Compare with ex-Firefox VP Johnathan Nightingale's recent thread about Google "amateur hour" and "oopses" that only affected Firefox:
It's sort of the reverse of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": nobody ever got fired for refusing to implement an accessibility measure that not even IBM (or Google, in this case) bothers to implement. Unless you're in a very specific sector (in which case you know what your obligations are), your legal duties will always be a strict subset of those of $BIGCORP; so you can use $BIGCORP's shirking of a particular duty as a heuristic to determine whether you can safely shirk that same duty.
Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?
Now why they're still sniffing user agents instead of doing feature detection is a good question for Google, who themselves, to the best of my knowledge, push for feature detection instead of sniffing user agents as best practice. Do as we say - not as we do?
Note: I think safari has since fixed indexeddb?
It's one of the reasons I stopped accepting lawyers and law firms as clients. Every other client would pay on time. Those in the law field would consistently slow-pay, I believe because they knew they wouldn't get sued over it.
"That overdue invoice? Oh, we never received it. Send it again." "Oh, Jenna in accounting must have it, but she's on vacation for two weeks." "Oh, that's in process." "Oh, we still haven't received it." "Oh, you have a signature on a certified mail delivery? It must be upstairs for approval." "Oh, we've already run all the checks for the month, it'll be in next month's batch."
I eventually went to a pre-paid hours, payable by credit card-only model. It was the only way to stay afloat. Plus it was delicious when someone would use up all their hours and give give some excuse.
"Oh, we really need this on the site today." "No problem. I can do that as soon as you buy more hours."
"Oh, we'll get that paid next week." "No problem, your website went offline an hour ago and will be back when you buy more hours next week." Poof! payment comes through three minutes later.
Maybe my population is skewed- two of the three doctors I see are Eagle Scouts, but not everyone is a cheapskate.
Wow only _30_ visits to the doctor and you get a $10 gift card? I have never been to an orthodontist but how often does one typically go? 30 times a year? Are those visits free?
On top of that, you have do free advertising (t-shirt) for him, plus having some useless trivia knowledge... I hope the questions are simple enough for people to always get right? This would just be pure frustration for me, I have learned over the years to literally dread trivia "opportunities".
And the best part... you can otherwise donate your paltry gift card to help him pay to go on vacation, albeit helping people, but you said vacation, therefore I'm guessing he works a couple days.
Are those visits free?
On top of that, you have do free advertising (t-shirt) for him,
plus having some useless trivia knowledge...
The trivia questions were pretty easy- "what is the outer layer of your teeth called?", "what is the capital of $state?" etc. It's not that big of a deal.
something something vacation
The best you can do is test the nightly or beta track all the time (if they have one). But that may have false positives due to bugs on their end. And once you notice the bug, you still have to fix it. This isn't something to drop everything for like a security bug, so it may have to wait on other things.
Meanwhile, people outside the company will assume it's intentional sabotage, because that's how the Internet thinks these days.
Google did an "oopsie" and blocked Firefox users from using Gmail
Sounds great.
I.e. something which Hanlon's razor should remove, but actually still exists.
IE6 was a browser of the same era as Netscape 4, when it was common and unsurprising for a CSS error or a malformed bit of HTML to crash the browser.
The idea that YT or any other Google product team would justify not CIing against IE6 or Firefox is absurd to me.
It doesn't matter if they were intentional. The author mentioned there may hav been hundreds of these "oops" events. Assuming it wasn't intentional, Google knew there was a problem and chose not to fix it.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
Or in Google's case, "fool Mozilla a hundred times..."
Can you elaborate? I kind of agree on the Kubernetes part in that it's really biased towards Google-scale, but I fail to see such biases in Go, despite having used it as my primary language for 4 years now.
Web developers the world over hated dealing with IE6 lack of compliance with established standards. Microsoft even had a newer versions of IE that was better. Everyone wanted this, it's just that nobody was willing to do anything about it.
This is the world we live in. Even with a near worldwide consensus on what needs to be done, nobody is willing to say it for fear of repercussions. People would rather jump through hoops to support the status quo than risk backlash.
Another problem is that the people who would normally have to approve a change like this are not the people who had to jump through the hoops to support IE6.
The ‘rest of the web’ had these banners for a long while before Google ever got around to adding it. My websites (and anything I worked on) certainly did.
No OMTP, OMTC, no hw video acceleration, no smooth scrolling, buggy dark theme, etc, so Firefox on Linux is not as polished and/or performing as on other platforms. The excuse for that was, that Linux has small market share, so it is not worth for putting more resources into solving these problems (some of them have bug reports open for over a decade!).
Well, Firefox itself has also small market share, it is in single digits now. The irony is in the part, that they actively used this as rationalization for what they do, but do not like it, when others use exactly that reason on them.
I'm not talking about validity of the rationale itself; just about the irony of finding them on the bottom of the hole they helped to dig out.
On the other hand, the above mentioned features could work, if Firefox would implement them, as they did for other platforms. Other applications on Linux are able to use the needed APIs available, why Firefox is not?
If you try doing much hardware graphics (let alone game development) for Linux end-users you'll understand why features like OMTP or OMTC are late to ship on that platform, if ever.
Even on Windows some new stuff like WebRender has to be manually opted in on specific driver versions and architectures one at a time, because it turns out video drivers are really bad and if you ship early your app will crash.
No, they are not. A massive subset of Firefox devs are Apple users. For Linux, the occasional Redhat or SuSE dev does the most-needed fixing.
> Those features are missing largely because they are hard to implement reliably on Linux and customers (who are largely not Linux users) won't feel the impact.
Neither of these are true. It does make easier rationalizing Linux mistreatment, though.
If there was no impact, the equivalent functionality would not be needed to be implemented under other OS-es either. You have bugzilla full of feedback, that it does have an impact.
It also makes Linux itself look worse, compared to other systems.
> There are often flags you can set to try and use them on Linux, YMMV.
I know, that you can force OMTC, for example. I've been doing that for years, with zero bugs. Why can't Mozilla do that by default? They haven't reviewed the situation for years, that's how much they care.
Also, for example, the EGL situation (needed for Wayland, obviously Wayland apps cannot use GLX without X11) was purely Firefox problem, not the driver stack one. (Worked on by Redhat dev).
> If you try doing much hardware graphics (let alone game development) for Linux end-users you'll understand why features like OMTP or OMTC are late to ship on that platform, if ever.
Mesa is one of best of breed drivers, especially compared to some drivers you can find on other platforms. See here: https://code.blender.org/2019/04/supported-gpus-in-blender-2... for what Blender devs think about the driver situation.
> Even on Windows some new stuff like WebRender has to be manually opted in on specific driver versions and architectures one at a time, because it turns out video drivers are really bad and if you ship early your app will crash.
I'm fine with incremental enablement. I'm not fine with the enablement never arriving.
And again; the original post was about the irony of the situation Firefox itself finds themselves in; exactly the same excuses are used against them.
Web apps and Chrome at Google are being made by entirely different team. Unless there is a mandate from the top to the web teams, it is irrelevant. They could be as well a different companies.
> Linux just gets less priority because it's quite frankly irrelevant as a Desktop OS.
That's exactly the point I was making: Firefox is also getting less and less priority, because it loses it's relevancy as a browser.
Except now Mozilla doesn't like exactly this same argument.
There's no other explanation for Mozilla's attitude towards Linux than negligence; objectively, it is neglected. The degree of willfulness is up to the debate.