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The website doesn't work in Firefox. "FAQ: The download buttons do not work". "The website is fully supported by Chrome now" The current state of the interne

The website doesn't work in Firefox. "FAQ: The download buttons do not work". "The website is fully supported by Chrome now" The current state of the internet, has reached a very low point. One would expect more from berkley.edu. EDIT: I find the downvotes preposterous. Are we somehow supposed to expect requiring a proprietary browser to simply download a file from an educational institution now?

ironjunkie 8y ago
Since when is Chrome a reference? If you want something not proprietary, why don't you use Firefox?
- quickben 8y ago
  That's what I accessed it with actually. It didn't work in Firefox. I clarified my post above.
- MBCook 8y ago
  It’s in DOWNLOAD button. How does it not work in EVERY browser? A link would. A form submission would. Ultra simple JavaScript would. It’s not a question of “why doesn’t chrome work“ but more a question of “how is this even an issue“.
  - ironjunkie 8y ago
    In this case I agree with you. I was just pointing out that we should be careful with Chrome being used as a "reference".
    - r1nkgrl 8y ago
      FWIW Chrome does have the largest market share of any desktop internet browser. That said, I understand what you are getting at and agree.
    - MBCook 8y ago
      That part I totally agree with. I’m really tired of people declaring other browsers “broken“ because they don’t implement the future-of-the-minute that chrome has already added.
  - derefr 8y ago
    It's a really big download (1.8TB). One where both you and they would be really rather perturbed if the download failed at 90%. In fact, they'd probably be perturbed by the bandwidth costs even if everyone who wanted the dataset was only downloading it once. Maybe it uses WebTorrent? (Not sure why it couldn't just fall back to giving you a .torrent file in that case, though.)
    - koolba 8y ago
      Why even fall back? The default for something like this should be a torrent as this is exactly what BitTorrent was supposed to solve!
      - singularity2001 8y ago
        "only hackers use torrent"
    - ori_b 8y ago
      Thankfully, Firefox has the ability to resume broken downloads. As does nearly every other method of downloading, other than (apparently) Chrome.
      - derefr 8y ago
        Broken downloads, yes. Corrupted downloads, no. Given that files served from CDNs are still usually served without HTTPS, there aren't many checksums between the two ends of the pipe to protect it from on-the-wire corruption. Doesn't matter much for video streaming ala Netflix; matters a lot for a structured dataset. BitTorrent and related protocols handle this automatically by breaking the file into large (megabyte-range) chunks, and then putting the cryptographic hashes of all the chunks in the manifest. As long as you've received the manifest, you can protect against both passive corruption and active MITMing in the same way you resume broken downloads: by just discarding chunks that failed to complete to a state of "has all the bytes and hashes correctly", and trying those chunks again. (Sadly, HTTP doesn't support a digest response header that applies to each chunk of a "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" response stream, or it could vaguely compete with this. The Content-MD5 header could have done this, but it was removed precisely because implementations were in conflict on whether it was for this, or for hashing the document as a whole.)
moscovium 8y ago
This appears to be a hosted site the team put together for a public front to the dataset, not an official Berkeley page. It certainly doesn't meet any standards required by a public institution, like ADA compliance, either.
tomcooks 8y ago
Works great on FF60.0.1

ironjunkie 8y ago

Since when is Chrome a reference? If you want something not proprietary, why don't you use Firefox?

quickben 8y ago
That's what I accessed it with actually. It didn't work in Firefox. I clarified my post above.
MBCook 8y ago
It’s in DOWNLOAD button. How does it not work in EVERY browser? A link would. A form submission would. Ultra simple JavaScript would. It’s not a question of “why doesn’t chrome work“ but more a question of “how is this even an issue“.
- ironjunkie 8y ago
  In this case I agree with you. I was just pointing out that we should be careful with Chrome being used as a "reference".
  - r1nkgrl 8y ago
    FWIW Chrome does have the largest market share of any desktop internet browser. That said, I understand what you are getting at and agree.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    That part I totally agree with. I’m really tired of people declaring other browsers “broken“ because they don’t implement the future-of-the-minute that chrome has already added.
- derefr 8y ago
  It's a really big download (1.8TB). One where both you and they would be really rather perturbed if the download failed at 90%. In fact, they'd probably be perturbed by the bandwidth costs even if everyone who wanted the dataset was only downloading it once. Maybe it uses WebTorrent? (Not sure why it couldn't just fall back to giving you a .torrent file in that case, though.)
  - koolba 8y ago
    Why even fall back? The default for something like this should be a torrent as this is exactly what BitTorrent was supposed to solve!
    - singularity2001 8y ago
      "only hackers use torrent"
  - ori_b 8y ago
    Thankfully, Firefox has the ability to resume broken downloads. As does nearly every other method of downloading, other than (apparently) Chrome.
    - derefr 8y ago
      Broken downloads, yes. Corrupted downloads, no. Given that files served from CDNs are still usually served without HTTPS, there aren't many checksums between the two ends of the pipe to protect it from on-the-wire corruption. Doesn't matter much for video streaming ala Netflix; matters a lot for a structured dataset. BitTorrent and related protocols handle this automatically by breaking the file into large (megabyte-range) chunks, and then putting the cryptographic hashes of all the chunks in the manifest. As long as you've received the manifest, you can protect against both passive corruption and active MITMing in the same way you resume broken downloads: by just discarding chunks that failed to complete to a state of "has all the bytes and hashes correctly", and trying those chunks again. (Sadly, HTTP doesn't support a digest response header that applies to each chunk of a "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" response stream, or it could vaguely compete with this. The Content-MD5 header could have done this, but it was removed precisely because implementations were in conflict on whether it was for this, or for hashing the document as a whole.)

moscovium 8y ago

This appears to be a hosted site the team put together for a public front to the dataset, not an official Berkeley page. It certainly doesn't meet any standards required by a public institution, like ADA compliance, either.

tomcooks 8y ago

Works great on FF60.0.1