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> The plan is to roll out to 5% of users on the Firefox 138 stable release, ramp up to 50% of users What an awful idea. How is a web developer supposed to test

> The plan is to roll out to 5% of users on the Firefox 138 stable release, ramp up to 50% of users What an awful idea. How is a web developer supposed to test the website when he and user might have different browser behaviour? It looks like someone read about deployment at Facebook and wanted to implement the same thing without any valid reason. Firefox is not a server-side software and this style of deployment doesn't make much sense.

spcebar 1y ago
In theory a web developer is already overriding these styles, and if they're not, they can. Default browser styles are never to be taken for granted.
- roenxi 1y ago
  Mozilla doesn't agree with you; if they thought that was true they wouldn't do the weird phased rollout to stable. Although I agree with codedokode insofar as I don't see how the phased rollout in stable could possibly help. Hopefully they've thought of something I haven't otherwise it is silly.
- econ 1y ago
  You shouldn't but there are many sites that assume the default font is black and the default background is white. (I'm sure I forgot to set them myself.) There are [to] many ways to set the font size. I don't even know which on is the correct choice, if there is such a thing. Maybe not trying to control it is the best approach? How can one tell?
- rendaw 1y ago
  The fact that every webdev carries around/trades personal "reset" stylesheets to undo everything the browser does by default is insane. It really highlights the disconnect between W3C and reality.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I think the fact that every webdev feels the need to override the user's agent and impose their own idea of what size a H1 should be is, well, kind of imposing. I might want to make H1 be 50 point comic sans. This should not matter to the web developer.
    - TylerE 1y ago
      It matters because we’re the one that has to deal with ticket when user complains that their tweaked-to-within-an-inch-of-its life system inevitably breaks the world. The problem isn’t you per say, it’s the 5000 people that mis-follow some YouTube video because it looks cool without it actually understanding what they’re changing , how to undo it, or what the implications are.
    - codedokode 1y ago
      I don't understand how one can design a website that would survive arbitrary style changes. I think that is unrealistic, so the designer should expect all default styles to be standard. And if the user has too much free time to change the font size then it is their own problem; my suggestion is that they simply use reader mode and change the styles there. I would like to remind that some time ago browsers allowed to change the default font size; it never worked well so Opera started to scale the whole page instead. Other browsers followed it. Android browsers seem to repeat the same mistake by the way: they override developer's styles when the user changes font size in OS accessibility settings.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        I mean, it's my computer. I should ultimately be in control of how a document renders. I might need larger text due to poor eyesight, or need to use a screen reader. Or I might just be irritated that the web developer just up and decided that light gray on dark gray text looked cool (it doesn't, it barely can be read). Or I might want to scroll with my keyboard because a mouse is painful to my RSI. If I go out of the way and set up accessibility settings, I would expect all applications on my device (including the web browser) to respect those settings.
beeflet 1y ago
I guess you could override the styles to whatever you want to keep it consistent, and then once the update rolls out to enough users you can stop overriding the styles if you want.
- zcorpan 1y ago
  Yes.
wnevets 1y ago
> How is a web developer supposed to test the website when he and user might have different browser behaviour? Any web developer that would have an issue with this is already overriding the default styling.
ack_complete 1y ago
Bigger problem is when users run into a problem and can't find information about it because others can't reproduce it. I ran into this when they ran an A/B test on removing the search box and it drove me crazy that no one else seemingly had the same behavior, until I found and disabled the A/B test plugin.
foolfoolz 1y ago
this is clearly an edge case and most (all?) modern websites will not run into any problems. this is a very reasonable change given the impact
mmis1000 1y ago
In practice, it's like not even one web developer would have problem. The default h1 style on web is quite disgusting in general, mostly with extremely big font size and wide padding. Made it very unusable on mobile devices. Without overriding it, you should already have problems.
kmijyiyxfbklao 1y ago
That situation will happen no matter how they do the release. There just has to be an easy way to tell if you have the change or not.
rvba 1y ago
Those in charge of Firefox / Mozilla foundation look as if they are trying to make Firefox irrelevant
not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
> Firefox is not a server-side software and this style of deployment doesn't make much sense. How does safe velocity not apply to client apps? We've been doing this for decades.
- benatkin 1y ago
  It shouldn't. It's part of an anti-feature called "studies": https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield
  - not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
    I'm still not following. I get studies and exp. But that's different than rolling out a default behavior to all users, which still requires safe velocity guardrails so you don't Crowdstrike yourself.
    - benatkin 1y ago
      They shouldn’t be tinkering around in my computer.
eschaton 1y ago
A web page’s behavior should be independent of any particular styling of the hierarchical elements used to represent the document it’s presenting. Just like any web page should work perfectly with JavaScript disabled, it should work perfectly with a user-supplied style sheet. If you’re making a web page that has this problem, what you’re making should not be a web page, and you should feel bad about the choices that led you to that point in your life. It will take a while to fix this problem in our industry since we’ve waited so long on it, but the best time to start is now.
- grandempire 1y ago
  > Just like any web page should work perfectly with JavaScript disabled And the problem is neither of those things are true in reality. So in real life a change like this can cost the economy millions of dollars.
  - eschaton 1y ago
    Sure they are, they’re just not sexy. And making this change will ultimately save orders of magnitude more than the cost.
    - grandempire 1y ago
      There are real websites people rely on that don’t work without JavaScript - and ones that depend on the h1 size too.
      - eschaton 1y ago
        And that’s a bad thing, and the people involved in making those sites should feel bad and do something about their mistakes rather than just shrug. And we should call them what they are: Mistakes, abuses of the web.
        toast0 1y ago
        Sure, the people making these things should feel bad about it, and ideally change their choices... But if 5% of Firefox users can't use your page, and your page is important, they'll consider Firefox broken and go use something else. Firefox isn't doing so well on market share, and appearing to be broken isn't going to help.
arp242 1y ago
> How is a web developer supposed to test the website when he and user might have different browser behaviour? So that is always going to be the case with a change like this, simply because people use older versions, use different browsers, etc. If this change breaks popular-site.com then it will continue work fine for 95% of people, and it breaks for "only" 5%, one of whom will (hopefully) report it. This allows the Firefox people to test the waters to make sure it's not going to horrible break things and break things for too many people.
- lynx97 1y ago
  Yay, "our users are our beta-testers" hard at work. How about devs evaluate a change by doing some testing, instead of using users as guinea pigs? I agree with parent, this is an awful approach.
  - anon7000 1y ago
    The scale is far too big. You cannot take into account the millions of permutations of websites and browser extensions when testing changes like this.
  - frosted-flakes 1y ago
    They're not testing the browser, they're testing the Web. Testing in the real world with real users is the only way to adequately probe the effects of potentially breaking changes like this. This is not new either. Many such changes have been reverted after discovering that they broke more things than expected. One example is the Object.groupBy static method, which was initially Array.prototype.group.
    - lynx97 1y ago
      > They're not testing the browser, they're testing the Web. That sounds like a pretty lame excuse. So if a self-driving car manufacturer does testing, they are not testing the car, they are testing the environment? Sounds like a pretty neat trick, maybe marketing should adopt this attitude.
  - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
notatoad 1y ago
if you're a web developer, it's always a good idea to keep a copy of the beta release installed to test your sites on, so you can see these changes before it hits the stable release.
- warpech 1y ago
  What surprised me that they roll it out to 50% of the beta channel users. So you might or might not see the change until they roll it out for all
  - zcorpan 1y ago
    Good point! We've adjusted the plan so that it's 100% of beta (starting today). Thanks.
Borgz 1y ago
From the linked article: >To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config.
tshaddox 1y ago
Isn’t this how many features are rolled out for Chrome and Firefox? Chrome’s feature flag system is called Finch: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/chrome-finch https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/chrome-finch This is a list of variations: https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/ https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/
paulddraper 1y ago
1. Users are already going to see different behaviors, depending on their browser version. It will have to work for both. 2. Anyone that cares a lot how h1 looks is going to set the style themselves, rather than relying on whatever the browser default happens to be. 3. Bad browser defaults have (not inaccurately) been blamed for people excessively crapping out CSS.
ramesh31 1y ago
Nobody tell him about the experiments tab
jiggawatts 1y ago
Even on the server side it can be annoying. For example, I tested something in my own private Azure Subscription, but the feature was simply missing in the customer subscription. Microsoft was enabling features randomly without even documenting this or showing any kind of user-visible indicator of what feature set was available or not.
input_sh 1y ago
> How is a web developer supposed to test the website when he and user might have different browser behaviour? If only there was like a Developer version, perhaps one version ahead of stable: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Firefox dev edition is nice but when changes are rolled out gradually like this, forcing the setting in about:config is the only reliable way. Firefox runs experiments on its users in dev edition as much as it does in stable.
jeroenhd 1y ago
In case you were actually looking for an answer to your question, it's in the article: > To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config. Gbd article doesn't specify how to test in Chrome (probably something in chrome://flags), but you can read the deprecation warnings dumped into your console. You may need to enable them in your default log level. If so, there may be a lot of other behaviour that you'll probably want to fix.
- zcorpan 1y ago
  Chrome doesn't implement the change yet, only the deprecation warning. So you can check the console in devtools or run a Lighthouse check.
tempay 1y ago
From the article: > Since Firefox 136, developers will see a console warning for h1s in article/aside/nav/section without author-defined font-size or margins Seems like it should be fairly obvious for any dev that tries to look into it even if they're not part of the cohort with the new behavoir.
zcorpan 1y ago
To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config. Rolling out potentially risky changes in this way is not new, and is also a strategy that other browsers employ. It allows for course-correcting if necessary and is less disruptive than shipping to 100% of users directly.
zx8080 1y ago
For gradual feature roll out there should be a clear success or failure criteria and also the feedback loop. What are they?
- zcorpan 1y ago
  The feedback loop is Firefox's "report broken site" in the Help menu. Success is there are no reports about broken sites due to this change, or the breakage is minor -- differently sized headings and different margins on some pages is expected and is acceptable. Sites becoming unusable is not acceptable.
onion2k 1y ago
Test what exactly? If your test is "The page renders how I expect when using the browser's default styling" then that's a terrible test, because that can change at any time without your control. You just have to accept what that is. There isn't a valid test for it. The fix for this is to define your own H1 margin and font size and then to test that the site looks correct with those values. Your test is should be that your styling works, not that Firefox's styling works. That'd be like testing a dependency. You shouldn't be doing that.
donnachangstein 1y ago
Easy, spin up 20 VMs, find the one that's different.
badgersnake 1y ago
Replacing doing actual testing with ‘just give it to 5% of users and see who screams’ is not an industry trend I’m on board with. Sure, it’s a lot cheaper but also, you’re supposed to ship things that actually work.
K0nserv 1y ago
The indignation in this thread and from OP is ridiculous, especially when all the ire is aimed at Firefox, who are doing the same thing all browser makers do. When you are changing the very fabric of the whole web, rolling things out in a gradual, controlled way is paramount. Not just because people can find and report issues before roll-out reaches 100%, but also because browsers collect telemetry on features and how they work in the wild that can be used to gauge the effect.
- jrvieira 1y ago
  you are both right. the decision to make this change is wrong in the first place
  - diggan 1y ago
    All three of you are wrong, computers were a mistake.
    - acheron 1y ago
      In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.
oblio 1y ago
How do you think the other browsers roll out changes...?
- oblio 1y ago
  To the downvoter: they do A/B testing and staged rollouts... nobody at that scale updates 100% in one go.
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
Even if they rolled out to 100% of the users on day 1, you'd sill have an heterogeneous audience with all the folks using older versions of Firefox. It likely takes (at least) many months before 99% of Firefox users upgrade to a any specific release.

spcebar 1y ago

In theory a web developer is already overriding these styles, and if they're not, they can. Default browser styles are never to be taken for granted.

roenxi 1y ago
Mozilla doesn't agree with you; if they thought that was true they wouldn't do the weird phased rollout to stable. Although I agree with codedokode insofar as I don't see how the phased rollout in stable could possibly help. Hopefully they've thought of something I haven't otherwise it is silly.
econ 1y ago
You shouldn't but there are many sites that assume the default font is black and the default background is white. (I'm sure I forgot to set them myself.) There are [to] many ways to set the font size. I don't even know which on is the correct choice, if there is such a thing. Maybe not trying to control it is the best approach? How can one tell?
rendaw 1y ago
The fact that every webdev carries around/trades personal "reset" stylesheets to undo everything the browser does by default is insane. It really highlights the disconnect between W3C and reality.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  I think the fact that every webdev feels the need to override the user's agent and impose their own idea of what size a H1 should be is, well, kind of imposing. I might want to make H1 be 50 point comic sans. This should not matter to the web developer.
  - TylerE 1y ago
    It matters because we’re the one that has to deal with ticket when user complains that their tweaked-to-within-an-inch-of-its life system inevitably breaks the world. The problem isn’t you per say, it’s the 5000 people that mis-follow some YouTube video because it looks cool without it actually understanding what they’re changing , how to undo it, or what the implications are.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    I don't understand how one can design a website that would survive arbitrary style changes. I think that is unrealistic, so the designer should expect all default styles to be standard. And if the user has too much free time to change the font size then it is their own problem; my suggestion is that they simply use reader mode and change the styles there. I would like to remind that some time ago browsers allowed to change the default font size; it never worked well so Opera started to scale the whole page instead. Other browsers followed it. Android browsers seem to repeat the same mistake by the way: they override developer's styles when the user changes font size in OS accessibility settings.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      I mean, it's my computer. I should ultimately be in control of how a document renders. I might need larger text due to poor eyesight, or need to use a screen reader. Or I might just be irritated that the web developer just up and decided that light gray on dark gray text looked cool (it doesn't, it barely can be read). Or I might want to scroll with my keyboard because a mouse is painful to my RSI. If I go out of the way and set up accessibility settings, I would expect all applications on my device (including the web browser) to respect those settings.

beeflet 1y ago

I guess you could override the styles to whatever you want to keep it consistent, and then once the update rolls out to enough users you can stop overriding the styles if you want.

zcorpan 1y ago
Yes.

wnevets 1y ago

> How is a web developer supposed to test the website when he and user might have different browser behaviour? Any web developer that would have an issue with this is already overriding the default styling.

ack_complete 1y ago

Bigger problem is when users run into a problem and can't find information about it because others can't reproduce it. I ran into this when they ran an A/B test on removing the search box and it drove me crazy that no one else seemingly had the same behavior, until I found and disabled the A/B test plugin.

foolfoolz 1y ago

this is clearly an edge case and most (all?) modern websites will not run into any problems. this is a very reasonable change given the impact

mmis1000 1y ago

In practice, it's like not even one web developer would have problem. The default h1 style on web is quite disgusting in general, mostly with extremely big font size and wide padding. Made it very unusable on mobile devices. Without overriding it, you should already have problems.

kmijyiyxfbklao 1y ago

That situation will happen no matter how they do the release. There just has to be an easy way to tell if you have the change or not.

rvba 1y ago

Those in charge of Firefox / Mozilla foundation look as if they are trying to make Firefox irrelevant

not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago

> Firefox is not a server-side software and this style of deployment doesn't make much sense. How does safe velocity not apply to client apps? We've been doing this for decades.

benatkin 1y ago
It shouldn't. It's part of an anti-feature called "studies": https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/shield
- not_a_bot_4sho 1y ago
  I'm still not following. I get studies and exp. But that's different than rolling out a default behavior to all users, which still requires safe velocity guardrails so you don't Crowdstrike yourself.
  - benatkin 1y ago
    They shouldn’t be tinkering around in my computer.

eschaton 1y ago

A web page’s behavior should be independent of any particular styling of the hierarchical elements used to represent the document it’s presenting. Just like any web page should work perfectly with JavaScript disabled, it should work perfectly with a user-supplied style sheet. If you’re making a web page that has this problem, what you’re making should not be a web page, and you should feel bad about the choices that led you to that point in your life. It will take a while to fix this problem in our industry since we’ve waited so long on it, but the best time to start is now.

grandempire 1y ago
> Just like any web page should work perfectly with JavaScript disabled And the problem is neither of those things are true in reality. So in real life a change like this can cost the economy millions of dollars.
- eschaton 1y ago
  Sure they are, they’re just not sexy. And making this change will ultimately save orders of magnitude more than the cost.
  - grandempire 1y ago
    There are real websites people rely on that don’t work without JavaScript - and ones that depend on the h1 size too.
    - eschaton 1y ago
      And that’s a bad thing, and the people involved in making those sites should feel bad and do something about their mistakes rather than just shrug. And we should call them what they are: Mistakes, abuses of the web.
      - toast0 1y ago
        Sure, the people making these things should feel bad about it, and ideally change their choices... But if 5% of Firefox users can't use your page, and your page is important, they'll consider Firefox broken and go use something else. Firefox isn't doing so well on market share, and appearing to be broken isn't going to help.

arp242 1y ago

> How is a web developer supposed to test the website when he and user might have different browser behaviour? So that is always going to be the case with a change like this, simply because people use older versions, use different browsers, etc. If this change breaks popular-site.com then it will continue work fine for 95% of people, and it breaks for "only" 5%, one of whom will (hopefully) report it. This allows the Firefox people to test the waters to make sure it's not going to horrible break things and break things for too many people.

lynx97 1y ago
Yay, "our users are our beta-testers" hard at work. How about devs evaluate a change by doing some testing, instead of using users as guinea pigs? I agree with parent, this is an awful approach.
- anon7000 1y ago
  The scale is far too big. You cannot take into account the millions of permutations of websites and browser extensions when testing changes like this.
- frosted-flakes 1y ago
  They're not testing the browser, they're testing the Web. Testing in the real world with real users is the only way to adequately probe the effects of potentially breaking changes like this. This is not new either. Many such changes have been reverted after discovering that they broke more things than expected. One example is the Object.groupBy static method, which was initially Array.prototype.group.
  - lynx97 1y ago
    > They're not testing the browser, they're testing the Web. That sounds like a pretty lame excuse. So if a self-driving car manufacturer does testing, they are not testing the car, they are testing the environment? Sounds like a pretty neat trick, maybe marketing should adopt this attitude.
- 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

notatoad 1y ago

if you're a web developer, it's always a good idea to keep a copy of the beta release installed to test your sites on, so you can see these changes before it hits the stable release.

warpech 1y ago
What surprised me that they roll it out to 50% of the beta channel users. So you might or might not see the change until they roll it out for all
- zcorpan 1y ago
  Good point! We've adjusted the plan so that it's 100% of beta (starting today). Thanks.

Borgz 1y ago

From the linked article: >To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config.

tshaddox 1y ago

Isn’t this how many features are rolled out for Chrome and Firefox? Chrome’s feature flag system is called Finch: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/chrome-finch https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/chrome-finch This is a list of variations: https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/ https://chromeenterprise.google/policies/

paulddraper 1y ago

1. Users are already going to see different behaviors, depending on their browser version. It will have to work for both. 2. Anyone that cares a lot how h1 looks is going to set the style themselves, rather than relying on whatever the browser default happens to be. 3. Bad browser defaults have (not inaccurately) been blamed for people excessively crapping out CSS.

ramesh31 1y ago

Nobody tell him about the experiments tab

jiggawatts 1y ago

Even on the server side it can be annoying. For example, I tested something in my own private Azure Subscription, but the feature was simply missing in the customer subscription. Microsoft was enabling features randomly without even documenting this or showing any kind of user-visible indicator of what feature set was available or not.

input_sh 1y ago

> How is a web developer supposed to test the website when he and user might have different browser behaviour? If only there was like a Developer version, perhaps one version ahead of stable: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

jeroenhd 1y ago
Firefox dev edition is nice but when changes are rolled out gradually like this, forcing the setting in about:config is the only reliable way. Firefox runs experiments on its users in dev edition as much as it does in stable.

jeroenhd 1y ago

In case you were actually looking for an answer to your question, it's in the article: > To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config. Gbd article doesn't specify how to test in Chrome (probably something in chrome://flags), but you can read the deprecation warnings dumped into your console. You may need to enable them in your default log level. If so, there may be a lot of other behaviour that you'll probably want to fix.

zcorpan 1y ago
Chrome doesn't implement the change yet, only the deprecation warning. So you can check the console in devtools or run a Lighthouse check.

tempay 1y ago

From the article: > Since Firefox 136, developers will see a console warning for h1s in article/aside/nav/section without author-defined font-size or margins Seems like it should be fairly obvious for any dev that tries to look into it even if they're not part of the cohort with the new behavoir.

zcorpan 1y ago

To test in Firefox with the new behavior, set layout.css.h1-in-section-ua-styles.enabled to false in about:config. Rolling out potentially risky changes in this way is not new, and is also a strategy that other browsers employ. It allows for course-correcting if necessary and is less disruptive than shipping to 100% of users directly.

zx8080 1y ago

For gradual feature roll out there should be a clear success or failure criteria and also the feedback loop. What are they?

zcorpan 1y ago
The feedback loop is Firefox's "report broken site" in the Help menu. Success is there are no reports about broken sites due to this change, or the breakage is minor -- differently sized headings and different margins on some pages is expected and is acceptable. Sites becoming unusable is not acceptable.

onion2k 1y ago

Test what exactly? If your test is "The page renders how I expect when using the browser's default styling" then that's a terrible test, because that can change at any time without your control. You just have to accept what that is. There isn't a valid test for it. The fix for this is to define your own H1 margin and font size and then to test that the site looks correct with those values. Your test is should be that your styling works, not that Firefox's styling works. That'd be like testing a dependency. You shouldn't be doing that.

donnachangstein 1y ago

Easy, spin up 20 VMs, find the one that's different.

badgersnake 1y ago

Replacing doing actual testing with ‘just give it to 5% of users and see who screams’ is not an industry trend I’m on board with. Sure, it’s a lot cheaper but also, you’re supposed to ship things that actually work.

K0nserv 1y ago

The indignation in this thread and from OP is ridiculous, especially when all the ire is aimed at Firefox, who are doing the same thing all browser makers do. When you are changing the very fabric of the whole web, rolling things out in a gradual, controlled way is paramount. Not just because people can find and report issues before roll-out reaches 100%, but also because browsers collect telemetry on features and how they work in the wild that can be used to gauge the effect.

jrvieira 1y ago
you are both right. the decision to make this change is wrong in the first place
- diggan 1y ago
  All three of you are wrong, computers were a mistake.
  - acheron 1y ago
    In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.

oblio 1y ago

How do you think the other browsers roll out changes...?

oblio 1y ago
To the downvoter: they do A/B testing and staged rollouts... nobody at that scale updates 100% in one go.

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

Even if they rolled out to 100% of the users on day 1, you'd sill have an heterogeneous audience with all the folks using older versions of Firefox. It likely takes (at least) many months before 99% of Firefox users upgrade to a any specific release.