Opera: please use bug detection, not browser detection

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-browser-sniffing-warning-the-trouble/

by gaika • 18 years ago

28 8 18 years ago

dev.opera.com

marijn3• 18 years ago

In general, I agree. Unfortunately, detecting some bugs is either a lot of work or almost impossible -- you can't, for example, generate DOM events programatically, so bugs in event handling are very tricky to test for.

On the bright side, it is often possible to write your fix in a non-invasive way, or adjust your code to not depend on the buggy behaviour. (For example, some browsers will still fire a keypress event if you cancel the corresponding keydown event. My code editor[1] ended up checking again in the keypress handler for keys that should have been handled, and cancelling them again.)

[1] http://marijn.haverbeke.nl/codemirror

marijn3• 18 years ago

And just today, I had to fix a Firefox bug where the cursor in an editable document would be displayed in the wrong place. Note that this is purely visual -- it acted as if it were in a different place than it showed. Good luck detecting that. So yes... there we go again: /Gecko/.test(navigator.userAgent)

dazzawazza• 18 years ago

Bloody hell, no one expects browser makers to actually fix bugs!

Respect to Opera for blogging about this.

falsestprophet• 18 years ago

Is anyone sick of Opera asking web developers to do stuff?

captain-m• 18 years ago

Why? Isn't a two way street between browser teams and web developers a good thing?

gommm• 18 years ago

No, I actually like how transparent they are about bug fixing and communicating with developers.... Plus their rant makes sense....

marijn3• 18 years ago

Actually, my experience is different. This was a year ago, so maybe they've improved, but my detailed bug report was anwered with a dumb question that showed the person had hardly read it, and then when I asked whether they could let me know when a version without this bug was released (the issue was completely blocking Opera support in my system), I was completely ignored.

To their credit, they did eventually fix it.

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

Given the above analysis, we now understand the bug well enough to try to write some code to detect it.

This is exactly as it should be: the burden should be on the browser developers to investigate bugs and write the tests they want web developers to use in their workarounds.

Opera: please use bug detection, not browser detection

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