• voracitude@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I’m pretty convinced that a country with an annual military spend of almost three quarters of a trillion dollars can afford to QA their web services in at least the latest versions of the five major browsers(1). Anything less might be seen as corporate favouritism.

    (1) Chrome, Firefox, Edge (so Chrome), Safari, and Opera (so also fucking Chrome, apparently) were the five I’m thinking of but I’m open to persuasion if anyone’s got a better list

      • voracitude@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        And the last reason to even consider using it goes out the window 🙄 Thanks for the heads-up.

          • voracitude@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Because it wasn’t based on the Chrome engine (initially, anyway). That’s actually a significant enough reason to at least consider it. I’ve never used Opera precisely because of its origins (honestly I thought it was Russian, though there’s not much practical difference in this case), but innovation is innovation. The fewer non-Chrome browsers exist, the worse off we all are.

            • BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social
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              11 months ago

              Ah, didn’t know how old that doc was. Opera only switched to Chrome in 2013 or so.

              But yeah, I agree. That’s why I support Ladybird’s and Servo’s development. They are the best bet to help stop the duopoly. If only Opera would BSD-license and open source their Presto Engine I would love to see someone pick up development of that. Instead we get Opera putting jumpscares in their browser .

              • voracitude@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                I’ve not even heard of those two, I’ve stuck with Firefox for so long. I’ll check them out, thanks!

      • voracitude@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Obviously, but that is a self-reinforcing loop. I’m not suggesting that government websites drive the most traffic or anything, but the government is kind of special as an entity. In several other areas the US government is bound to show no preferential treatment to vendors or other entities, such as in public broadcast TV or awarding government contracts. I don’t think “internet browsing software” is one such covered area, but forcing people to use one browser to access their websites is pretty equivalent in this day and age, so if they drop support for Firefox a lawsuit might change that.

        My point with the money is that a whole team of highly skilled QA professionals isn’t even a rounding error on that kind of balance sheet, but thinking about it further there’s a solid argument to be made that supporting a variety of web browsers for government web services is in the interest of national security. In that case they could pull the money from the military budget for the project.