Wanna know what’s funny? I work for a company that develops web application for business use. Officially, we claim to support Chrome, Edge (this was pre-chromium Edge but the terms haven’t been updated), Safari and Firefox.

Unofficially? Most of us only test in Chrome and call it a day. I’m literally the only one in the company actively testing Firefox first, and then MAYBE checking if Chrome works. Because 99.99% of the time if it works on Firefox it works on Chrome.

Now, that has at times brought some problems to light that would have been undetected since from what I’ve understood, Chrome is big enough to start introducing ways of doing things that are not officially part of any standard and just.. brute force their way to make it de facto standard. But each and every time someone tries to get away with using breaking non-standard things, it usually gets caught because I’m apparently the only one left who actually gives a fuck about the promises made to customers, as well as the web diversity. Even if we are a small company with a website that gets used mostly by Chrome users, I’m looking out to that 1% or whatever the most recent statistics for our user base was.

But I did also mention Safari is supported. That’s a different beast and I don’t think anyone in our company tests on that, since it’s mainly windows PCs all around. I had a chance to get a new work laptop just recently but didn’t dare to go for a Mac because our test automation code base might have still some windows dependencies and I didn’t wanna start dealing with those just yet, but next time I probably will. On another, newer project I work on I’ve picked Playwright as the test automation framework which has capability for testing on Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, so that should at least be covered. The legacy projcet could maybe be ported on that as well (currently using selenium on that one) but it’s a big hassle and there’s no way I’ll get the green light from higher ups to do so without proper justification and proof that it would improve something.

But yeah, when ever I test manually and go elbow deep into it? It’s Firefox first and whatever I have time for afterwards. It’s worked so far, can’t see why I would need to stop doing it this way now.