I’ve been reading the bug reports I’ve received in the last 5 days, and I’ve realized that most of the bug reports come from people using Firefox or Safari. What makes this even worse is, according to the last survey, 77% of XKit users use Chrome.

As part of my policy on transparency, I’m writing this in order to let you know why that is happening and what might happen in the future.

(Read Mored, I apologize deeply if you are on mobile.)

Yes, XKit works much, much better on Chrome (and Opera actually, since Opera is now just Chrome with makeup) than on Firefox and Safari because of various reasons.

One of the reasons is lack of documentation: for example, Apple's Safari Developer page still boasts Safari 6, even though Safari 7 was released more than 5 months ago. There is absolutely no official documentation on the website about what’s changed in Safari 7. (Even though one of those changes broke XKit completely when it was first released.)

When searching for what’s changed in a Firefox version (related to extensions), I usually find the answer in a comment on a blog post. Meanwhile, Chrome’s developer documentation is pretty clear and always up to date.

The other is lack of features: for example, Safari still does not support the “download” attribute, while even the Blackberry Browser apparently supports it. This means Safari users have to use my server as a proxy when using Audio Downloader, which makes audio downloads much slower and unstable.

Writing extensions for these two browsers is like cooking without any lights on. Sure, you’ll probably come up with something edible, but it will probably not taste as good.

For now, I have no idea on what I am going to do. If you know how these browsers operate, please feel free to make a pull request on Github or open an issue if you know the fix/issue or send me an ask.

If I can’t get the help I need, I might eventually have to drop support for those browsers (at least officially). Don’t get me wrong, I love choice and if I had the documentation and time, I would even support Internet Explorer 3.0, but every day I get to spend less and less time on XKit due to college and work, and I would like everyone to have a XKit that is bug-free.

But even if I end up doing that, I will make another survey asking what you think before doing anything, so no need to worry. I’m just writing this beforehand to let you know what might happen in a few months.

Update: For clarification, I have no plans to drop support for Firefox or Safari right now, and I will only do it as a very, very, very last resort.

PS: I’m still on my break, so I apologize if you still haven’t received an answer from me if you’ve sent me an ask.

PPS: Posts related to transparency, such as this one, will be posted using the “transparency” tag from now on.