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Comment by Chabsff | Hacker News Reader

Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that.

It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by having Firefox contextually relax tracking a bit or by having the government change how they perform the tracking, but the status quo is not really sustainable. And that's really all the article is saying at the end of the day.

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I work in govt tech, we already internally do not care about FF support at all and only really look to chrome based browsers (chrome edge mostly) and safari. Many people don't even know what it is anymore, seems like time killed this browser too. Mozilla spending too much time/money and other crap over the years

> Mozilla spending too much time/money and other crap over the years

It seems like a pretty bit conflict of interest when the #1 money source for Firefox comes from Firefox's only real competitor.

yea things have seriously gone downhill since chrome took off in 2010

What does a government site need that you can't do on firefox? Honestly this is disenfranchising, you should consider the ethics of what you are proscribing for the populace. I should have a right to choose a browser that respects my privacy from a PC.

It's clearly not about what is needed, it's about what is tested. And spending resources on a browser that appears to have 2% of the market is not going to be a high priority.

Exactly. There are a plethora of browsers out there, and no one can be expected to test against all of them. As long as we go for a "government conforming to industry" mentality, then the cutoff has to be somewhere, and if Firefox doesn't make that cutoff, then that's all there is to it.

No browser deserves special treatment here. And this is as true for Firefox as it is for Lynx.

A long time ago we had something called "standards" that were intended to solve this problem. The idea was that developers of different browsers would get together in a neutral forum and agree common ground that everyone would support. That way developers could reliably build upon that common ground and expect their products to operate correctly in any browser. It was an excellent idea that heralded the success of the modern WWW.

Naturally this enforced competition wasn't in Google's interests as its browser became dominant and it adopted the infamous Microsoft strategy to deal with the threat. Apparently we're fast approaching the extinguish phase.

The correct solution to this is for influential public bodies not to insist upon supporting any specific browser or browsers but instead to once again support open web standards and therefore free access to their information and services for all.

This is almost certainly in their own interests anyway. Google has a nasty habit of suddenly killing off its non-standardised extensions. Relying on functionality that other browsers don't necessarily support as well seems unwise.

Nonsense. Only completely trivial standards work without testing actually implementations against each other.

How do you think WiFi devices work together? Is it because WiFi is a standard? Not really - it's because WiFi vendors all test their chips against other WiFi chips on the market.

I've been the person doing that testing. Checking interoperability with a range of other devices is one way you can look for problems but when it comes to signing things off the standard is the final word. Do you know what happens to the devices that don't comply with statutory radio transmission standards? They don't get sold.

Typically the cost of fixing the problem and going through the whole certification process again from the start is significant. There are some direct financial costs but mostly the damage is increased time to market. That's a great incentive for the maker to get their act together and comply with the standards like everyone else as quickly as possible. If you screw up too many times your product might be obsolete before you're ever allowed to sell it.

> statutory radio transmission standards

Not the kind of standards we are talking about.

WiFi was your own example.

This, but for so many issues. Innovation is being stifled by platform monopolies. Standards can too but right now that’s not the primary cause. It’s a balance.

> No browser deserves special treatment here.

Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right, so the government has a duty to support privacy first browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects" if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what should be questionable.

That's the mother of all reaches.

How?

Maybe you can make this argument - that the government should support technologies that emphasize privacy. That could possibly lead to some funding. Creating a policy to support a single vendor, however, is something that I think would be a bit odd for the government. Government spending is supposed to be devoid of bias where possible - you can't just give a contract to someone you like or think is cool, you need to show that it's in the taxpayer's interest (ie: they are cheaper, usually).

To say "we are going to support a browser with 2% market share because we like it more" would therefor be a really big deal. I think a far better avenue would be for the government to provide funding for privacy technologies directly, in an effort to increase their marketshare, and thereby making support of those technologies trivial to justify without any potential issues of bias.

The thing is, the government already does this. The majority of TOR's funding comes from the USG, for example. I'd suggest that maybe the government could fund Mozilla's non profit, to a degree.

This is all based on a premise that Mozilla is worthy of that funding. Is Mozilla really the privacy champion that it touts itself as? Would funding be contingent on anything else? If the government is so determined to prioritize privacy, why not Brave? Or some other entity? Or a new entity?

The supreme court ruled there is no right to privacy in the same ruling that overturned roe v wade.

> The supreme court ruled there is no right to privacy in the same ruling that overturned roe v wade.

My understanding is that the consequence is denial of the right to privacy is limited to women while they are pregnant. Not a categorical denial of the right to privacy.

I don't think that's true. They just ruled that the constitutional right to privacy is not sufficient for the Roe v Wade ruling.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/roe-...

> The final decision was little changed from the leaked draft. Writing for the five-justice majority (with Chief Justice Roberts concurring only in the judgment), Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to privacy is not specifically guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution. When unenumerated liberty rights exist — the right to raise your child as you see fit, for example — those rights must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Reviewing the history of abortion restrictions in the early United States, Alito concluded that the right to abortion is not.

> The opinion ignited a firestorm of controversy. Predictably so: Dobbs is arguably the first case to formally rescind a fundamental constitutional right. The opinion also failed to explain how its logic would not also result in the overturning of Griswold’s right to contraception or a series of other cases that rely on the same logic as Roe. These include Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which invalidated laws criminalizing same-sex intimate sexual conduct, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized the right to marriage for same-sex couples.

Thank you.

Well, that’s what you get when you’re a Public Service. There’s an idiot living on the top of a mountain that needs some basic infrastructure? You got to get your truck out and build that supply line. You won’t do it? Then the government that granted you that Public Service status has renounced sovereignty on that part of the country

Exactly, what a weird train of thought from government workers. Seems like the mission has been lost

> There are a plethora of browsers out there

Three is not a plethora.

Blink engine, Webkit engine, Gecko engine. Three.

"appears to have 2%" is doing a lot of work he. If the earlier comments are accurate, the government stats are based on Google Analytics data that is specifically blocked or obscured by Firefox.

That 2% kind be breached, but the data doesn't accurately represent usage if Firefix is blocking GA in any meaningful numbers.

Yeah I used the word "appears" exactly to emphasize that the appearance is sufficient. The government is working with the data they have.

The government shouldn’t work based on data, but on virtue. That’s the whole point of a constitution, common law, etc.

Easier said than done. That introduces the chance for bias and nepotism. The data driven approach is intended to avoid that.

The data should be accurate though. Any data-driven decisions can easily miss the original intentions if they're made with bogus information.

Looking at browser usage data from GA when Firefox specifically blocks it quite often is useless.

What's your proposal? Because taking an approach that isn't data driven means it needs to be a replacement, and you need to convince people that it's worth the risk of nepotism and bias.

For starters, how about not using a proprietary service from one of the biggest tech oligopolies which has strong economic incentives to misuse any data that passes through it? If government needs accurate tracking numbers to base its decisions on, it should roll its own tracking for those numbers.

Not a great proposal, frankly.

My proposal was simply that data-driven decisions should be made based on accurate data.

Nepotism and bias aren't the alternative here. If you require that decisions are driven by data and you don't have access to accurate data, you should default to doing nothing. If anything, nepotism and bias sneak in when decisions are made despite the fact that no accurate data is avaliable.

Just use progressive enhancement instead, so the site works in all browsers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

so govt should spend tax payer money to support a browser by the numbers no one uses? for "virtue" ? going to have a hard time convincing people of that one

it would be at least a little virtuous to seek accurate figures before making decisions

... there's plenty of privacy-respecting Chromium-derivative browsers...

Last I checked gov tech is larger than just one person commenting on HN.

US gov't supporting monopoly instead of fighting it? I'm not surprised.

USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.

Some of the USDS people are even ex-Mozilla!

GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.

I don't think the USDS makes all or even most of the current federal gov websites.

No, they don't. But they did create the VA site: https://www.usds.gov/projects/va-dot-gov

And they're involved with the Department of Education, although I couldn't find out exactly what they built.

Oof, that sucks to hear. I had a hard time believing they'd be behind that website seeing that I often hear complaints about it. :(

the va site is vast, to say any one team created the VA site would not be even close to correct.

They did help change over the old va.gov to the new va.gov (which was built as vets.gov), which imo has been a huge improvement.

(There are still many, many problems with the VA and its website. Just saying that 1. the new va.gov is a big improvement and 2. the USDS is far from being a single point of responsibility for it, or even _the_ major point of responsibility)

USDS certainly does not. The guiding principle at the time from what I remembered is to try to set "some standard" for all federal government websites to strive to because there were none.

We also helped with design and infrastructure support for ssa.gov (launched earlier this year) with a contractor team to try to boil down 60,000 pages to ~30 pages that people tend to use.

// opinions of a former USDS, no longer with the team

Hi!

Can you elaborate on what in particular on the VA site that causes serious harm to the people it's meant to serve? I'm happy to bring it to the team or if you don't feel comfortable with stating it here, please bring it up to the open source website for va.gov. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi...

Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons.

On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing from the POV of the browser's developers.

The most practical answer is, as was posted by someone else here, the government spec'ing to a standard instead of a set of browsers, which it really should be doing in the first place. The mere fact that the current setup means that the government accidentally makes and/or breaks winners in that space is justification enough.

Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still be possible.

Yeah, I think the root comment of this thread is talking out of his ass. Third-party trackers are not needed, and wouldn't make sense to use, to discern browser market share; browsers self-report their identity and operating system unless specifically configured not to. For example, my User-Agent string in my GET request to retrieve Hacker News is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0".

Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities.

The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.

That's the sort of this that should be illegal for anticompetitive reasons.

I strongly agree. I don't think a website is going to do anything with my user agent string that benefits me. I'd much prefer a web where websites can't do things outside of the standard. We ne er needed webmidi, but a company that makes a browser/is hybrid definitely wanted it.

Speaking of Google, won't this interfere with their "look we're not a monopoly" payments to Mozilla Corp?

There is no standard that you can use instead of a set of browsers. There is no way of making sure that a website works with a browser other then testing it with that browser. The reason people test with different browsers is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's that even standard features often do not work in certain browsers.

Sort of agreed as of today, but this is not something that we just have to accept, especially considering the government doesn't really have a need to make use of the full suite of tools provided by the various existing standards. There are safe subsets to be picked in 2023.

The government doesn't design roads to conform to the top brands of cars and trucks. It specs them to a standard and any manufacturer can have their product certified as compliant. This both protects the public and gives anyone an opportunity to provide products no matter how small their market share is. Doing it the other way around would be madness, and I don't see why the same principle shouldn't apply here.

> The reason people test with different browsers is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's that even standard features often do not work in certain browsers.

This is exactly why sites should be tested for their conformance with the standard rather than with specific browsers. Testing against specific browsers just encourages browser-makers to continue to avoid fixing their shit.

If you want to make money or reach constituents, this isn't actually a viable option for anyone.

When people complain that they can't submit their DMV forms (or whatever) and you say, "well we followed all the standards, go find another browser" and they say "which one" and you say "I don't know, we didn't test with any browsers, we just test against the standard" who do you think they'll blame?

Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a way that everyone agrees on?

Is it really a standard if the dominant vendor just ignores the standard and does what it wants because then it becomes the "actual standard" ?

As a (terrible) example, look at FIPS. The government has the power to mandate a standard that everyone needs to implement. If instead of "supporting specific browser vendors" they "support a specific standard" then all vendors have a target that works with an agreed upon common ground.

> Is it really a standard if no one implements it in a way that everyone agrees on?

Plenty of standards are guidelines. The point is the website’s purpose trumps dogmatic adherence to a standard. If the site works against standards but not in the browser, it’s a failure.

But we can still have websites that work against existing browsers while also being strictly conforming to the standard, surely?

Basically, no proprietary features whatsoever. No draft features. No optionally-supported standard features without a fallback that fully covers the same underlying use case.

So we can't have a well-functioning system because that would interfere with some people making money. We truly do live in sad times.

That's why I said "reach constituents". Governments, nonprofits, utilities, etc, all ideally need to actually reach everyone, it doesn't matter how.

Given the history of standardisation for promoting interoperability includes numerous success stories and a pattern of resistance fading over time I don't see why we should expect web standards to be any different. The level of functionality needed by a typical government site has worked close to 100% correctly in literally every major browser for literally decades.

Then perhaps we should look at how we ended up in this state of affairs where testing against the standard doesn't actually ensure that your website works in the most popular web browsers out there, and do something about it? Like, say, mandatory standard conformance testing for browsers with >X% market share?

They're the government. They can create a spec or standard for browsers to be able to use government supplied digital services. It's done all the time.

This would be beneficial guidance for browser developers, but also for anyone developing government sites. Saying "whatever chrome is doing is our standard" is a cop out.

There was until Google and Mozilla decided W3C wasn't moving fast enough and introduced WHATWG.

Sure there is a standard, are you saying the w3 doesn't exist? The issue is that somehow people here are arguing that it is sufficient to test that you are adhering to a standard by only testing against chrome, edge and safari (two of which are the same engine).

If you want test that you are adhering to a standard (if there is no testsuite available) you need to test against more than 2 independent implementations.

Firefox is not IE8, which declared lot of CSS3 and HTML5 standards as "won't be supported" in 2009, paving the way for its own extinction.

USDS serves basic pages and applets which work fine on Firefox. It is only a handful of very complex web apps like Photopea where the developer will say "run this on Chrome for best results".

> Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way.

They really should be hiring a pollster to ask people which browser they use. It might be a bit difficult for those who use the default, but it wouldn't be that difficult to ask a couple of followup questions (e.g. which device) to determine which default browser that is.

I think most people would say "the internet" or "my phone" rather than something useful.

I get unsupported browser warnings on my country's government portal when I use Firefox.

I think it's been the case for a good 10 years.

It works fine, of course

The 2% rule USDS use is taken directly from GDS (gov.uk), so that isn't what your old employer's policy is at all. They have to define reasonable, after all.

That part of the article was just wrong, to be fair (I used to be head of the front-end community at GDS and helped set things like browser support schedules). Our default approach was to add up all browser share (yes, based on GA, but this was a while ago) until we got to 99%, then removed the browsers that were left over. So typically we wouldn’t consider dropping a browser version until it was less than 0.4% usage. You can use a colleague’s client-side tool to test this approach: http://edds.github.io/browser-matrix/ (assuming it still works).

The browser support is currently listed at https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/designing-for-d... . The mention of 2% is specific to IE11, so I guess this was special-cased at some point.

I stand corrected, thank you.

Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to

So, the default position of the government is, "If we can't surveil you, we can't help you?" (Or taken the other way, you want us to help you? Let us surveil you!) This seems to be how it works out in practice, just because of favorable economics in mass surveillance. Example: RFID and license plate readers for toll collection. Various registrations with government agencies are another example.

2% is still 7 million people

Well, if the world including whatever governments, institutions, groups, interests, companies, FOSS projects, OS distros, etc... all want to depend only on Chromium, then fine.

If Mozilla can't even play this card, then they should really just shut down.

Or, maybe, like Wikpedia, they should stop begging for more-more-more, and spend what they get wisely.

Not to mention, they could simply start bug bounties and/or crowdfunding for actual deliverables and/or services (ie. a security team).

And if all this fails, then it fails. Maybe we'll simply get a Firemium or Chromefox/fix whatever the name. A fork where adblock works.

> it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that.

It would be best for the future of Firefox if they don't.

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