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Comment by tansan | Hacker News Reader

The `<use>` element in SVG can target an external source and clone it into the shadow DOM. However, there is a bug that prevents it from copying certain elements resulting in an unexpected SVG.

One commenter puts it into perspective:

"How is this still not fixed 10 years later? This bug is now just as old as Voyager 1 leaving the solar system or Lana Del Rey debut album. We went through an entire Spider Man reboot cycle and 3 James Bond movies. A whole generation of consoles came and passed by with PlayStation 4 being both released and superseded by PlayStation 5 while this bug was open. This bug is older than Grand Theft Auto 5. We live in a whole different world now, especially considering the pace web is developing and we STILL cannot store an icon with a gradient in an external SVG sheet."

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I get the frustration but on the other hand there’s an expectation here that the software must be absolutely bug free and I just don’t see that ever happening.

To look at the metric another way: 10 years, 120 months. 95 comments (including all kinds of automated comments). So less than one a month, among a small group of people. Fixing the bug is clearly not just a one-line thing and requires a ton of effort (including the loading of external resources, which always requires security consideration), which doesn't bode well when compared with the size of audience clamouring for it.

The reality is that it just isn’t that important.

I mean that commenter also didn't fix it in the last ten years. Chromium is open source isn't it?

Maybe the commenter is less than ten years old. Otherwise they have as little excuse as the rest of us.

This is such a bad faith argument whenever I see it, when an end-user is commenting on a project, at least that is funded and has a dedicated team working on it. Asking for something to be fixed, doesn't have to warrant such a reply. I can see if it was some obscure project or some solo dev project, but it's run by Google for gods sake. People don't like it, but even if you are a solo dev open sourcing your stuff a product that expects non tech people/even Js developers, expecting them to open a PR for your coded in some low level language instead of letting you know how much priority it might take is wrong IMHO.

What we also forget is that Chromium (+ HTML, Javascript, SVG, ect) is starting to be in a market dominance position where Windows was in past decades: We're at the mercy of a market winner who improves it at their pace.

At times, it appears that web standards have evolved from their open nature to primarily supporting Google's agenda. If Google wants a certain product to run the browser, they will bend the standards to do that.

I bet as soon as a Google product needs this feature, the bug will be fixed.

Oh, probably. That's a pretty standard pattern; I know of a feature that was lacking from Apple's window manager until they found a need for QuickTime to use it and added it in.

This is called "the paranoid style", political scientists talk about it as a unique feature of American politics.

It's hard to interact with because falsifying it requires invoking it yourself.

ex. here, we'd have to say "I bet you'd be right here complaining if it was fixed that Google was allowing arbitrary remote loads in not provably secure context." It requires a whole lot of supposition and negativity.

But Chromium is open source. Opera and Microsoft, among others, contribute frequently. Igalia is a consulting firm that takes commissions for Chromium browser work. So the correct statement would be that anyone with enough time and/or money could make this work, not just Google.

I agree with what you are saying.

But this guy from Russia came in, threw a fit and was never heard again in this bug.

And still, the reply was polite.

I am sure there are tons of more bugs in the chromium project that are 10 years or older. Some things are just more critical than other.

Posting this link to HN (and then describing some unrelated events of the last decade) is asking for it to be fixed? No, it's just griping loudly about one's pet bug, which is one of a zillion in a project as large as Chromium, hoping that somehow this shames Google into reprioritizing it.

>but it's run by Google for gods sake

So? Google still has a team assigned to the project, and that team has limited people, and it also has preferences and priorities.

> Chromium is open source isn't it?

Being open source doesn't mean that you can contribute to it at all. In this particular case, Google does actually take contributions, but only from people who signed their CLA, and many people aren't going to agree to that.

What would happen if you throw a patch into their discussion without signing CLA and with WTFPL license? Can someone else take that patch and resubmit it with proper procedure? Sounds like a good approach if you want bug fixed but don't want to sign any agreements.

WTFPL is not a good license for the same reason that "public domain" isn't good. It's not actually recognized internationally. Copyright is the basis of viable international licenses and they need you to turn over the copyright to them (or license it to them or whatever their CLA says).

So, if you did that it'd probably be worse than useless because it might hamper the legal adoption of identical or near-identical code if the fix was such that there was essentially only one decent solution.

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/thirdparty...

Google allows WTFPL third party code.

That probably complicates things from a legal perspective. I could imagine that that patch can no longer be submitted by anyone.

Have you ever looked at the Chromium source code?

Man, that comment has a lot of “I’m the main character” energy.

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