer toolbar addon, and Firebug) for development, mainly because we never had the rights to install anything else until just a few weeks ago. But I didn’t know about that developer edition of Firefox. I’ll have to give that a shot.

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I see everyone’s point. It seems that there are more browsers that can do the same job as FireFox. The only concern is which browser needs more attention for support and as @felgall has said before, it could be IE. So most importantly, I think support for IE should be focused on the most.

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Well Microsoft are only applying security patches to IE11 now and will stop doing even that before too much longer. IE11 works very similar to other browser so is not really a huge issue - plus it will be gone soon.

The popular browser where the current version behaves the most differently to the other browsers is Firefox. In coming years we will be testing our full functionality in our browser of choice (Chrome, Opera, Safari, Edge or Vivaldi) and then checking to make sure that the page is not totally broken in Firefox.

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I currently use Chrome for development as it has the best integration of tools.

I have FF but use it mainly for checking.

I use Safari for personal browsing. I try not to login to Google when using Chrome, call me crazy buy they track way too much, and I have a feeling (probably naive) that I’m a little more obscure using another browser.

I’m on a Mac so I use VirtualBox with modernIE to check Explorer.

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I use firefox as it is the most reliable browser and also you can use duckduckgo for basic searching as it doesnot track user.Firefox generally consist of a number of add on extension.So,its better to use rather than google chrome.

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Most reliable? In which respect? :neutral_face: BTW, you can use duckduckgo as default search engine in chrome, too (as in just about any other browser). And there are many extensions available as well.

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Here is something interesting that FireFox has that Chrome doesn’t. This is why most people ask me

Where do you see the red lines?

And I say, I see them here.

747×267 19.8 KB

This is a problem Chrome users have to face. For FireFox users, the red lines mean that you are missing an element. This element can be essential to the page. Let’s say you are missing a </div> element before you start another column. Well, that </div> element you are missing actually screwed up the page because it was never closed. Now you’re left to debugging it yourself and you’ll most likely post it on a forum asking for help. With FireFox users, you don’t have that problem. You simply look for the red lines, if the red lines are there, that means you should most likely insert that element before the red lines.

I do like Chrome’s tools, but most of those tools are available on FireFox too. But this feature is probably one of Chrome’s flaws. Try it out if you don’t believe me.