Early support for browsers that the output will be expected to work on

[Erudition]

While there are FLO versions of the proprietary Google Chrome (e.g. ungoogled-chromium), Firefox is the browser of choice for many privacy and FLO advocates and I expect the sites I build to be able to work consistently across browsers - in fact the design tool is a great place to limit features to those supported cross-browser and cross-platform.

As it currently stands with Webstudio only supporting Blink-based browsers, I naturally get the (hopefully false) impression that the site I'm designing can only be relied on to look/work as expected in those same browsers.

Perhaps it's just the app's UI that is Chrome-specific and the tool's output is cross-browser, but when cross-browser support is not targeted early on it's often the case that browser-specific features creep in that need to be substantially refactored when the decision to support more browsers is finally made, so the time saved upfront is often not worth it...

Anyway, if other browsers are targeted with Webstudio's output, I suggest mentioning that in the tool's not-supported error message, such as:

Sites produced with Webstudio have cross-platform support, but the Webstudio app itself currently runs only on Blink-based browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. We plan to support more browsers in the near future.

[kof]

Yeah, its a false impression, builder != "your site", its a good idea to mention it there, I saw several people jumping to the wrong conclusions too!

[Erudition]

Interesting take.

I don't see Firefox as "dying", it's been floating around the same 5-10% market share for the last 5 years, higher than nearly all other browsers except the two proprietary juggernauts. I'm a web developer, and I use free/libre/open software (hence Webstudio, hence Firefox) when possible. Both of these traits are likely overrepresented in your community, so the market share doesn't even tell the whole story here.

I currently rely on Elementor, which works just as well and with a similar number of bugs in Firefox as with Chrome. Both browsers have support some of the "latest and greatest" standards, with FF often being more standards-compliant. I guess the cutting edge features you are referring to needing are not standards though.

[kof]

Chromium is also open source and is used by a number of other browsers.

[kof]

Firefox is often lagging behind specs, because underfunded, but this is also a question if we have time to invest into dealing with those situations instead of building features in one browser that we support really well.

[ghost]

Looking back at the attitude of the Webstudio devs not supporting Firefox, it seems like I have made the better decision to go with alternative solutions.

[kof]

There is no attitude, there is limited resources, small team. We need to make tradeoffs right now in order to advance the product for majority of users.

That being said we just added ability to test the site in preview mode in all browsers. So only building itself is still limited to chromium based browsers.