Mastodawn

Greg de J May 30, 2023

Web developers: when you say, “your browser does not support this site,” what you REALLY mean is that YOU don’t support the browser. Don’t turn it around on the user because you chose not to stick to well-supported standards, or worse, are doing user agent sniffing.

If you truly use some feature shipped by one browser and not everyone, at least say, “We use x standard feature, which is unsupported in this browser.” But even then, the web is all about progressive enhancement.

#WebDevelopment

@cassidy Or be like me, test only in Firefox and when Chrome users complain about the site looking wrong, you just go like "you should upgrade to a proper browser" ;p

Ankit Pati May 23, 2023

@Reina @cassidy Or be like me and do the exact opposite.

Kagan MacTane (he/him)May 23, 2023

@cassidy The only case I can see for user-agent sniffing at this point is if you want to provide the user with instructions tailored to the UI they have. So instead of having to say, "On Firefox, choose the three little lines to the right of the Address Bar; on Chrome, choose the three little dots...", you can just give them the single one that applies to them.

That's all.

@kagan yeah, sure. But it is abused so much that I don’t think it’s worth keeping around for that one use case. Heck, I get told my *operating system* is not supported by *a website* on a regular basis thanks solely to user agent sniffing. There should be zero reason for that.

Kagan MacTane (he/him)May 23, 2023

@cassidy I'm not saying "Let's keep it around for that" (and I don't feel I need to, since there's no realistic risk of it going away anytime soon); I'm just saying "If someone tries to suggest 'Hey, let's do a user-agent sniff!', the only way it's getting my approval is if the reason is something like this. Otherwise, my reply will be, 'Actually, let's not.'"

༒ ɐɥɔǝʇɐɯ ʍǝɹpuɐ ༒May 23, 2023

@cassidy yeah, sadly I sometimes miss the days when we had to support IE6, because at least “everyone” was forced to support a certain baseline level of compatibility, whereas today it’s like the degree of consideration is like “last X versions of Chrome and Firefox” and no further thought goes into it.

Ben Foote May 23, 2023

@cassidy Slack: Firefox on Linux is no longer a supported browser.
Firefox + User Agent Switcher: I'm Chrome!
Slack: Hello friend, welcome aboard.

HACK13 May 23, 2023

@benpocalypse @cassidy gosh I hate how many companies are just ditching support for anything but chrome

Morton Fox May 23, 2023

@benpocalypse @cassidy

I only had to spoof the user agent for one website in the last few years, but I'm still annoyed that I had to do that.

Cleo Menezes Jr. 🌵May 23, 2023

@benpocalypse @cassidy Your comment is as good as this one. I keep trying to decide which one is better.

@cassidy if your browser doesn't support websites you're a liability for yourself and everyone else, also stop using internet explorer

@Felipe_B yeah, right, except it happens when I’m using modern standards-compliant browsers like Firefox and GNOME Web—basically anything NOT based on Google’s code. We don’t need to cede even more control of the Internet to Google’s whims, thank you very much.

Kohan Ikin May 23, 2023

@cassidy I promise I don't mean this as snark - but I tried viewing this post in the NetSurf & Links browsers, and only got a message "To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform."

I know Mastodon can't run as a web app in Links, I'd never expect that! But it's disappointing that Mastodon posts aren't even readable at their canonical URL as regular HTML :(

@syneryder yep, completely a fair point! I try to make everything I do have a sensible fallback without JavaScript to help ensure accessibility, machine readability, etc. Bummer that Mastodon doesn’t work that way.

eishiya May 23, 2023

@syneryder @cassidy The sad part is *they used to be*! While browsing timelines and making posts always required JS as far as I know, permalinks used to be static pages, as were information pages like /about. 4.0 changed everything into an inaccessible mess.

Kohan Ikin May 24, 2023

@eishiya @cassidy Oh wow, you're kidding?! So I guess ActivityPub isn't to blame here for the lack of static pages, it's Mastodon itself. Huh.

I still hand-code all my HTML & run it through HTML validators, dagnabbit! ;)

eishiya May 24, 2023

@syneryder ActivityPub is just the protocol used between servers. Instance websites work like other social websites - there's a backend with the database and post processing, and a front-end, and the Mastodon front-end has been """simplified""" and made more """consistent""".

In fairness, though I do snark on these changes, some convenience has come out of them. I just hate that there's no quick, light way to view Mastodon posts by their permalink URLs now, and that /about requires more trust.

Brianary May 23, 2023

As the browser market has dwindled to various Chromium flavors vs Firefox as the lone holdout (where they are focused on a pretty wide array of things other than the browser), it probably will continue to become more proprietary.

Crazy Pony May 23, 2023

@cassidy i always read "our site does not support your browser" when i try to visit them in Midori

Its their bleeding edge super brittle javascript framework that does critically demand on the selected most recent browsers to render some content at all

@crazy_pony I mean… is Midori still updated? Last I checked it was super out of date and used an insecure WebKit version, but it’s admittedly been a while.

henry May 23, 2023

@cassidy Always interpret this kind of notification as open admission of gross incompetence and do not proceed. Think of it as reading “Hey dude, look, this site is working with some browsers, not with others, no idea why LOL. Might be infested with viruses that steal your data and infect your computer LOL, but yo it works on this one browser…”

henry May 23, 2023

@cassidy “Dude, we don’t even know PHP over here. The site was put together by some guy who knew a guy who could get it done really cheap on eBay. The comments in the code are like Cs and Rs turned the wrong way isn’t that cool? The site is just barely holding up though. So anyways we don’t try to fix it just sit around play Call of Duty. If anyone calls we tell them they gotta use Chrome. And the managers here don’t know any IT so they don’t even know how dumb it makes them look.”

joel b May 23, 2023

@cassidy reminds me of restaurants that try to get away with ‘due to staffing shortages… [whatever]’ like somehow it’s the staff’s fault, never the ones in charge.

Magitism May 23, 2023

@cassidy In an ideal world I would agree with you completely (and do about user agent sniffing) but it has never actually been that simple in the real world. Browsers have weird idiosyncrasies, clients have weird desires and testing in every browser/os combination is very hard and add in devices and it becomes actually impossible. I’ve personally witnessed two seemingly identical iphones, factory reset by QA, where a page worked on one and not the other. The real world is messy.

@cassidy Fair enough, but I’m still naming and shaming Internet Explorer in my error messages.

dxzdb May 24, 2023

@cassidy yeah! when I see that “we only support Chrome” I yell back: “well, you are not trying hard enough”

Zeugs May 25, 2023

@cassidy
If it's not in the web standard it's legit. It's about web STANDARDS! You should not do extra hours so that shitty non standard tech works and you enable large companies market domination schemes.

Håkon O.May 25, 2023

@cassidy I think the message should be: degrade gracefully. Don't lock people out because they chose another browser than you. We don't want to go back to the days of Internet Explorer.

il fabbro Jun 16, 2023

@cassidy
already years ago I used to say that "Chrome is the new Internet Explorer", because of his disregards about accessibility and web standard.
Web developers started to use any experimental features just because "it is supperted by Chrome".

The result is many sites with some banner "Update your browser" (means: please download Chrome because we don't care supporting anything else). Like in late '90.