Adactio: Links—Tagged with bug

Software Folklore ― Andreas Zwinkau

Detective stories and tales of bughunting in software and hardware.

Sometimes bugs have symptoms beyond belief. This is a collection of such stories from around the web.

An Abridged History of Safari Showstoppers - Webventures

In an earlier era, startups could build on the web and, if one browser didn’t provide the features they needed, they could just recommend that their users try a better one. But that’s not possible on iOS.

I’m extremly concerned about the newest bug in iOS 18:

On-screen keyboard does not show up for installed web apps (PWAs) when focusing a text input of any kind

Whaa? That’s just shockingly dreadful!

Bugs I’ve filed on browsers | Read the Tea Leaves

I think filing bugs on browsers is one of the most useful things a web developer can do.

Agreed!

Care

I know that the number one cause of jank and breakage is another developer having messed with the browser’s default way of doing things.

THIS!!! A thousand times, THIS!

Apple on course to break all Web Apps in EU within 20 days - Open Web Advocacy

I don’t like to assume the worst and assign vindictitive motives to people, but what Apple is doing here is hard to read as anything other than petulant and nasty …and really, really bad for users.

If you’ve ever made a progressive web app, please fill in this survey.

The Grug Brained Developer

If only all thinkpieces on complexity in software development were written in such an entertaining style! (Although, admittedly, that would get very old very fast.)

A layman’s guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained

Software Paper Cuts · Matthew Bischoff

Running up against a paper cut bug feels a little bit like getting a physical one: not the end of the world, but certainly unpleasant. These types of tiny annoyances accrete over time, especially when no one is paying attention to them. In a single day of using my phone, I encounter dozens of these minor bugs that each annoy me just a little bit, making the task I’m trying to accomplish just a little bit more complicated.

Little Big Updates: dispatches from Quality Week

This is a wonderful piece of writing by Marcin, ostensibly about bug-fixing but really an almost existential examination of the nature of coding.

Bugs are, by definition, a look backward—at past behavior, at code that already exists, at the old work of engineers whom you’ve never met. It can feel more fun to write new code, chart new territories, add new functionality.

But the past can be fun, too. A good bug is a puzzle. A mystery. A whodunit. To solve a bug, sometimes you have to be a scientist: observe and measure, chart out the logic, follow the math. But then, two minutes later, you need to wear a hat of a very particular detective—take your flip notepad and interview different pieces of code to understand not what they claim they do, but what they actually do.

Safari isn’t protecting the web, it’s killing it | HTTP Toolkit

I do want to recognize that the Safari/WebKit team are working hard, and I do desperately want them to succeed! Chromium’s domination is bad for everybody, and building a popular browser that’s focused on privacy & security, as they appear to be trying to do, is a fantastic goal. That does not mean their current approach deserves our blind support.

I’m sure the Safari team are working on the issues below already, and I think it’s likely that the problems fundamentally derive from management decisions about company priorities rather than the team themselves.

In the past (the early 2010s) Apple was frequently leading the way on new features, as the very first browser to ship major JavaScript APIs like Web Workers, and the browser driving experimental prefixed features like CSS Canvas backgrounds. It’s exceedingly rare now to see a web feature primarily driven by Apple. Something has changed.

1187179 - service worker NavigationPreload should trigger for frame requests - chromium

It’s official. The extremely niche browser behaviour I documented is a bug.

Enable/unmute WebAudio on iOS, even while mute switch is on

Remember when I wrote about Web Audio weirdness on iOS? Well, this is a nice little library that wraps up the same hacky solution that I ended up using.

It’s always gratifying when something you do—especially something that feels so hacky—turns out to be independently invented elsewhere.

In a Land Before Dev Tools | Amber’s Website

A great little history lesson from Amber—ah, Firebug!

Where did the focus go? | Amber’s Website

Amber documents a very handy bit of DOM scripting when it comes to debugging focus management: document.activeElement.

HTML: The Inaccessible Parts - daverupert.com

Well, this is a grim collection from Dave:

There are some cases where even using plain ol’ HTML causes accessibility problems. I get frustrated and want to quit web development whenever I read about these types of issues. Because if browsers can’t get this right, what hope is there for the rest of us.

It’s worth clicking through each link he lists—the situation is often much more nuanced than simply “Don’t use X.”

Phil Nash wrote a post on his site that really helped me, so
I wrote a post on my site, which helped Peter, so
Peter wrote this post on his site, which showed up via webmention on my site, and now
this post will help somebody else …who I hope will write about it.

881410 - Incorrect transforms when stripping subdomains

The latest version of Chrome is removing seams by messing with the display of the URL.

This is a bug.

Google AMP - A 70% drop in our conversion rate. - Rockstar Coders

Google hijacking and hosting your AMP pages (in order to pre-render them) is pretty terrible for user experience and security:

I’m trying to establish my company as a legitimate business that can be trusted by a stranger to build software for them. Having google.com reeks of a phishing scam or fly by night operation that couldn’t afford their own domain.

Link tags: bug

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