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Comment by znowi | Hacker News Reader

"STOP! WebKit is required here. The Comix Editor was tested under Chrome. It uses some webkit-specific tricks."

WebKit - the new IE.

A warning is fine, but I just hate it when a site doesn't even let me try in another browser. I use Firefox Nightly, maybe it fixed the issues that are breaking your app? If you're detecting via user agent, what if I use an odd user agent? What if I want to look at the web console to see just what breaks in case I know what the issue is?

> I use Firefox Nightly, maybe it fixed the issues that are breaking your app?

If it's using -webkit prefixed CSS, that's pretty unlikely.

> What if I want to look at the web console to see just what breaks in case I know what the issue is?

Anyone interested in doing that should be well aware of how to spoof a user agent.

> If it's using -webkit prefixed CSS, that's pretty unlikely.

Unsupported CSS features should not affect the functionality of a web app, only its appearance. Emphasis on "should"; far too many web apps end up fundamentally broken when this happens.

Well how do you expect it to work when the functionality is to change the appearance?

I think something like web-based SVG editor is pushing browser limits too far (some folks reported it crashed Chrome for them). CSS is not "just styling" here. It has functional meaning. For example invalid z-ordering, visibility or cursors can pretty much ruin the experience.

It's a proof-of-concept hobby project, as far as I can tell.

While this is true of bank, ecommerce, news, etc, sites, it doesn't apply when the author is just sharing something he's playing around with.

They should at least include the non-prefix css (or other prefixes) as well for when a feature becomes available on other browsers in case they forget to update it or if they're not aware of what other browsers support.

If you're building NBCnews.com, sure.

If you're building a fun hobby project, you can do whatever you like, including building it in a specific environment.

Of course :)

However, it does limit feedback for any of us not using Chrome. Author is probably cool with that though as it appears and I commend them for not making us jump through hoops to try it anyways by switching user agent.

or use something like this

https://github.com/LeaVerou/prefixfree

"Anyone interested in doing that should be well aware of how to spoof a user agent."

You are not answering the question. Why block a user-agent, if the check can be easily worked around?

Edit: I mean why block as opposed to display a simple warning ("this site is known to not work well with your browser").

So non technical users go "oh, I'll take a look in Chrome", not "this thing's stupid, nothing works".

The same thing can be achieved by displaying a simple warning that lets users bypass it ("oh, I was warned it might not work in my browser, and indeed it doesn't, I will take a look in Chrome").

Q: "I use Firefox Nightly, maybe it fixed the issues that are breaking your app?"

A: "If it's using -webkit prefixed CSS, that's pretty unlikely."

There's actually been talk of non-Webkit vendors supporting the webkit prefix. Opera already does, Microsoft and Mozilla have said they need to support it in at least some cases.

"Non-WebKit browser vendors first started talking about implementing the -webkit prefix [in February of 2012] during a CSS Working Group meeting. Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera all said they felt the need to support -webkit, lest their users be relegated to an inferior browsing experience (because so many sites are using only the -webkit prefix)."

http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/04/opera-forges-ahead-with-pla...

Tantek Çelik of Mozilla: "At this point we're trying to figure out which and how many webkit prefix properties to actually implement support for in Mozilla. Currently we have zero. Zero is no longer an option for us."

Florian Rivoal (Opera), Sylvain Galineau (Microsoft): "Zero is not an option for us anymore either."

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0313.h...

I hope browser vendors only implement support for webkit- prefixes for now-standard properties (eg. box-shadow), and not for properties that only WebKit implements.

It doesn't work under FF Nightly. I'm sorry this was a quick way how to deal with the issue. I don't want to deal with complains "it is broken / it doesn't work for me".

I'm going to push new version which will allow you to continue over that warning.

Updated, refresh your caches: https://github.com/darwin/cmx.io/commit/02ae7bc5b37cfc3117f8...

Thank you very much for the update! I apologize for being rude before, I don't want to bring you down on a very successful day on Hacker News. :)

For what it's worth, though the visual editor doesn't work in Nightly, the code editor + saving does work! It was really fun to mess around with the source and edit your sample comic. Great work!

The main problem with IE wasn't that it was an exclusive product incompatible with other browsers. The problem was that it was bad. I'm not a fan of people only supporting WebKit, but at least WebKit browsers are good.

I used IE briefly in 2000 and 2001, before Mozilla (0.9) became usable enough and Phoenix came out; back then (IE 5.5 to IE 6.0) it definitely was the best browser, by far.

It was the most forgiving browser, with a quirks mode that handled broken code like a champ. But Opera was the best browser, and if your code rendered correctly in it, it would probably render correctly everywhere else (except maybe Netscape 4, an abomination that took too long to die).

Opera was also commercial. At some point there was a free adware version, but I think that was later than 2001. After IE, most people stopped paying for web browsers.

IE isn't bad. It's bad because it is like 10 years old. IE actually innovated a ton of what we consider javascript and CSS/HTML now and days.

Actually, for a while, IE was the best browser available. It was lighter weight, faster than Netscape, and had better web standards support. Mozilla, with its new Gecko engine, took a long time to mature, and was still fairly slow and bloated until Firefox (née Phoenix) came around. Remember, IE was where several features that now form the basis of the modern web came from. Heard of something called XMLHttpRequest? That came from IE.

The problem was that it was bad, in the ethics sense of the word.

IE was an attempt to aggressively eject the competition and kill the open web. When the web stubbornly refused to buy into IE-only technologies, it became Microsoft's dog in the manger, holding back the day that web apps made the OS irrelevant. It was good, technically, and then it was bad, technically, but it was always always evil.

Yep. <strikeout>HTML Standards</strikeout> <strikeout>webkit</strikeout> Chrome proposed standards.

We're doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

It's not the new IE, far from it.

You can run Chrome on Linux, Mac and Windows! And at least in theory you can have a go at trying to port the Chromium browser to other platforms, as well.

Strange, I don't get that message in Firefox; also it appears to work fine, but maybe I'm missing out on some stuff :)

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