Comment by extra88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by extra88 | Hacker News Reader

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How old? I have a copy of Firefox 3.6.27 from 2012, the main content is below the sidenav, probably because its in an <aside>, support for which wasn't added until Firefox 4. That's okay, it's still usable, the content is still all there and readable.

But there are some other things that are more fundamentally borked, the accordions won't operate. I'm for progressive enhancement and while requiring JavaScript for a site to work well or in some cases work at all is okay, there should still be some provision to "fail safe" so the content is available when the specific JavaScript fails for some reason (I don't think it's because they're using <button>, technically using that outside a form was against old HTML specs but I think browsers still routinely supported them). For accordions, my preference would be to use <details> and <summary> elements and a polyfill to make them work in browsers that don't support them; they'll "fail safe" and display all the content in browsers that don't support them and don't run the polyfill.

24.6 ESR from June 2014. The side navs are now on top of the main content. So the main contend slides under the side nav and is hard to read. I understand that it's a 3 year old browser, but it's on a Win7 machine, like lots of other web users.

I realized that Firefox 3.6 not supporting <aside> wouldn't really affect the layout, it's basically a <div> and it's floated left, something 3.6 can handle. The main content has a class containing width: calc(100% - 250px); and Firefox didn't support calc() until 4 but that wouldn't explain it happening to you in 24.6 ESR.

Maybe older Firefox has a bug in calc(), disabling that property in a newer browser is enough to shift the content below the sidenav because it falls back to width: 100%;. I see what you mean about hard to read, if I disable the calc() width, the sidenav stays put but the main content scrolls on top of it. That's a little confusing because the sidenav staying put is due to the property position: sticky; but caniuse.com says Firefox didn't support that until version 26, version 32 without having to enable a flag.

Anyhow, I do think government guidelines in particular should handle older browsers better than this page is demonstrating. Part of the point of using frameworks for libraries and others is they can maintain and aggregate all the little solutions to problems between browser implementations and between older and newer browsers.

This is a really interesting question, given the very long tail of old browsers out there. There's downloadable data about the browsers visiting gov't websites (all anonymized by Google Analytics)[1], but that doesn't solve the "when do you stop supporting" question, particularly for old versions of IE.

[1]: https://analytics.usa.gov/

Just an FYI but that version is probably full of pretty serious security issues. 24.1.1 has 78 published cves[1] and that list isn't complete.

I'd update!

1. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-452/...

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