Except if you’re on Firefox, in which case there is no widget. (As an aside, since switching to Firefox, I’m astonished how much of the internet just doesn’t work in it. Do frontend developers… not check whether their website works in Firefox? Is Firefox so niche these days? It’s not like you have to run it in VM like you’d have to with Edge/Safari… Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud here; my main point was that the widget doesn’t appear in Firefox, just fyi.)
Do frontend developers… not check whether their website works in Firefox?
Oh, we check. Of course we check.
And then we find that it doesn’t work, because Firefox has some weird bug. Some really dumb bug, that makes Firefox render a page in a different way than every other browser. Some bug that has existed for 20 years (!!!) and is still unsolved. (Or 15 years. Or 17 years. Or 9 years.)
And then what? Well, “just” fix the problem, right? “Just” put in additional development time, to compensate for the fact that Mozilla’s development process is increasingly dysfunctional? “Just” devote 500% more effort, to support… [checks notes]…
I am (and any good web developer is) sympathetic to the need to support various minorities of users (by browser, by OS, by device, by physiological capabilities, by network limitations, etc.). I can tell you that I make every reasonable effort to support not only Firefox, but every browser I hear about. (I’ve responded to user complaints about lynx, links, qutebrowser, Dillo, and TenFourFox, to take several examples of varying obscurity; and in each of the cases I have in mind, I was able to solve the issue.)
But the fact is that fully supporting Firefox takes up an utterly disproportionate amount of effort. For developers who do not have the budget of a megacorporation behind them, that amount of effort cannot be justified. Many of us try. Most of us do not fully succeed. Some give up. Can you blame them?
Thanks for the detailed response! I wasn’t aware that Firefox was such a clusterfuck. I think I also had pretty old browser market share numbers cached in my head and those numbers were probably for desktop market only; the 5 % number surprised me. Huh, Firefox actually is niche; I was being facetious.
Indeed. It’s quite frustrating, by the way; like anyone who’s been paying attention to the state of the internet lately, I really have no desire to encourage, much less contribute to, Google’s growing control of the web (and with Microsoft Edge being migrated to Google’s Blink rendering engine, Firefox will be one of the last islands of resistance to the Apple/Google—i.e., WebKit/Blink—hegemony). I want to support Firefox! I want Firefox to be good (as it once was), and I want people to use it!
Well, they seem to have plenty of resources available to rewrite their browser in Rust, to develop a mobile operating system, to make a version of Firefox for virtual reality (!!) …
… it seems possible, at least, that some of those resources are capable of being applied to their vast backlog of bugs. But who knows?
I couldn’t say. I regularly use neither the Less Wrong website (I do my LW browsing/commenting/etc. via GreaterWrong) nor Firefox (which I use only for testing purposes).
Have you reported this bug to the Less Wrong development team?
It shows up for me. Here is a screenshot from my Firefox:
You can see it in the bottom right corner.
I do indeed test our website on Firefox about once a week and make sure everything works, and also do a bunch of crash-tracking to understand whether there are any browser-related issues that show up. You might be using an outdated version of Firefox, and sadly the development effort for testing all current versions of Firefox (and it’s not just about older versions, most of our browser-related bugs actually come from more recent releases that then get patched) is beyond our development capacity.
Except if you’re on Firefox, in which case there is no widget. (As an aside, since switching to Firefox, I’m astonished how much of the internet just doesn’t work in it. Do frontend developers… not check whether their website works in Firefox? Is Firefox so niche these days? It’s not like you have to run it in VM like you’d have to with Edge/Safari… Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud here; my main point was that the widget doesn’t appear in Firefox, just fyi.)
Oh, we check. Of course we check.
And then we find that it doesn’t work, because Firefox has some weird bug. Some really dumb bug, that makes Firefox render a page in a different way than every other browser. Some bug that has existed for 20 years (!!!) and is still unsolved. (Or 15 years. Or 17 years. Or 9 years.)
Or Firefox doesn’t support some feature that every other browser supports. Or Firefox’s mobile simulator does not properly simulate a touch device. Or Firefox fires bizarre, superfluous events on mouse wheel scrolls. Or Firefox can’t discriminate between the left and right mouse button. Or Firefox has stopped supporting the ability to implement special CSS workarounds for Firefox. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And then what? Well, “just” fix the problem, right? “Just” put in additional development time, to compensate for the fact that Mozilla’s development process is increasingly dysfunctional? “Just” devote 500% more effort, to support… [checks notes]…
… 5% more users.
Hm.
Yes.
I am (and any good web developer is) sympathetic to the need to support various minorities of users (by browser, by OS, by device, by physiological capabilities, by network limitations, etc.). I can tell you that I make every reasonable effort to support not only Firefox, but every browser I hear about. (I’ve responded to user complaints about lynx, links, qutebrowser, Dillo, and TenFourFox, to take several examples of varying obscurity; and in each of the cases I have in mind, I was able to solve the issue.)
But the fact is that fully supporting Firefox takes up an utterly disproportionate amount of effort. For developers who do not have the budget of a megacorporation behind them, that amount of effort cannot be justified. Many of us try. Most of us do not fully succeed. Some give up. Can you blame them?
Thanks for the detailed response! I wasn’t aware that Firefox was such a clusterfuck. I think I also had pretty old browser market share numbers cached in my head and those numbers were probably for desktop market only; the 5 % number surprised me. Huh, Firefox actually is niche; I was being facetious.
Indeed. It’s quite frustrating, by the way; like anyone who’s been paying attention to the state of the internet lately, I really have no desire to encourage, much less contribute to, Google’s growing control of the web (and with Microsoft Edge being migrated to Google’s Blink rendering engine, Firefox will be one of the last islands of resistance to the Apple/Google—i.e., WebKit/Blink—hegemony). I want to support Firefox! I want Firefox to be good (as it once was), and I want people to use it!
But boy, Mozilla sure doesn’t make it easy…
Do you know anything about whether that’s a “mozilla lacks resources” thing or a “mozilla is actively dysfunctional” thing?”
Well, they seem to have plenty of resources available to rewrite their browser in Rust, to develop a mobile operating system, to make a version of Firefox for virtual reality (!!) …
… it seems possible, at least, that some of those resources are capable of being applied to their vast backlog of bugs. But who knows?
Is this why lesswrong doesn’t work on firefox? (Voting specifically.)
Voting should work on Firefox and if it doesn’t that is surprising and bad. Do you have any kind of noscript plugins running by any chance?
(Note that there are some general bugs re: voting aggregation that are not Firefox specific that we are working on)
I couldn’t say. I regularly use neither the Less Wrong website (I do my LW browsing/commenting/etc. via GreaterWrong) nor Firefox (which I use only for testing purposes).
Have you reported this bug to the Less Wrong development team?
No, so I checked to see if it’s still an issue before doing so, and it isn’t.
No, it works on Firefox but there’s a menu option to deactivate the widget and you likely deactivated it when you aren’t seeing it.
Hm, I see the widget in Chrome though
It shows up for me. Here is a screenshot from my Firefox:
You can see it in the bottom right corner.
I do indeed test our website on Firefox about once a week and make sure everything works, and also do a bunch of crash-tracking to understand whether there are any browser-related issues that show up. You might be using an outdated version of Firefox, and sadly the development effort for testing all current versions of Firefox (and it’s not just about older versions, most of our browser-related bugs actually come from more recent releases that then get patched) is beyond our development capacity.
I see. I should say FF 66 on Ubuntu. But anyway, Said’s comment helped me resolve much of my confusion.
Alas, the screenshot above is from FF66 on macOS. So looks like the smallest things can make a difference :/