14 ms·

Why in the world was Flipkart regexing for an "X is undefined" message? That seems as brittle as possible.

• klmr 8y ago
  Why in the world did Firefox care enough to revert the behaviour, rather than telling them to go to hell?
  • runarberg 8y ago
    Because it is the right thing to do. First, you shouldn’t brake the web. Second, you shouldn’t be mean to people. Some people do stupid things (perhaps they don’t know any better), accommodating for them and helping them do the right thing, is a far better option, then to ignore and shame them.
    • mbrameld 8y ago
      I would argue that coddling FlipKart's engineers is NOT the right thing to do. Educate them on why what they did was wrong, help them fix it, but don't punish the rest of the world for one company's mistakes. Similarly, I would argue that by relying on undefined behavior it was the FlipKart engineers breaking the web.
      • djakjxnanjak 8y ago
        People who would make that decision don’t end up making decisions at Firefox. Browser behavior consists mostly of arbitrary decisions which have been codified into rules to keep things from breaking.
  • oftenwrong 8y ago
    Because Flipkart is one of the biggest sites in India. Firefox devs didn't want to ruin the day-to-day web browsing experience of so many people, so they reverted the change. They preserved the user experience at the expense of the developer experience, and I think that was the right call. Doesn't matter that it was Flipkart's fault.
  • bzbarsky 8y ago
    Because: 1) It's not just Flipkart. It's a library that was being used on multiple sites. For example, lego.com was broken too, for the same reason. 2) Firefox can't tell Flipkart to go to hell per se. All it can do is tell its users to go to hell and not use Flipkart (or lego.com), or at least not use them in Firefox. Phrased that way, I think it's clearer why Firefox cared enough...
• oftenwrong 8y ago
  Because they were using a demo function from a JS lib that attempts to match error messages: https://github.com/facebookincubator/idx https://github.com/facebookincubator/idx >The idx runtime function exists for the purpose of illustrating the expected behavior and is not meant to be executed. The idx function requires the use of a Babel plugin that replaces it with an implementation that does not depend on details related to browser error messages. https://github.com/facebookincubator/idx/issues/55 https://github.com/facebookincubator/idx/issues/55