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submitted 11 months ago by morrowind@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 85 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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

[-] computergeek125@lemmy.world 32 points 11 months ago
[-] Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 24 points 11 months ago

Opera, chrome, but with CCP data theft and monitoring

[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

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

[-] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 15 points 11 months ago

Not to even mention the fact a Chinese company owns Opera. Why is it even being considered?

[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 4 points 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 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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 1 points 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!

[-] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago

They're both pretty new so dont expect a ton of stuff but they are both under heavy development and have funding. Enjoy!

[-] tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago

Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.

[-] eluvatar@programming.dev 6 points 11 months ago

I don't think the issue is if it can afford it. The question is what constitutes a major browser.

[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 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.

this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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