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)
What a weirdly arrogant, condescending response. I also started on basic on a vic20, had a dad who worked in IT for the government, and have done all of that except the physical wiring on any noteworthy scale. This is utterly unhelpful.
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.
You might wanna check the reception on your crystal ball, Nostradamus, cuz you’re wrong on all counts. I’m 38 and have worked in general IT as well as network engineering.
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.
No, you can’t really make blanket statements like that at all.
Open source doesn’t compromise security on its own and closed source is the same.
Open source might be more secure but that’s only if people actually audit it properly and some closed source codes are audited more closely than some open source code.
This is the exact same ridiculous argument that proprietary software corporations make. It never made any sense, security through obscurity will never work. Linux is open-source used on ~80% of all web servers, in your logic these servers would all be vulnerable. It just doesn’t make any sense. Linux is also used in many embedded devices and Android is based on the Linux kernel. But Android (which is also entirely open source) has one of the best security models out there.
Vulnerabilities can and are usually found without code inspection. Fuzzing, reverse engineering, etc. At the same time, it is easier to find vulnerabilities having the code to check, but it is easier also for those who want to have them patched. That’s why we have tons of CVEs in Windows, iOS etc., and they don’t all come from the vendor… Depending on the ratio of eyeballs looking at something to fix and the ones looking at something to exploit, open source can be more secure compared to closed source.
Tell me you have never worked in IT security without telling me you never worked in IT security.
To give you an actual answer, instead of pure Internet snark, the concept you’re proposing is called “security through obscurity” if you want to research it.
The TL:DR of it is it doesn’t work. If it did, all software would be proprietary and things like viruses wouldn’t exist. The source code for Windows isn’t available, but Windows gets exploited constantly.
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
Mozilla hasn’t been putting any effort into making firefox a proper competitor despite their 400M+/year from Google.
They haven’t pushed the envelope in any way, haven’t invested in a Rust browser engine, haven’t moved away from XUL, haven’t fixed their oldest bugs, haven’t made Gecko more easily embeddable, haven’t added added better documentation to Gecko, haven’t improved speed or memory use, haven’t invested heavily in their android version (it’s slow af on older devices), only just now are starting to enable extensions in firefox on android, …
Their biggest changes are buying up a few useless startups (Pocket, some analytics company?), multiprocess firefox, manifest, containers, looking more chrome-like, firing 400 developers or something during COVID and paying their CEO 5M (?).
All they do is exist. The only reason people switch is because other browsers fuck up. IMO, that’s not a strategy to get more users, but a strategy to collect the Google cheque.
Their ceo pay keeps going up. Even as their market share declines. And they’re still entirely dependent on Google for revenue, who at this pint is basically donating to them to avoid more anti trust issues. It’s a precarious system.
I’m just switching back to Firefox given all the bullshit that’s coming in Chrome. Hopefully others follow suit and that number starts climbing back up.
That’s terrible. How can Firefox usage rates be declining? It seems like every day there’s some new scammy feature being rolled out in all the other browsers.
Most people have no idea that there are differences between browsers, or how the internet even works for that matter, and as such, generally use either Chrome or whatever the default installed browser is.
I worked at a software company in 2010 and was still actively coding web applications that work in ie6. They wanted web 2.0 flashy things… And also must work in ie6. It was not fun
Did you read the article? This is about how the government’s web developers could stop writing websites that support Firefox. You might have to switch to Chromium to use government websites.
Web dev here. Unless they explicitly block other browsers or somehow adopt bleeding-edge tech that other browsers have and Firefox doesn’t (has Firefox ever not been the first to support new standards?) I don’t know how this would even be a problem.
They are talking about .gov websites. Any website operated by the US government should, at least according to their own standards, develop for and test for users using Firefox. If this is followed in practice the article doesn’t really cover.
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.
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.
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.
Something can’t become categorically imperative, a quiddidity such as an essentially categorical property is invariant with respect to time. It either is or it isn’t. Per contra, aesculapian aid might become dispositionally required.
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.
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…
Well, as much as I like Firefox (and I even donate to the Mozilla foundation), I know for a fact that companies won’t pay their programmers money to make PR on Firefox.
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).
Governments agencies usually obtain software through contracts with vendors. Microsoft is one of those vendors so I’m not surprised to hear about this.
Also, Firefox is the pretty much the browser of freedom and independence so I’m surprised it’s not illegal or “against family values” at this point. 😔
All you people too young to remember the late 1990s, enjoy the internet as we used to know it before adblockers, because it sounds like you’re going to be out of options a lot of times soon.
I plan to use Firefox as long as I can, but I hate that I already have to have a backup browser for some sites, including the back end of the website where I used to work. And that will only get worse.
I will tell you something that most people won’t: you don’t have to use those websites.
It doesn’t matter how important you think they are, you can take a stand by not using them if they don’t respect you.
Do you know the reasoning behind the common saying “the united states doesn’t engage with terrorists”? Politics aside, it’s because engaging with your enemy legitimizes or empowers them. By refusing to negotiate or engage with terrorists, the policy aims to avoid granting them recognition or validation for their methods.
You can take the same stance; when a website stops working with non-chromium browsers you stop using it. You IMMEDIATELY stop using it, even better if you pay them money, you should IMMEDIATELY cancel citing that they’re stealing your intellectual freedom. If the US government does the same and you’re required to use a chromium browser to fill out your taxes for example, do it on paper, give them a message that you’d rather not use technology than have guns pointed at you
Sure, until there are almost no websites left you can go to.
It worked in the '90s with internet explorer, it can work again now.
You just have to care enough to push back, to leave suggestion comments saying their website doesn’t work with your browser, and that web browsing is an Internet standard. That’s how it was done last time.
Sadly, it happened to IE as it was a nightmare to work with and web-devs started pushing back. Chrome is, by most accounts, the best browser to work with as a web-dev so it seems unlikely that there will be the same push back against it.
Sadly, it happened to IE as it was a nightmare to work with and web-devs started pushing back.
As a software developer during that time the fact that IE was or was not difficult to work with was not the reason for the pushback.
What happened was thst the customer base did the pushback, reminding corporations who tried to do the quickest development possible, by working with just one single browser (the one with the most population), that the Internet is a standard, and that all browsers are supposed to work with their websites.
Overtime that pressure created the change.
And that can happen again now.
Chrome is, by most accounts, the best browser to work with as a web-dev so it seems unlikely that there will be the same push back against it.
Please don’t be so dismissal of the point I’m making.
Remember when websites could open infinite windows, and prevent you from backout out or closing windows?
Even if things get really bad, they wont get that bad. Also dont forget flash meant the ads were media rich, security hole ridden, cpu spinning, awful monsters as well.
My first desk job was in 96 and even then I needed 3 browsers to get the different government websites to work properly. I don’t know if there was a time before needing a backup browser.
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