4 ms·

USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to suppo

USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.

dblohm7 3y ago
Some of the USDS people are even ex-Mozilla!
Miraste 3y ago
GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  I don't think the USDS makes all or even most of the current federal gov websites.
  - Miraste 3y ago
    No, they don't. But they did create the VA site: https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov And they're involved with the Department of Education, although I couldn't find out exactly what they built.
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      Oof, that sucks to hear. I had a hard time believing they'd be behind that website seeing that I often hear complaints about it. :(
    - llimllib 3y ago
      the va site is vast, to say any one team created the VA site would not be even close to correct. They did help change over the old va.gov to the new va.gov (which was built as vets.gov), which imo has been a huge improvement. (There are still many, many problems with the VA and its website. Just saying that 1. the new va.gov is a big improvement and 2. the USDS is far from being a single point of responsibility for it, or even _the_ major point of responsibility)
  - boris-ning-usds 3y ago
    USDS certainly does not. The guiding principle at the time from what I remembered is to try to set "some standard" for all federal government websites to strive to because there were none. We also helped with design and infrastructure support for ssa.gov (launched earlier this year) with a contractor team to try to boil down 60,000 pages to ~30 pages that people tend to use. // opinions of a former USDS, no longer with the team
- boris-ning-usds 3y ago
  Hi! Can you elaborate on what in particular on the VA site that causes serious harm to the people it's meant to serve? I'm happy to bring it to the team or if you don't feel comfortable with stating it here, please bring it up to the open source website for va.gov. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-website https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi...
Chabsff 3y ago
Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons. On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing from the POV of the browser's developers. The most practical answer is, as was posted by someone else here, the government spec'ing to a standard instead of a set of browsers, which it really should be doing in the first place. The mere fact that the current setup means that the government accidentally makes and/or breaks winners in that space is justification enough.
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still be possible.
  - john-radio 3y ago
    Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market share; browsers self-report their identity and operating system unless specifically configured not to. For example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities. The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.
    - andrepd 3y ago
      That's the sort of this that should be illegal for anticompetitive reasons.
jddj 3y ago
I get unsupported browser warnings on my country's government portal when I use Firefox. I think it's been the case for a good 10 years. It works fine, of course
nvm0n2 3y ago
The 2% rule USDS use is taken directly from GDS (gov.uk), so that isn't what your old employer's policy is at all. They have to define reasonable, after all.
- robin_reala 3y ago
  That part of the article was just wrong, to be fair (I used to be head of the front-end community at GDS and helped set things like browser support schedules). Our default approach was to add up all browser share (yes, based on GA, but this was a while ago) until we got to 99%, then removed the browsers that were left over. So typically we wouldn’t consider dropping a browser version until it was less than 0.4% usage. You can use a colleague’s client-side tool to test this approach: http://edds.github.io/browser-matrix/ http://edds.github.io/browser-matrix/ (assuming it still works). The browser support is currently listed at https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/designing-for-different-browsers-and-devices#browsers-to-test-in-from-june-2022 https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/designing-for-d... . The mention of 2% is specific to IE11, so I guess this was special-cased at some point.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    I stand corrected, thank you.

dblohm7 3y ago

Some of the USDS people are even ex-Mozilla!

Miraste 3y ago

GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.

mardifoufs 3y ago
I don't think the USDS makes all or even most of the current federal gov websites.
- Miraste 3y ago
  No, they don't. But they did create the VA site: https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov And they're involved with the Department of Education, although I couldn't find out exactly what they built.
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Oof, that sucks to hear. I had a hard time believing they'd be behind that website seeing that I often hear complaints about it. :(
  - llimllib 3y ago
    the va site is vast, to say any one team created the VA site would not be even close to correct. They did help change over the old va.gov to the new va.gov (which was built as vets.gov), which imo has been a huge improvement. (There are still many, many problems with the VA and its website. Just saying that 1. the new va.gov is a big improvement and 2. the USDS is far from being a single point of responsibility for it, or even _the_ major point of responsibility)
- boris-ning-usds 3y ago
  USDS certainly does not. The guiding principle at the time from what I remembered is to try to set "some standard" for all federal government websites to strive to because there were none. We also helped with design and infrastructure support for ssa.gov (launched earlier this year) with a contractor team to try to boil down 60,000 pages to ~30 pages that people tend to use. // opinions of a former USDS, no longer with the team
boris-ning-usds 3y ago
Hi! Can you elaborate on what in particular on the VA site that causes serious harm to the people it's meant to serve? I'm happy to bring it to the team or if you don't feel comfortable with stating it here, please bring it up to the open source website for va.gov. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-website https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi...

Chabsff 3y ago

Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons. On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing from the POV of the browser's developers. The most practical answer is, as was posted by someone else here, the government spec'ing to a standard instead of a set of browsers, which it really should be doing in the first place. The mere fact that the current setup means that the government accidentally makes and/or breaks winners in that space is justification enough.

TheCoelacanth 3y ago
Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still be possible.
- john-radio 3y ago
  Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market share; browsers self-report their identity and operating system unless specifically configured not to. For example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities. The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    That's the sort of this that should be illegal for anticompetitive reasons.

jddj 3y ago

I get unsupported browser warnings on my country's government portal when I use Firefox. I think it's been the case for a good 10 years. It works fine, of course

nvm0n2 3y ago

The 2% rule USDS use is taken directly from GDS (gov.uk), so that isn't what your old employer's policy is at all. They have to define reasonable, after all.

robin_reala 3y ago
That part of the article was just wrong, to be fair (I used to be head of the front-end community at GDS and helped set things like browser support schedules). Our default approach was to add up all browser share (yes, based on GA, but this was a while ago) until we got to 99%, then removed the browsers that were left over. So typically we wouldn’t consider dropping a browser version until it was less than 0.4% usage. You can use a colleague’s client-side tool to test this approach: http://edds.github.io/browser-matrix/ http://edds.github.io/browser-matrix/ (assuming it still works). The browser support is currently listed at https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/designing-for-different-browsers-and-devices#browsers-to-test-in-from-june-2022 https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/designing-for-d... . The mention of 2% is specific to IE11, so I guess this was special-cased at some point.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  I stand corrected, thank you.