5 ms·

And here I go explaining my friends and family I helped switch to Firefox that the browser I've installed on their computers got broken at the beginning of a ne

And here I go explaining my friends and family I helped switch to Firefox that the browser I've installed on their computers got broken at the beginning of a new day while Edge and Chrome work fine... personally, I know very well bugs happen and I'm not mad, but this certainly hurts the confidence in it for the non-tech people.

smcl 5y ago
Just yesterday I was telling a colleague who was fighting with chrome (entering the address `something.companyname.local` caused chrome to search for that string, he had to enter `https://something.companyname.local https://something.companyname.local` for it to work) they should just switch to Firefox. Bugs happen but this is a pretty annoying one.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  On other hand I find it annoying that the start page of Firefox has box I always think of as search, but it is also address bar. While address bar is already at top. So I search some filename just for it to try to access it...
  - smcl 5y ago
    Oh weird you're right, I don't think I've ever interacted with that extra address/search bar. I wonder what they were thinking, that seems redundant and a bit silly
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      It is for people like me who doesn't want every domain I ever type in to be sent to Google or somewhere else for autocompletion. I mean, most of all lkve autocomplete, but when you type in <nameofprobationofficewebsite>.<tld> or what have you, are you sure you want everyone of these keystrokes to go to Google? If not then you want a separate search field.
      - smcl 5y ago
        Ah I think you're mistaken. We're talking about when you open a new tab in Firefox the default landing page has a little grid showing commonly accessed sites as well as an additional search/address bar which says "Search with google or enter address" We have the same feelings on this - I also would prefer an explicitly separate search bar and address bar. Edit: or maybe I'm understanding Ekaros' comment incorrectly? Either way the thing I'm talking about is that there's a combined search/address bar always visible in FF, and when you open a fresh window or tab there's a landing page which has an additional combined search/address bar.
        skinkestek 5y ago
        Aha, very possibly I'm mistaken. I wondered why anyone still saw the search bar without explicitly enabling it.
        smcl 5y ago
        Well I'm glad it happened, otherwise I wouldn't have learned that it was actually possible to separate these two bars in Firefox. So thanks for that :D
        Ekaros 5y ago
        No this is exactly correct. I can just write the address in address bar if I want. But I do not have search engine as default page or even have one in as bookmark. So I would love to just have a search box where I can copy paste a filename with either full path or as something.py... And browser to not try to access non existent .py domain which only has third-level addresses anyway...
        skinkestek 5y ago
        You can, just go to settings and enable it. (For everyone wondering why we crazy people stick with Firefox: there are actually a number of technical/ux reasons in addition to not wanting to give control of the web away to a single company.)
- stef25 5y ago
  FF does that as well with my local dev sites. It does suggest "did you mean to go to ...", which then works.
- 4cao 5y ago
  FYI There is a workaround for this: add a search engine with "http://%s http://%s" (or "https://%s https://%s") as its query URL and make it the default one. And when you actually want to search, explicitly prepend the phrase with a keyword for another search engine (like "d<space>[search string]" for DDG).
jiggawatts 5y ago
I've spent the last 3 days angrily submitting bug ticket after bug ticket, including one for Firefox. I just got a new laptop, and the amount of things that get shipped totally broken is just crazy. Windows 11 almost but not entirely broke HDR. It kinda-sorta works for some things, sometimes, but most apps that used to work with HDR back in Windows 10 just can't any more and are forced to use SDR with sRGB gamut only.[1] The Win UI SDK regressed from WPF and lost all wide-gamut or HDR support at the API level (which probably explains the above). As in, Microsoft literally removed a wide swath of floating-point color support along with the wide-gamut scRGB color space. We're back to 8-bit RGB arrays in sRGB only as the only option. Like in the 1990s. Windows Server 2022 can't activate its license unless it uses the UTC time zone. Why? Because Microsoft employees test using Azure VMs, which... use UTC by default. Speaking of color: Firefox for a while just... stopped doing color management. Then it worked again after a few weeks when it updated. But it might not be Firefox's fault, because Windows also seems to randomly turn color management off, or force it back to sRGB silently. If you have a laptop with one of those hybrid Intel+NVIDIA GPU combinations, then HDR games don't work at all with the built-in display, they all report HDR support as N/A. But they will work with external displays! Speaking of HTTP/3 in Firefox: I've had it permanently disabled because the early releases would leak about 10 GB of memory per minute and lock up the browser very quickly. But not quickly enough to prevent the automated test suites from passing. ... and so on... The point I'm trying to get to is that in 2022 we've achieved this state of affairs where human beings don't do actual Quality Assurance any more as a job. It's all automated and those people have been summarily fired. Any issue that is invisible to a DevOps pipeline is Not A Bug and will ship broken. If it ships in a working state, that's probably just a lucky accident, and a subsequent patch will break it for sure. All of the issues above are caused by automated test suites one way or another. Automated tests are literally blind to output color rendering; testing that requires a physical monitor. Automated tests are almost never set up for long-term testing for things like memory leaks, because they have to run fast. Automated tests use default, vanilla settings for the host OS. Automated tests don't have funky hardware combinations. Automated tests don't measure "jank", or inconsistent performance issues, Etc, etc... What you're experiencing is the end result of all of this. NOBODY is sitting down and validating the end-result from the perspective of a human user sitting in front of an actual device. That final quality assurance is just not there any more, and hence we're all embarrassed when we have to "show off" some piece of IT tech and find that it's just a broken mess. /rant [1] This bug has apparently been fixed in some beta, and might ship around the middle of this year. In other words, Microsoft is perfectly content to break display output on their consumer desktop operating system for six months and just leave it at that.

smcl 5y ago

Just yesterday I was telling a colleague who was fighting with chrome (entering the address `something.companyname.local` caused chrome to search for that string, he had to enter `https://something.companyname.local https://something.companyname.local` for it to work) they should just switch to Firefox. Bugs happen but this is a pretty annoying one.

Ekaros 5y ago
On other hand I find it annoying that the start page of Firefox has box I always think of as search, but it is also address bar. While address bar is already at top. So I search some filename just for it to try to access it...
- smcl 5y ago
  Oh weird you're right, I don't think I've ever interacted with that extra address/search bar. I wonder what they were thinking, that seems redundant and a bit silly
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    It is for people like me who doesn't want every domain I ever type in to be sent to Google or somewhere else for autocompletion. I mean, most of all lkve autocomplete, but when you type in <nameofprobationofficewebsite>.<tld> or what have you, are you sure you want everyone of these keystrokes to go to Google? If not then you want a separate search field.
    - smcl 5y ago
      Ah I think you're mistaken. We're talking about when you open a new tab in Firefox the default landing page has a little grid showing commonly accessed sites as well as an additional search/address bar which says "Search with google or enter address" We have the same feelings on this - I also would prefer an explicitly separate search bar and address bar. Edit: or maybe I'm understanding Ekaros' comment incorrectly? Either way the thing I'm talking about is that there's a combined search/address bar always visible in FF, and when you open a fresh window or tab there's a landing page which has an additional combined search/address bar.
      - skinkestek 5y ago
        Aha, very possibly I'm mistaken. I wondered why anyone still saw the search bar without explicitly enabling it.
        smcl 5y ago
        Well I'm glad it happened, otherwise I wouldn't have learned that it was actually possible to separate these two bars in Firefox. So thanks for that :D
      - Ekaros 5y ago
        No this is exactly correct. I can just write the address in address bar if I want. But I do not have search engine as default page or even have one in as bookmark. So I would love to just have a search box where I can copy paste a filename with either full path or as something.py... And browser to not try to access non existent .py domain which only has third-level addresses anyway...
        skinkestek 5y ago
        You can, just go to settings and enable it. (For everyone wondering why we crazy people stick with Firefox: there are actually a number of technical/ux reasons in addition to not wanting to give control of the web away to a single company.)
stef25 5y ago
FF does that as well with my local dev sites. It does suggest "did you mean to go to ...", which then works.
4cao 5y ago
FYI There is a workaround for this: add a search engine with "http://%s http://%s" (or "https://%s https://%s") as its query URL and make it the default one. And when you actually want to search, explicitly prepend the phrase with a keyword for another search engine (like "d<space>[search string]" for DDG).

jiggawatts 5y ago

I've spent the last 3 days angrily submitting bug ticket after bug ticket, including one for Firefox. I just got a new laptop, and the amount of things that get shipped totally broken is just crazy. Windows 11 almost but not entirely broke HDR. It kinda-sorta works for some things, sometimes, but most apps that used to work with HDR back in Windows 10 just can't any more and are forced to use SDR with sRGB gamut only.[1] The Win UI SDK regressed from WPF and lost all wide-gamut or HDR support at the API level (which probably explains the above). As in, Microsoft literally removed a wide swath of floating-point color support along with the wide-gamut scRGB color space. We're back to 8-bit RGB arrays in sRGB only as the only option. Like in the 1990s. Windows Server 2022 can't activate its license unless it uses the UTC time zone. Why? Because Microsoft employees test using Azure VMs, which... use UTC by default. Speaking of color: Firefox for a while just... stopped doing color management. Then it worked again after a few weeks when it updated. But it might not be Firefox's fault, because Windows also seems to randomly turn color management off, or force it back to sRGB silently. If you have a laptop with one of those hybrid Intel+NVIDIA GPU combinations, then HDR games don't work at all with the built-in display, they all report HDR support as N/A. But they will work with external displays! Speaking of HTTP/3 in Firefox: I've had it permanently disabled because the early releases would leak about 10 GB of memory per minute and lock up the browser very quickly. But not quickly enough to prevent the automated test suites from passing. ... and so on... The point I'm trying to get to is that in 2022 we've achieved this state of affairs where human beings don't do actual Quality Assurance any more as a job. It's all automated and those people have been summarily fired. Any issue that is invisible to a DevOps pipeline is Not A Bug and will ship broken. If it ships in a working state, that's probably just a lucky accident, and a subsequent patch will break it for sure. All of the issues above are caused by automated test suites one way or another. Automated tests are literally blind to output color rendering; testing that requires a physical monitor. Automated tests are almost never set up for long-term testing for things like memory leaks, because they have to run fast. Automated tests use default, vanilla settings for the host OS. Automated tests don't have funky hardware combinations. Automated tests don't measure "jank", or inconsistent performance issues, Etc, etc... What you're experiencing is the end result of all of this. NOBODY is sitting down and validating the end-result from the perspective of a human user sitting in front of an actual device. That final quality assurance is just not there any more, and hence we're all embarrassed when we have to "show off" some piece of IT tech and find that it's just a broken mess. /rant [1] This bug has apparently been fixed in some beta, and might ship around the middle of this year. In other words, Microsoft is perfectly content to break display output on their consumer desktop operating system for six months and just leave it at that.