The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.
Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.
Thank you for the excerpt. I initially interpreted the title as US government agencies will stop using Firefox, not US government agencies will stop requiring their web masters to test in Firefox.
I’d imagine that effectively means agencies would stop using Firefox, if they can’t use it on their own sites.
Fat chance they’re actually using Firefox in the first place. My money’s on Chrome or IE.
Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting all websites.
^except the ones that only work in chrome
if you spoof your user-agent it won’t help Firefox in metrics, since websites will think you’re other browser.
I visit weather.gov around once a day on both mobile and desktop Firefox.
I took the liberty of reading the article but I’m gonna say the title is quite… tendentious. Makes it sound like it’s yet another one of those FUD / nutjob clickbait that have been coming at the privacy community for a few days with sensationalist titles such as “The CIA will stop funding Signal” (never has been) or “FBI wants to sell Wikipedia” (never has been).
What is going on?
EDIT: Cosmic Cleric has provided the definition of “tendentious”, which I have linked.
tendentious
ten·den·tious /tenˈdenSHəs/ adjective expressing or intending to promote a particular cause or point of view, especially a controversial one. “a tendentious reading of history”
Thank you. I’m not too proud to say I didn’t know this word. And, you saved me looking it up. When I was a kid, my dad got tired of defining words for me when I was reading a book, so he taught me to use a dictionary. From then on, I’ve read with a dictionary next to me.
New word for me, too. Odd, considering how incredibly relevant it is nowadays!
It’s a very common word in other languages (Spanish) but my brain didn’t even process it correctly the first time I saw it in English lol
Thanks for taking the time to explain it to others, which I should have done beforehand. Admittedly when I wrote that post I was thinking of the term “tenacious” which means something completely different, and that distracted me from noticing I was using a perhaps obscure word.
Your adroit incorporation of the term “tendentious” exemplifies lexical virtuosity. Impressive articulation. Truly seamless weaving of a sesquipedalian polysyllabic term.
Someone call 911, I think I’m having some kind of medical issue with how this post looks.
We would be euphoria-laden in our willingness to expeditiously mobilize and engage medical assistance should it become categorically imperative.
Your adroit incorporation of "adroit " reminds me of mine own erewhile efforts to incorporate “adroit” into my poetical experimentations, which I hope resulted in an execution considered adroit back in the time.
Grateful I am for your bringing of this memory of creation to me.
Much of it has to do with Firefox’s decisions in the past 5-7 years that have made it very unfriendly to enterprise environments. The provisioning tools have gotten progressively more hostile to IT departments.
The US government is also finally moving to more modern systems for authentication and Mozilla has incorporated some particularly poor changes to how the stack is handled that are very unfriendly to IT environments that need to manage credentials for multiple authoritative sources. We had to switch to Chrome a couple years ago because our support cases with Mozilla would on many occasions come back with a response of ‘we’ve made our decision and will not be considering changes’.
Unfortunately, as Firefox kicks itself out of the enterprise market; that’s going to cascade to the personal market even further as well.
Serious question re the auth part:
Have you tried submitting PRs? Much of the complaints that I see about the development side of Firefox are grounded on the fac that “they won’t have this cool thing that Chrome has”, ignoring that those things are usually dangerous or are rejected for justified, studied reasons (see: WebUSB). Sounds just about the area where auth would have issues, and it’d be interesting to see what Firefox’s actual response was.
Who knows, maybe they’re cluing you that you shouldn’t depending on Google…
I did try, unfortunately, in something as big as a browser it’s very time consuming to even fix simple bugs without side effects.
Original title is worse, I editorialized it as much as I thought appropriate
You made it express an opinion as if in an editorial report?
Or do you mean edited/revised?
Completely off-topic but I recall a lawyers TV show back in the day where the response to this joke was something like:
“About at the same time you stopped beating yours”
Which would have been interesting to see how that would have worked at the court. Can’t remember the show alas, but it was probably The Practice (a late 90s show I think, predecessor to Boston Legal).
The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites.
Now I know what to blame for every single US government website being so poorly put together they they barely function, if they function at all.
The Free Software Foundation Europe has an awesome initiative called Public Money Public Code where they try to convince lawmakers to use as much open source software as possible when using public funds. I really hope they succeed.
What about security? If it’s open source, anyone can poke around in the code and find vulnerabilities to exploit way easier.
And 100% of it is dog shit. I have seen custom products from Accenture, Deloitte, and E&Y, and they were passable prototypes at best.
Accenture doesn’t make shit. They bring in expensive ass consultants with 25 years of experience (on paper), then they sell something basically off the shelf. What’s left of the budget goes to a subcontractor, who now has to glue the already purchased pieces together with spit and gum, now on a very tight timeline before the funding runs out and your tiny company gets the blame
Haven’t worked directly with the others, but the Accenture story was the same everywhere
That’s the opposite of most UK government websites. I’ve always found them very well designed and easy to use. I think they’re well regarded by web designers
Not to derail a good point but there are at least a few government entities with brain cells. Check out digital.gov and cloud.gov, the latter of which has created a responsive, accessible platform for government websites.
every single US government website being so poorly put together
So, just like the rest of the internet? A technology, that popularly speaking, has only been around for 30-years?
And you expect an entity, as huge and diverse as the US government, on federal/state/local levels, to be on the same page?
I can safely make 2 predictions about you:
- You’re young, and that’s A-OK. My kids are GenZ, maybe Alpha? They’re my last, best hope for this world. But you haven’t had the benefit of watching all this evolve. I was writing BASIC on a VIC-20 as a child. 3K RAM!
- You’re not in tech. So again, you haven’t had the benefit of trying to make all this shit work. GenXers physically and programmatically built the world you live in, on top of the work of the Boomers. I’ve hung cable drops and coded, all messy.
This clusterfuck is both expected and natural. Or did your science teacher tell you evolution was orderly? Or perhaps intelligently designed?
And anyone else wanting to complain, I’ll remind you, this is how the government vs. the free market works.
Government works by rules that are not broken or bent. And this pisses some people off. Private enterprise works by what works and what doesn’t. It’s fast and fluid, and not designed to take “the people” in mind. And this pisses some people off.
Some tasks are appropriate for the government, some for the public sector. We’re still working this shit out. (website_under_construction.gif)
This thread is filled with people who don’t make a connection between shitty government websites and the roads that are filled with pot holes, several train derailments every day, a tax collection agency that doesn’t have enough staff to do audits on wealthy people, and schools that ban books that have rainbows in them but teach books by Prager U.
We could have better government websites - but not if we elect “starve the beast” politicians.
Really sad. In Germany, Firefox sits comfortably at 10% market share, and actually is having a slight uptick in the last month.
Wait until Google implements manifest V3 and “kills” adblockers. Firefox will become cool again for the normies.
I will wait and see. We could see Google pulling it’s weight to convince publishers to start blocking Firefox. Google is not just going to sit and watch its market share shrink.
People are so used to seeing ads they probably wont bother, i have friends who work in IT who just acceppt that half of the sites they visit are full of annoying flashy and intrusive ads.
Yeah but if you tell them about ad blockers and show them how to install them, and they see how much better the experience is afterwards, then they’ll bother.
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
And the last reason to even consider using it goes out the window 🙄 Thanks for the heads-up.
Not to even mention the fact a Chinese company owns Opera. Why is it even being considered?
I don’t think the issue is if it can afford it. The question is what constitutes a major browser.
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.
