This feeling when finally things get fixed after 2 years of negociating. Sometimes things take longer. Sometimes policies change on the other side. All in one, that's very good fortune for the Web and the users. It's bit like that smell for the last two years in summer time in my street, I finally got to ask the gardener of one of the houses around and it revealed what I should have known: Camphor tree (楠). Good week. Tune of the week: Carmina Burana - O Fortuna - Carl Orff.
Webcompat Life
Progress this week:
Today: 2016-05-02T09:21:45.583211
368 open issues
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needsinfo 4
needsdiagnosis 108
needscontact 35
contactready 93
sitewait 119
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You are welcome to participate
We had a meeting this week: Minutes
Webcompat issues
(a selection of some of the bugs worked on this week).
- From the front line, I have good news from Google. Gmail notifications on desktop has been fixed! And it seems, almost like a miracle, that Gmail on Firefox Android is fully fixed. This last one was a long set of discussions and negociations. Thanks for whoever on Google's side who helped us with this battle.
- Newegg had multiple issues on their site with regards to redirection and user agent sniffing. This is fixed!
- And it seems from my tests on Firefox Android that Gmail is now working! We will be probably able to remove the UA override we had in place.
Webcompat development
- better interaction with people reporting issues.
- A couple of issues we are investigating around Exceptions and HTTP Error
Gecko Bugs
- Opened a bug for a long wished feature in Debugger: Bug 1267518 - Change names in Debugger to make it easier to read (deobfuscate)
- Bad interaction in between User Agent Switcher and Developer Tools is in the process of being fixed.
Updating Our Webkit Prefixing Policy
This is the big news of the week. And that's a lot of good for the Web. WebKit (aka Apple) is switching from vendor prefixes to feature flags. What does it mean? It means that new features will be available only to developers who activate them. It allows for testing without polluting the feature-space.
The current consensus among browser implementors is that, on the whole, prefixed properties have hurt more than they’ve helped. So, WebKit’s new policy is to implement experimental features unprefixed, behind a runtime flag. Runtime flags allow us to continue to get experimental features into developers’ hands while avoiding the various problems vendor prefixes had.
Also
We’ll be evaluating existing features on a case-by-case basis. We expect to significantly reduce the number of prefixed properties supported over time but Web compatibility will require us to keep around prefixed versions of some features.
HTTP Cache Invalidation, Facebook, Chrome and Firefox
Facebook is proposing to change the policy for HTTP Cache invalidation. This thread is really interesting. It started as a simple question on changing the behavior of Firefox to align with changes planned for Chrome, but it is evolving into a discussion about how to do cache invalidation the right way. Really cool.
I remember this study below a little while ago (March 3, 2012). And I was wondering if we had similar data for Firefox.
for those users who filled up their cache, - 25% of them fill it up in 4 hours. - 50% of them fill it up within 20 hours. - 75% of them fill it up within 48 hours. Now, that's just wall clock time... but how many hours of "active" browsing does it take to fill the cache? - 25% in 1 hour, - 50% in 4 hours, - and 75% in 10 hours.
Found again through Cache me if you can.
I wonder how many times a resource which is set up with a max-age of 1 year is still around in the cache after 1 year. And if indeed Web developers set a long time for cache invalidation as to mean never reload it, it seems wise to have something in Cache-Control: to allow this. There is must-revalidate, I was wondering if the immutable is another way of saying never-revalidate. Maybe a max-age value is even not necessary at all. Anyway, read the full thread on the bug.
Reading List
Follow Your Nose
TODO
- Document how to write tests on webcompat.com using test fixtures.
- ToWrite: rounding numbers in CSS for
width - ToWrite: Amazon prefetching resources with
<object>for Firefox only.
Otsukare!