Compatibility

Web Compatibility

A person should be able to use the Web with any devices and browsers.

Our attempt is to help both website developers and browser implementers to reach a point where users have no issues when browsing the Web because of their choices.

Contact Us

Cross Browsers. Any vendors

• Web Compatibility bug reporting (Cross Browsers. Any vendors)
• @WebCompat on twitter
• @MozWebCompat for Mozilla Web compatibility issues

Our activity

The Web Compatibility activity is composed of permanent Mozilla staff and volunteer contributors. We are part of the Developer Experiences Team.

• Our current projects.

Mozilla Staff

The web compatibility team is composed of:

• Oana Arbuzov - oana (IRC) - compat triage and testing team
• Sergiu Logigan - sergiu (IRC) - compat triage and testing team
• Adam Stevenson - adam_s (IRC), compat team
• Dennis Schubert - denschub (IRC), compat team
• Karl Dubost - karlcow (IRC), compat team
• Mike Taylor miketaylr (IRC), compat team manager
• Thomas Wisniewski - twisniewski (IRC), compat team

Meetings

Weekly Meeting

The team has a public meeting every Tuesday at 6am PST*.

Day of week	Pacific Time	Eastern Time	UTC	Central European Time	Japan Time
Tuesdays	6:00AM - 7:00AM	9:00AM - 10:00AM	2:00PM - 3:00PM	3:00PM - 4:00PM	10:00PM - 11:00PM (summer) 11:00PM - 12:00PM (winter)

• If there are no agenda items on the public etherpad, there is no meeting.
• See our Compatibility/Meetings for more details and minutes.

Tech Evangelism Triage

All are welcome to participate.

The current goal is to triage the backlog and make sure we haven't missed important bugs to be diagnosed, or to catch what has been fixed. Anything deemed not important will be made P5, and won't appear in query results.

• Thursdays, 8am Pacific, Vidyo Channel Compatibility
• Untriaged Tech Evangelism::Desktop and ::Mobile with no priority (minus P5s)

What is Web Compatibility

Web Compatibility issues are related to Web sites implementing techniques that create issues for a certain class of browsers and/or devices. A person will not be able to use a Web site according to his/her own choices.

These issues are cross-platforms, cross-products and related to the Web as a whole. There are circumstances when a company will choose to use a standardized techniques which is not available for an old browser, but that should be mitigated in making the Web site usable in any circumstances. So if a person is using the last version of Firefox or a vocal browser such as Jaws, or a proxy browser such as Opera Mini or UCWeb, the Web site should be able to work.

Mozilla has two areas for dealing with Web Compatibility issues. The goal is to make the Web usable by anyone and not only Firefox products, but we will focus the efforts on solving issues for Firefox users.

Web Compatibility issues can change over time, we keep an updated list of the most common issues.

Web Compatibility Taxonomy

Why sites are failing in Firefox? What can we do when this is happening?

• The Web site is using a specific vendor technology. Examples: Think about prefixed CSS and JavaScript. Specific codec for video supported only in one browser, platform, …
  • We can outreach the site. Long process and not always successful
  • We may be able to shim it inside Firefox while attempting to do outreach.
  • We can fix it in Firefox if really widespread on too may sites. It becomes (unfortunately) part of the Web reality.
• The Web site is sending a specific working version of the site. Often based on user agent sniffing both on the client side or/and the server side. Examples: Different tier version for different browsers (Google search, Baidu, etc.). These can be very difficult to solve. It's more business related than a technical issue.
  • We can outreach to the site, if we can demonstrate that the other version is working well in Firefox.
  • We can create a UA override in some circumstances. Drawback: we disappear from the statistics.
• The Web site is sending to a specific interactions of the site through features detections.
  • We can outreach to the site.
  • We can try to shim it.
• The Web site is using a standard technology not yet supported by Firefox. Example: SpeechRecognition. This creates a load of secondary issues such as adding future code detection legacies. The Webcompat issues of today are sometimes created by the lack of support of technologies of yesterdays.
  • We need to fix it in Firefox.
• The Web site is using a non-standard technology not yet supported by Firefox. Example from the past: innerText, window.event, … These are hard to fix. When we fix it in Firefox, we create secondary compatibility issues, because sites were relying on it. Example: using window.event, to target the detection of keyCode.
  • We can fix it in Firefox, but we need to deal with the consequences too.
  • We can outreach if the problem is not widespread.

Web Compatibility Issues

You can participate into making the Web a better place by handling these issues.

Status	Bugzilla	Webcompat.com
To triage	🐝	🐝
To diagnose	🐝	🐝
Find a contact	🐝	🐝
To contact	🐝	🐝

• Our Contractors from SOFTVISION started a QA effort for Firefox for Android and here are some more details:
  • Test Plan
  • Lessons Learned

WebCompat Tracking and Triage

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility/WebCompat_Tracking_And_Triage

Web Compatibility How-To

In case, you want to contribute time or help fix issues, you can learn how to get involved. The Web Compatibility team also participates in the Outreachy program.

Web Compatibility Summit

WebCompat Summit (2015)