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It's not just them. Have you tried viewing HN comments in Firefox for Android? A few years ago Chrome gained majority among web developers and everyone just st

by skarap 11y ago

It's not just them. Have you tried viewing HN comments in Firefox for Android? A few years ago Chrome gained majority among web developers and everyone just stopped testing with Firefox or any other browser. In fact not just testing - they started developing for Chrome only. And now we've got us into another IE6 situation and I think it will be even harder to overcome this time.

berdario 11y ago
This is the crux of the issue. Gmail itself is unusable on Android + Firefox. When using an alternative browser you'll also stumble in problems with plenty of Android apps: Slack, Citymapper, etc... (when opening a web page intent, they expect that the only app that'll receive that will be Chrome) The situation isn't as bad for desktop browsers, but it's depressing how things can still be broken.
- skarap 11y ago
  > The situation isn't as bad for desktop browsers Don't worry, it will get worse. Firefox is now forced to accept `-webkit-` in css (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/firefox_webkit_css_support/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/firefox_webkit_css_s...) not to be "broken". This will obviously lead to even less Firefox testing. Hell, even I (my team) am contributing to this! We're working on Angular-based web SPA now. It hasn't got much functionality yet, but already has quite a few bugs when viewed in Firefox. And the usual answer from frontend guys is "It's a firefox bug!".
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    I suspect it will go beyond CSS. There are a certain kind of app on Android that makes the device FS available via a web browser. Thing is that these apps invariably makes use of a Chrome-ism when dealing with drag and drop. In Firefox you can only drag a single file at a time. drag over multiple, or a folder, and there won't be much of a result. In Chrome however it will transfer over just fine. This has been sitting in the Mozilla bugtracker for some time, because the Chrome behavior goes beyond the HTML spec for file uploads.
    - yyhhsj0521 11y ago
      Yeah sometimes I wonder if providing extra behaviors is good or bad. Certainly it could save developers a lot of works and save users a lot of time, but it may become next ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); Maybe Chrome should put a warning into the console, saying that this function is experimental.
  - emn13 11y ago
    I remember fixing one of frontend bugs in an SPA and contrary to the claims it turned out to be a webkit bug that the code relied on (the app had been developed on a mac, so it's fairly easy to only test on webkit/blink). Lovely. Aside/Rant: I also get the impression that frontend devs have never read the CSS2.1 spec or bothered to understand it (CSS3 is longer, and consists largely of special-purpose extra modules, so a complete reading is less valuable and more difficult). There's somehow this feeling that since CSS "isn't a real programming language" you should be able to use it intuitively. And when things don't work out and you fiddle until it works without giving thought to why, that's OK. That's such a huge waste of time. The box model may not be 100% intuitive, but boy, if that's your standard, what you doing in IT?
    - masklinn 11y ago
      > the app had been developed on a mac, so it's fairly easy to only test on webkit/blink It's no harder to only test on Chrome in Linux and IE in Windows, I fail to see how that's an excuse. The only excuses are IE testing when developing on OSX and Safari testing when developing on Windows, it's trivial to install both Firefox and Chrome on any OS.
      - emn13 11y ago
        Actually, it's easier to test for IE versions on linux/mac due to http://xdissent.github.io/ievms/ http://xdissent.github.io/ievms/ - You can install the VMs on windows too (of course), but I've never stumbled upon quite as simple a solution. On windows I tend to just rely on compat mode, which is surprisingly good, but far from perfect.
- hussong 11y ago
  FWIW, Paypal rendered as completely blank pages (home and login / payment pages) in FF/Ubuntu until a couple days ago. Not sure when this started, but I've seen it before on some of their payment pages.
spoiler 11y ago
Most of the time when I saw people develop "for Chrome" (like experiments), it would use standard stuff, but it only so happens that other browsers don't implement them [properly], yet. Or maybe I'm just awfully pedantic, but whenever I make stuff I tend to make it as close to the standard as possible, and fall back to vendor-specific stuff only when necessary (and usually try to cover all the major browsers). Also, aren't most the Chrome-specific things disabled unless the app runs as an extension to discourage this type of chrome-only behaviour? I can't test/verify now, since I'm on my phone. This excludes CSS prefixes, since those are rarely needed these days anyway.
quanticle 11y ago
>And now we've got us into another IE6 situation and I think it will be even harder to overcome this time. I hate to defend Chrome, but I don't think that comparing Chrome to IE6 is warranted (yet). The problem with IE was that a large number of users were stuck with IE6 and never updated (either by their own choice or their IT departments'). So web developers had to write code for modern web browsers, and then implement a compatibility layer (I guess we call it polyfill, these days) for IE6. Chrome, however, has an update mechanism that the vast majority of users and IT departments do not override. Chrome is not in an IE6 situation because historically the number of users running old versions of Chrome is small and drops off rapidly as new versions come out. I pulled these graphs from a few years ago, comparing Chrome adoption to IE adoption: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/chrome-adoption-2012-09.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/chrome... http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/internet-explorer-adoption-2012-09.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/intern... Notice that Chrome uptake is very rapid, with the vast majority of users being on the current version of Chrome after approximately two to three months. Compare that with IE, where the majority of users still aren't using the most modern version of Internet Explorer after two to three years. So no, I don't think Chrome is in the same position as IE. Google pushes updates to Chrome on a frequent basis, and, more importantly, those updates are actually applied by users. That said, it's still possible that Google could tomorrow do what Microsoft did when IE "won the browser war", which is disband the team and cease Chrome development. Do I think this is a likely scenario? Of course not. Is it possible? Sure.
- josteink 11y ago
  The problem with IE6 was not that users didn't update. It was that IE created a monoculture among developers, using IE only features. Which resulted in code which got out on the web, and stayed there. And then every browser had to either 1. be "broken" because the web-pages didn't work, or 2. forego W3C, standard-process and all that and emulate IE's bugs in order to be "real" browsers people could use. And long after IE6 is gone, all that is still hanging around, causing issues to this day. Right now we're getting a Chrome monoculture. People are using pre-standard Chrome and Webkit only features in production websites. In the future those websites will stick around, no matter if Chrome users update their browsers or not. Chrome is the new IE. With Google giving a shit about real standardization, launching non-standard features in Chrome and production websites at the same time, they are the new Microsoft.
rubberstamp 11y ago
HN on firefox is bad. Comments doesn't have any hierarchy. HN has to fix that. I use firefox on android as it is the only one that has extensions. I use uBlock and mht extensions. On linux desktop too firefox is used mostly as it uses less memory than chrome when you have too many tabs open
- lucb1e 11y ago
  And on top of that, it's also a principle matter for me. Unless I run into impossibilities, I prefer free and open source software because it offers more control, privacy and hackability, and it will act in my best interest instead of that of the company behind it.
- pmontra 11y ago
  HN on Android looks exactly the same in FF, Chrome and the stock browser. I checked right now. Even the zoom behaviour is the same. The only browser that makes the site behave better is Opera with text reflow on zoom enabled. I can't understate how useful that feature is in general and I can't understand why every browser doesn't offer it. It's the reason why I'm using Opera on Android despite using Firefox on the desktop. Another reason I'm not using FF on Android is that it's noticeably slower at rendering the page at the end of a scroll action. It seems that blink is better at that. I'm adblocking with AdAway on the device I rooted and with Adblock Plus (a local proxy) on the one I didn't root. You get them on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus.android https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus....
  - rubberstamp 11y ago
    opera has always been innovative browser with good features as long back as i can remember(opera on Nokia s60v3 back then). features like great speed dial on mobile n desktop, save for offline, opera turbo mode, syncing bookmarks between desktop n mobile, website overview mode, text reflow.. I have to use addons with other browsers to have these features on chrome or firefox. Opera has a great team. Has poor market share though. They also had good security. Opera wasn't vulnerable to some big ssl bug discovered a couple of years ago. Most other browsers were. They recently switched their rendering engine to webkit though
darklajid 11y ago
Upvoting you is not enough - let's focus on the local problem. Dang - have you seen HN in Firefox on Android recently? Is there something we can do to improve this? Given that HN receives a moderate amount of (visible) changes recently, is there a way to make the site work in that situation/setup?
- msl09 11y ago
  What's wrong?
  - darklajid 11y ago
    http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W The indentation for one. Notice that the second comment is an answer to the first, but is on the same level of indentation. Following discussions like that is highly annoying. Weird: While grabbing the phone to answer your question I noticed that "threads", i.e. the view of my comments, works fine. Just the comments below submission links are broken. Compare to Chrome: http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq Note that I do use uBlock in Firefox. Now that I think about it, that might be relevant as well. But then again, why would that break the submission view and not the "threads" link?
    - pmontra 11y ago
      I get that Chrome like rendering in every browser on my tablet (1) and with Opera and the stock browser on the phone. I reinstalled Firefox on the browser and it looks like your one. I understand that it makes difficult to follow threads but at least we can see deeply nested comments: they don't collapse to a single column of letters. (1) Lines are not terminated at the screen boundary on the tablet if I zoom in. They keep going off screen to the right. Same on the stock browser on the phone and with Opera if I turn off text reflow.
- rubberstamp 11y ago
  whatever you do, please keep everything else as it is now. HN loads very fast as it doesn't load every library on the planet. Do fix the rendering problem on firefox if possible, and keep it lightweight as it is now
rpgmaker 11y ago
This is the first comment that I have read that has acknowledged this situation. I've been noticing this for quite a while. At first I was reluctant to believe it because designers should know better than anyone how bad that can turn out in the long run. Firefox is treated as IE now by this crowd. Google has been particularly shameful promoting their browser. It's gotten to the point where if your Firefox version is two releases behind they start showing their little "install chrome" ad. Ridiculous.

by skarap 11y ago

berdario 11y ago

This is the crux of the issue. Gmail itself is unusable on Android + Firefox. When using an alternative browser you'll also stumble in problems with plenty of Android apps: Slack, Citymapper, etc... (when opening a web page intent, they expect that the only app that'll receive that will be Chrome) The situation isn't as bad for desktop browsers, but it's depressing how things can still be broken.

skarap 11y ago
> The situation isn't as bad for desktop browsers Don't worry, it will get worse. Firefox is now forced to accept `-webkit-` in css (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/firefox_webkit_css_support/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/firefox_webkit_css_s...) not to be "broken". This will obviously lead to even less Firefox testing. Hell, even I (my team) am contributing to this! We're working on Angular-based web SPA now. It hasn't got much functionality yet, but already has quite a few bugs when viewed in Firefox. And the usual answer from frontend guys is "It's a firefox bug!".
- digi_owl 11y ago
  I suspect it will go beyond CSS. There are a certain kind of app on Android that makes the device FS available via a web browser. Thing is that these apps invariably makes use of a Chrome-ism when dealing with drag and drop. In Firefox you can only drag a single file at a time. drag over multiple, or a folder, and there won't be much of a result. In Chrome however it will transfer over just fine. This has been sitting in the Mozilla bugtracker for some time, because the Chrome behavior goes beyond the HTML spec for file uploads.
  - yyhhsj0521 11y ago
    Yeah sometimes I wonder if providing extra behaviors is good or bad. Certainly it could save developers a lot of works and save users a lot of time, but it may become next ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"); Maybe Chrome should put a warning into the console, saying that this function is experimental.
- emn13 11y ago
  I remember fixing one of frontend bugs in an SPA and contrary to the claims it turned out to be a webkit bug that the code relied on (the app had been developed on a mac, so it's fairly easy to only test on webkit/blink). Lovely. Aside/Rant: I also get the impression that frontend devs have never read the CSS2.1 spec or bothered to understand it (CSS3 is longer, and consists largely of special-purpose extra modules, so a complete reading is less valuable and more difficult). There's somehow this feeling that since CSS "isn't a real programming language" you should be able to use it intuitively. And when things don't work out and you fiddle until it works without giving thought to why, that's OK. That's such a huge waste of time. The box model may not be 100% intuitive, but boy, if that's your standard, what you doing in IT?
  - masklinn 11y ago
    > the app had been developed on a mac, so it's fairly easy to only test on webkit/blink It's no harder to only test on Chrome in Linux and IE in Windows, I fail to see how that's an excuse. The only excuses are IE testing when developing on OSX and Safari testing when developing on Windows, it's trivial to install both Firefox and Chrome on any OS.
    - emn13 11y ago
      Actually, it's easier to test for IE versions on linux/mac due to http://xdissent.github.io/ievms/ http://xdissent.github.io/ievms/ - You can install the VMs on windows too (of course), but I've never stumbled upon quite as simple a solution. On windows I tend to just rely on compat mode, which is surprisingly good, but far from perfect.
hussong 11y ago
FWIW, Paypal rendered as completely blank pages (home and login / payment pages) in FF/Ubuntu until a couple days ago. Not sure when this started, but I've seen it before on some of their payment pages.

spoiler 11y ago

Most of the time when I saw people develop "for Chrome" (like experiments), it would use standard stuff, but it only so happens that other browsers don't implement them [properly], yet. Or maybe I'm just awfully pedantic, but whenever I make stuff I tend to make it as close to the standard as possible, and fall back to vendor-specific stuff only when necessary (and usually try to cover all the major browsers). Also, aren't most the Chrome-specific things disabled unless the app runs as an extension to discourage this type of chrome-only behaviour? I can't test/verify now, since I'm on my phone. This excludes CSS prefixes, since those are rarely needed these days anyway.

quanticle 11y ago

>And now we've got us into another IE6 situation and I think it will be even harder to overcome this time. I hate to defend Chrome, but I don't think that comparing Chrome to IE6 is warranted (yet). The problem with IE was that a large number of users were stuck with IE6 and never updated (either by their own choice or their IT departments'). So web developers had to write code for modern web browsers, and then implement a compatibility layer (I guess we call it polyfill, these days) for IE6. Chrome, however, has an update mechanism that the vast majority of users and IT departments do not override. Chrome is not in an IE6 situation because historically the number of users running old versions of Chrome is small and drops off rapidly as new versions come out. I pulled these graphs from a few years ago, comparing Chrome adoption to IE adoption: http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/chrome-adoption-2012-09.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/chrome... http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/internet-explorer-adoption-2012-09.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/intern... Notice that Chrome uptake is very rapid, with the vast majority of users being on the current version of Chrome after approximately two to three months. Compare that with IE, where the majority of users still aren't using the most modern version of Internet Explorer after two to three years. So no, I don't think Chrome is in the same position as IE. Google pushes updates to Chrome on a frequent basis, and, more importantly, those updates are actually applied by users. That said, it's still possible that Google could tomorrow do what Microsoft did when IE "won the browser war", which is disband the team and cease Chrome development. Do I think this is a likely scenario? Of course not. Is it possible? Sure.

josteink 11y ago
The problem with IE6 was not that users didn't update. It was that IE created a monoculture among developers, using IE only features. Which resulted in code which got out on the web, and stayed there. And then every browser had to either 1. be "broken" because the web-pages didn't work, or 2. forego W3C, standard-process and all that and emulate IE's bugs in order to be "real" browsers people could use. And long after IE6 is gone, all that is still hanging around, causing issues to this day. Right now we're getting a Chrome monoculture. People are using pre-standard Chrome and Webkit only features in production websites. In the future those websites will stick around, no matter if Chrome users update their browsers or not. Chrome is the new IE. With Google giving a shit about real standardization, launching non-standard features in Chrome and production websites at the same time, they are the new Microsoft.

rubberstamp 11y ago

HN on firefox is bad. Comments doesn't have any hierarchy. HN has to fix that. I use firefox on android as it is the only one that has extensions. I use uBlock and mht extensions. On linux desktop too firefox is used mostly as it uses less memory than chrome when you have too many tabs open

lucb1e 11y ago
And on top of that, it's also a principle matter for me. Unless I run into impossibilities, I prefer free and open source software because it offers more control, privacy and hackability, and it will act in my best interest instead of that of the company behind it.
pmontra 11y ago
HN on Android looks exactly the same in FF, Chrome and the stock browser. I checked right now. Even the zoom behaviour is the same. The only browser that makes the site behave better is Opera with text reflow on zoom enabled. I can't understate how useful that feature is in general and I can't understand why every browser doesn't offer it. It's the reason why I'm using Opera on Android despite using Firefox on the desktop. Another reason I'm not using FF on Android is that it's noticeably slower at rendering the page at the end of a scroll action. It seems that blink is better at that. I'm adblocking with AdAway on the device I rooted and with Adblock Plus (a local proxy) on the one I didn't root. You get them on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adaway https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus.android https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.adblockplus....
- rubberstamp 11y ago
  opera has always been innovative browser with good features as long back as i can remember(opera on Nokia s60v3 back then). features like great speed dial on mobile n desktop, save for offline, opera turbo mode, syncing bookmarks between desktop n mobile, website overview mode, text reflow.. I have to use addons with other browsers to have these features on chrome or firefox. Opera has a great team. Has poor market share though. They also had good security. Opera wasn't vulnerable to some big ssl bug discovered a couple of years ago. Most other browsers were. They recently switched their rendering engine to webkit though

darklajid 11y ago

Upvoting you is not enough - let's focus on the local problem. Dang - have you seen HN in Firefox on Android recently? Is there something we can do to improve this? Given that HN receives a moderate amount of (visible) changes recently, is there a way to make the site work in that situation/setup?

msl09 11y ago
What's wrong?
- darklajid 11y ago
  http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W http://m.imgur.com/On83n3W The indentation for one. Notice that the second comment is an answer to the first, but is on the same level of indentation. Following discussions like that is highly annoying. Weird: While grabbing the phone to answer your question I noticed that "threads", i.e. the view of my comments, works fine. Just the comments below submission links are broken. Compare to Chrome: http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq http://m.imgur.com/Wpusprq Note that I do use uBlock in Firefox. Now that I think about it, that might be relevant as well. But then again, why would that break the submission view and not the "threads" link?
  - pmontra 11y ago
    I get that Chrome like rendering in every browser on my tablet (1) and with Opera and the stock browser on the phone. I reinstalled Firefox on the browser and it looks like your one. I understand that it makes difficult to follow threads but at least we can see deeply nested comments: they don't collapse to a single column of letters. (1) Lines are not terminated at the screen boundary on the tablet if I zoom in. They keep going off screen to the right. Same on the stock browser on the phone and with Opera if I turn off text reflow.
rubberstamp 11y ago
whatever you do, please keep everything else as it is now. HN loads very fast as it doesn't load every library on the planet. Do fix the rendering problem on firefox if possible, and keep it lightweight as it is now

rpgmaker 11y ago

This is the first comment that I have read that has acknowledged this situation. I've been noticing this for quite a while. At first I was reluctant to believe it because designers should know better than anyone how bad that can turn out in the long run. Firefox is treated as IE now by this crowd. Google has been particularly shameful promoting their browser. It's gotten to the point where if your Firefox version is two releases behind they start showing their little "install chrome" ad. Ridiculous.