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Comment by jansommer | Hacker News Reader

Html form validation is great. There's just one gigantic catch:

It doesn't work in Firefox for Android.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1510450

I'm using Firefox on all of my mobile devices but I can't blame devs for ignoring FF for Android on this one. This is an API every other browser had working 10 years ago, it's on the Firefox team to sort out this mess. The less than a percent of users who don't see the error messages for controls marked in red isn't worth ignoring the standard for.

The more websites use this, the more pressure Mozilla will feel to fix their browser. This isn't something like WebMIDI or whatever API Chrome or Safari implemented before standardising, it's part of the original HTML5 spec.

Firefox for Android has a smaller user base than Samsung Internet and Opera. It's 0.5%. It's a waste of time working on supporting it. Especially considering how little time people put into making sure their sites work for people using accessibility software. I don't think it's worth mentioning in these issues unless you're also ready to talk about UC Browser.

I wanted to quickly check the 0.5%, and see 1.2% in Japan for instance, where iPhone have near 80% share.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/japan

That's still not a lot, but above 1% is a decent threshold to decide to support a browser.

Yay, I'm in the point five percent!

Is that somewhat biased? - I assume the number of people using Firefox has a quite big overlap with people using ad&tracking blockers, which block many statistic sites. (Website operators may log user agent which will be somewhat accurate still)

This is always something I question whenever the analytics numbers come out. I know my adblocker blocks GA, so I'm not going to be included in any GA statistics.

Every time I've asked a marketing person about this they get hand-wavy about "it all comes out in the wash". But meanwhile they say things like "our analytics show that our market is mostly older and non-tech-savvy people". I'm not sure that the analytics numbers do actually show that. I think that's just the demographic that you can see.

As a daily Firefox on Android user, not catching up on standards is what hurts the most. Most painfully to me, all the WebGL stuff like [1] and some minor annoyances like [2]. Still, having uBlock origin among other extensions is a killer feature.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1884282

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1897707

It's much worse than "doesn't work": the validations work, they just don't show any error. It would be okay if validations just weren't implemented, but this is just absolutely fucked. I discovered this years ago after a long and painful debug session, and I'm quite sure I wasn't the first or last to go through that.

I just realized this having switched to FF on Android fairly recently. Working on an app and saw literally nothing when trying to submit an empty required field. Couldn't imagine what I was missing until I searched. I was stunned. No issue with rolling your own validation but this should work!

That's weird, caniuse says it works: https://caniuse.com/?search=constraint%20validation%20api

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