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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

I know that Mozilla is not a single group and actually heterogenous but this talk doesn't ring very true to me when the Firefox add-ons site uses CSS Grid and when it detects you don't have it it shunts you to the mobile site which looks and works terribly (hiding things) on a real desktop computer monitor.

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When your target audience is 'Firefox users', doesn't it make sense to more freely use features that are supported by Firefox?

Firefox is open source. There are lots of Firefox forks. Right now there are more add-ons that work in the Firefox forks then there are add-ons that work in modern Firefox.

I'm going to make a guess that the same goes for exploits.

Not with the amount of new attack surfaces that Mozilla is cramming into Firefox lately.

What do you mean "shunted," redirected to an m. site? The only old browser I have handy at the moment is super-old, Firefox 3.6.27, and it isn't redirected anywhere. The addon site's layout is clearly not as intended but seems readable and usable.

My guess is the addon site is using a strategy a lot of developers are taking, design a narrow mobile experience that doesn't use CSS Grid (because small screens typically have a single column layout anyway and most non-Grid supporting browsers are mobile) but make it fluid to work in larger viewports for any browser that doesn't support CSS Grid. Not every browser has to have the exact same experience, it's something Jen covers in this video series.

BTW, Firefox ESR 52 supports CSS Grid and addons that aren't supported in 57 and later. I think some of the forks are only needed to run unsigned extensions, which sounds like a bad idea.

Is it possible that site is redirecting you to the mobile version for other reasons? CSS grid has ~85% support worldwide; current versions of every major desktop browser support it.

(Not doubting your experience, just surprised that it would be because of grid and not some other feature).

I'm sure. There are lots of us that don't use major browsers. I discussed it on IRC with some of the dev's from the Firefox fork I use. It was detecting CSS Grid and if not shunting to the mobile site.

This was about half a year ago.

Maybe you shouldn't use a fork that's lagging behind so much it doesn't support CSS grid?

No. I should. I care about browsing, not about running web apps. Modern browsers are just attempts to re-create the entire OS within a JS engine.

Couldn't the forks host their own mirror of the addons site, or inject their own CSS into the official Mozilla Addons pages?

For people using forks for the old extension system, why use an outdated engine lacking support for new features, instead of using a separate (native application|electron-based application|shell script)?

Indeed that fork does. But due to them respecting the intellectual property of the extension devs they can't just willy nilly copy everything over. They have been contacting authors and trying to do it on a case by case basis for a lot of them.

That's one of the strategies you may choose to deal "what if user's browsers does not support CSS Grid?": start with the mobile layout. Offer advanced layout for the browsers with css grid support, fallback to the mobile version for others.

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