[kuschku]

I’m curious, how did you manage to build a website that claims to work in Chrome, but not in Chromium? In Safari, but not in Firefox?

And worst of all, it actually obviously works in Chromium and Firefox, but you just check the UA.

Works:

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/60.0.3112.90 Safari/537.36

Doesn’t work:

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/60.0.3112.90 Chrome/60.0.3112.90 Safari/537.36

I mean, sure, if you want to build a site that relies on ridiculous UA testing, and breaks everywhere, sure.

But not even in the "works best in Netscape" era did people actually intentionally break their pages in browsers where it actually worked. This is a new low. This is completely ridiculous.

Proof: http://i.imgur.com/YlPE77b.jpg Oh, and as you can see, if I spoof the UA in FF; it actually works fine. This is completely bullshit, and I’m sure I’ll never do business with you. This is completely ridiculous, leaving out major browsers (and, for example, over 40% of the desktop browsing market in Germany) intentionally and unnecessarily.

[tomduncalf]

Ultimately this was a client project with a fixed budget and timeline so a decision had to be made between extending browser support and adding more features.

Given the target audience (graphic designers, the vast majority of whom are on Mac and will use Safari or Chrome, as I validated from stats on other sites I've built), the decision was made to focus work on the type tester on those browsers.

The rest of the site should still be accessible with any browser, but we decided it was better to not show the type tester at all than have a broken experience (which was the situation with Firefox).

Anyway, hopefully that justifies it somewhat - I think it was the right decision all things factored in. There's a lot of CSS trickery/hackery to make the type tester work (native support for advanced typography stuff is poor) so making it x-browser wasn't easy. The messaging to users of other browsers could probably be improved though :)

[kuschku]

> Anyway, hopefully that justifies it somewhat - I think it was the right decision all things factored in. There's a lot of CSS trickery/hackery to make the type tester work (native support for advanced typography stuff is poor) so making it x-browser wasn't easy. The messaging to users of other browsers could probably be improved though :)

It doesn’t even work on Chromium, in the same version as Chrome. There is literally no excuse for that, it’s literally the same browser engine.

On top of that, even back in the "best viewed on netscape navigator 4.0" era there was a solution for this: Show a message that it was only tested with browser X, and that your client was too cheap to pay for anything else, but at least allow the user to bypass that.

As said, the excuses convinced me even more to never do business with you.

[dwaltrip]

Go grind your axe somewhere else... Why would you go off on some random person on the internet when obviously didn't have the relevant context?

Moreover, you failed to acknowledge the points they made in response!

[kuschku]

This is behaviour that's harmful to the web as a whole.

The loop of "everyone only uses chrome" → "I only need to support chrome with my website" → "nothing works on firefox, I'll switch ti Chrome" is harmful to the entire internet industry, and the startuo economy.

It is harmful to all of us, and hurts all of our future.

[dwaltrip]

I agree with with you that this is an important issue. However, your aggressive comments that ignore what the other person said may not be helping.

[kuschku]

I am getting more aggressive because the other person completely ignores the effects on the surrounding ecosystem, and does not even consider a solution that would provide a compromise, as the "optimized for chrome and safari, ignore and use anyway" button would provide.

I see their situation, and their limits, but this is a very egocentric opinion that completely ignores the effects on the rest of society, which is an issue that's just all too common (see also monopolistic effects, or environmental effects, etc).

[tomduncalf]

Good point about Chromium, I'll change that - it wasn't deliberately excluded. But disagree about the messaging, in this case it was more important to the client that the feature worked as smoothly as possible than that everyone could see it. In some cases I'd disagree, but given the narrow target demographic (and their browser choices) here, I think it was a reasonable choice.