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Comment by rwz | Hacker News Reader

Software relying on undefined behavior like that deserves to be broken and made fun of. I fully support breaking it and the idea that they had to revert the error message change horrifies me.

This is why we can't have nice things.

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Unfortunately sometimes software or APIs don't give codified error messages or exceptions and the _only way_ to detect the cause of the error programmatically is to scrape the error message, as horrible as it is.

But if you do that, you can easily wrap it in try-catch, to make it robust to wording changes, not breaking the site.

I thought about this, but I think in the general case it's not always obvious whether the lesser of two evils is to risk getting false positives (by being too "robust to wording changes") or false negatives by being too strict. Either way, my point really is that I'm not about to condemn error message scraping wholesale.

Maybe the site deserves that, but users would just observe that Firefox doesn't work with the site and switch to Chrome.

Ah yes the undoable task of fixing it on there site.

How long would have taken to fix? How much time would we all now safe?

Firefox is not in a position these days where they can force other people to fix their websites.

I wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion. Was there a better, more defined way to catch that error type globally? if there is not, that is not the site creators fault, that is on mozilla

Not sure I follow, if your code throws an exception, you should be able to code against why that exception would have been able to occur, not against "the toString() output of the exception", especially in a landscape with multiple browsers that all have different exception text.

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