The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.
Thank you for the excerpt. I initially interpreted the title as US government agencies will stop using Firefox, not US government agencies will stop requiring their web masters to test in Firefox.
I’d imagine that effectively means agencies would stop using Firefox, if they can’t use it on their own sites.
Websites built for Chrome do work in Firefox.
Google Sheets would disagree.
I use sheets in Firefox literally every day.
Yeah, Firefox works on everything right now. I have not opened chrome in ages, could easily have been a year since I have needed it.
https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+120,and_ff+119&compareCats=all
If you scroll down past the browser version checkboxes (I’ve ticked the right ones for you) and list of features FireFox supports, you’ll find a very long list of web features that don’t work (or don’t work properly) in FireFox.
Some of them are pretty important features and there are sites that use them. Pretty sure Google Sheets uses the Filesystem stuff for example - it “works” in FireFox but not as well as in Chrome.
What this article is about is unless FireFox’s marketshare trend reverses, websites are going to stop including workarounds specifically for FireFox users. They’ll just let the site be broken in that browser.
I’ve had some add-ons break, but I’ve never had any issues with sheets itself either. Wonder what issues the other guy’s been having
I always get annoyed by the copy paste thing. I can’t remember which way it goes but you either can’t copy paste with the mouse or with Ctrl c/v. That’s the only thing that bugs me about FF and sheets.
When the website and browser are made by the same company, they aren’t exactly motivated to make sure it runs well in other browsers.
Fat chance they’re actually using Firefox in the first place. My money’s on Chrome or IE.
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tbh I already editorialized the title a bit to make it less exaggerated, wasn’t sure how far to take it.
Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting all websites.
^except the ones that only work in chrome
*especially! Spoof user agent if you have to.
if you spoof your user-agent it won’t help Firefox in metrics, since websites will think you’re other browser.
Nono, the other way round. Visit it with chrome and spoof a firefox user agent, so it looks like you used firefox, while you can still use the website.
Well I only suggest it for sites one has to use, and even then I think it would still show google people are fed up with their shit
Or just in general
I visit weather.gov around once a day on both mobile and desktop Firefox.
I’ll be over here making sure they still got a sliver of Mosaic in their logs.
I actually did that today before reading the article.
I took the liberty of reading the article but I’m gonna say the title is quite… tendentious. Makes it sound like it’s yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as “The CIA will stop funding Signal” (never has been) or “FBI wants to sell Wikipedia” (never has been).
What is going on?
EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of “tendentious”, which I have linked.
tendentious
ten·den·tious /tenˈdenSHəs/ adjective expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one. “a tendentious reading of history”
New word for me, too. Odd, considering how incredibly relevant it is nowadays!
It’s a very common word in other languages (Spanish) but my brain didn’t even process it correctly the first time I saw it in English lol
Very common word in Dutch too, but the Spanish did at one point rule the low countries before we kicked them out, so.
Thanks for taking the time to explain it to others, which I should have done beforehand. Admittedly when I wrote that post I was thinking of the term “tenacious” which means something completely different, and that distracted me from noticing I was using a perhaps obscure word.
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
Someone call 911, I think I’m having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.
We would be euphoria-laden in our willingness to expeditiously mobilize and engage medical assistance should it become categorically imperative.
Something can’t become categorically imperative, a quiddidity such as an essentially categorical property is invariant with respect to time. It either is or it isn’t. Per contra, aesculapian aid might become dispositionally required.
Just kill me instead. Thanks!
The fuck does tendentious mean and how do I even pronounce it?
We speak murican here friend
Your adroit incorporation of "adroit " reminds me of mine own erewhile efforts to incorporate “adroit” into my poetical experimentations, which I hope resulted in an execution considered adroit back in the time.
Grateful I am for your bringing of this memory of creation to me.
Much of it has to do with Firefox’s decisions in the past 5-7 years that have made it very unfriendly to enterprise environments. The provisioning tools have gotten progressively more hostile to IT departments.
The US government is also finally moving to more modern systems for authentication and Mozilla has incorporated some particularly poor changes to how the stack is handled that are very unfriendly to IT environments that need to manage credentials for multiple authoritative sources. We had to switch to Chrome a couple years ago because our support cases with Mozilla would on many occasions come back with a response of ‘we’ve made our decision and will not be considering changes’.
Unfortunately, as Firefox kicks itself out of the enterprise market; that’s going to cascade to the personal market even further as well.
Serious question re the auth part:
Have you tried submitting PRs? Much of the complaints that I see about the development side of Firefox are grounded on the fac that “they won’t have this cool thing that Chrome has”, ignoring that those things are usually dangerous or are rejected for justified, studied reasons (see: WebUSB). Sounds just about the area where auth would have issues, and it’d be interesting to see what Firefox’s actual response was.
Who knows, maybe they’re cluing you that you shouldn’t depending on Google…
Well, as much as I like Firefox (and I even donate to the Mozilla foundation), I know for a fact that companies won’t pay their programmers money to make PR on Firefox.
I did try, unfortunately, in something as big as a browser it’s very time consuming to even fix simple bugs without side effects.
True. Browsers are so damn complex these days!
Original title is worse, I editorialized it as much as I thought appropriate
You made it express an opinion as if in an editorial report?
Or do you mean edited/revised?
edited/revised
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
Completely off-topic but I recall a lawyers TV show back in the day where the response to this joke was something like:
“About at the same time you stopped beating yours”
Which would have been interesting to see how that would have worked at the court. Can’t remember the show alas, but it was probably The Practice (a late 90s show I think, predecessor to Boston Legal).
The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.
Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.
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The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.
What about security? If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to exploit way easier.
Security through obscurity doesn’t, work the vulnerabilities are still there. Also if the vulnerabilities are visible they’re also easier to close.
More eyeballs are from people wanting those flaws fixed that wanting to exploit them.
Proprietary source code has much fewer eyeballs, none of which you can verify belong to competent or trustworthy people.
If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to
exploit way easierpatchFTFY. Open source software is more secure than closed source, not less
No, you can’t really make blanket statements like that at all.
Open source doesn’t compromise security on its own and closed source is the same.
Open source might be more secure but that’s only if people actually audit it properly and some closed source codes are audited more closely than some open source code.
Is this a serious question?
This is the exact same ridiculous argument that proprietary software corporations make. It never made any sense, security through obscurity will never work. Linux is open-source used on ~80% of all web servers, in your logic these servers would all be vulnerable. It just doesn’t make any sense. Linux is also used in many embedded devices and Android is based on the Linux kernel. But Android (which is also entirely open source) has one of the best security models out there.
That’s the same bullshit line politicians and corporations use, it’s simply not true
Vulnerabilities can and are usually found without code inspection. Fuzzing, reverse engineering, etc. At the same time, it is easier to find vulnerabilities having the code to check, but it is easier also for those who want to have them patched. That’s why we have tons of CVEs in Windows, iOS etc., and they don’t all come from the vendor… Depending on the ratio of eyeballs looking at something to fix and the ones looking at something to exploit, open source can be more secure compared to closed source.
Lol
And 100% of it is dog shit. I have seen custom products from Accenture, Deloitte, and E&Y, and they were passable prototypes at best.
