> Now it seems that Chrome has pulled far ahead, and Firefox is often in 3rd place. I can't think of too many recent features that FF has been a leader on. SW kinda, I guess, but that's it.
Chrome is ahead on things like Web Components because these are features that Google has wanted and pushed. It's not due to lack of implementation effort that they're disabled in Firefox, it's because Firefox wants to wait for the standardization process to continue for a bit. I mean, Firefox has XBL internally so it's not hard to imagine that most of the framework for web components already existed. Firefox was also using ES6 internally for years.
When it comes to browsers being "leaders" in features it's always a bit more nuanced than that due to standardization and the features the browser vendor itself wants to push before it is standardized.
> Chrome is ahead on things like Web Components because these are features that Google has wanted and pushed.
It's a feature that Firefox wanted and pushed as well, in the past. They've stopped being leaders on this particular feature though (partly because some of the proponents left, i imagine).
> It's not due to lack of implementation effort that they're disabled in Firefox, it's because Firefox wants to wait for the standardization process to continue for a bit.
You're talking about the old v0 specs that they implemented and disabled. The v1 specs are already standardized and in Chrome stable, shadow DOM is in Safari stable.
That's my real point, not that Firefox is behind Chrome, they're usually in 3rd place on most things.
I'd like more evidence to back this claim.
I'd like to point to this comment of mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227907) about CSS properties.
Chrome is ahead on things like Web Components because these are features that Google has wanted and pushed. It's not due to lack of implementation effort that they're disabled in Firefox, it's because Firefox wants to wait for the standardization process to continue for a bit. I mean, Firefox has XBL internally so it's not hard to imagine that most of the framework for web components already existed. Firefox was also using ES6 internally for years.
When it comes to browsers being "leaders" in features it's always a bit more nuanced than that due to standardization and the features the browser vendor itself wants to push before it is standardized.