Hacker News Reader

Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate: I don't think blocking bleeding-edge browsers is necessarily "stupidity." If you're smart enough to understand all the caveats of running a bleeding edge software program, you're smart enough to change your user agent string.

If you're not, you have no business running nightly, and you're probably going to generate a lot of "yOuR sITE is BRokEN!" support emails / forum posts / bug reports for other projects, and conspiratorial posts screeching on social media.

I see this all the time - people who run dev branches/nightlies/alphas and have the QA skills of a turnip who have no business doing so...and of course they're noisy as hell and waste a lot of people's times.

If you don't know the most basic points of QA and how to file a bug report that doesn't waste people's time, stop running anything beyond "stable" or betas marked specifically for public consumption. You're not "cooler" or more 133t running nightly releases.

View on HN

People can run whatever software they want. They don't need your permission, or to know how to file a bug report, or whatever other bullshit you've dreamed up. They're also allowed to complain when a site is broken in their browser.

If you don't want to see unsophisticated complaints and bug reports, then you need to stop looking at them. Perhaps find a different profession/hobby where your user-hostile attitude actually benefits someone.

It’s also simply not true that more user-facing bugs happen on nightlies. I run nightlies at times and have never found them to be less stable in any tangible way that would affect site usability and show up in a bug report. On the contrary, nightlies are the first to get important bug fixes. It’s overwhelmingly likely that GP is just a lazy audacious dickwad ignoring valid bug reports.

To be honest, they don't need to find a different profession / hobby, as long as their user hostile attitude makes them money.

To some extent that is correct, ironically this was likely an attempt to reduce user complaints and bug reports. The problem is that they didn’t went about the the correct way there is a better way to implement feature detection than to check the user agent: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Tools_and_tes...

“The site isn't working on FF nightly or Chrome Canary” is a perfectly valid bug report. It’s up to the dev if they want to investigate and fix or if they want to wait for more data/reports to come it.

You think I’m going to source dive your tens of thousands of lines of shitty hacked up react just because I’m a nightly user? Fuck no. Do your job clown.

Yup. A Fx Nightly user might be reporting a new, valid bug about a spec change or new policy around the anti-fingerprinting tech which would give the site/app owner time to react before this change makes its way to stable. Will there be some legit browser bugs, probably? Will folks running unstable versions be more likely to diagnose who is at fault and do a bug report, also probably.

Same argument goes for games on Linux. There was an interview a couple years back where a team noticed more reports from Linux users, and when they looked into it, the reports had logs, steps to reproduce, system info and it help squash bugs on all platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com