Regarding: https://openrefine.org/docs/manual/installing#compatible-browser
The install text currently lists browsers based on Webkit and stating “We are aware of some minor rendering and performance issues on other browsers such as Firefox.” This text doesn’t provide a link and looking at the repo issues, there isn’t a clear set of bugs or performance issues which need to be tackled to consider Firefox and other browsers supported.
It is unclear from this text if bugs are in OpenRefine or ones the Firefox community should be tackling. Would a meta issue or a label, or would this be large enough for needing to create a project for collecting the bugs which are blocking Firefox from being considered supported?
Hi and welcome @wolfgang8741 .
I have to admit that I’m not aware of what the specific issues are with using OpenRefine with Firefox and how much of an impact they have. From tracking back through some GitHub issues and PRs it looks like we encountered issues with the scatterplot facet display and that FF is not currently in the list of browsers that we test for (see Tests failing on Firefox · Issue #3837 · OpenRefine/OpenRefine · GitHub).
I’d be happy to see a way of collating FF (and other browser) specific issues in Github and maybe this would help us understand how much of a gap there is here - although how much priority should be given to getting FF “supported” is another question and given FF market share it’s previously been suggested this shouldn’t be a priority (see Having UX tests running on Firefox · Issue #3367 · OpenRefine/OpenRefine · GitHub)
Hi @ostephens I’m glad to hear that the collation of known issues are welcome, and understand it may be a lower priority. I wasn’t sure what might fit into the practices here. I didn’t search in closed issues so I missed those mentioned.
My thoughts are we can’t fix what is not known to be an issue. Which it came to my surprise since I’m a FF user and haven’t noticed anything under my workflows being an issue with OpenRefine + FF on Pop!_OS.
As an OpenRefine user mostly with Wikidata, I can live with degraded performance as long as out right functions are not broken and there isn’t data corruption. I’m not advocating for developing significant effort and dev time to FF, but ensure issues unique to the browser don’t surprise users. We can only prevent a monoculture if we dedicate some support the margin and like https://webcompat.com/ it is good identify where there is a gap to fix them.
I’ve had success with Identifying getting a few bugs fixed in FF the past few months, unrelated to OR. Since searches for Firefox returns 59 open issues and 286 closed. I’ll start looking through them, but I don’t have write access to add labels. I’ll see what I can compile from the existing tasks, limited on time at the moment, but will be watching this thread and back at a later date.
Hi @wolfgang8741,
Thanks a lot for volunteering for this! It looks like we do not currently have labels to identify issues that are browser specific. I think it would be worth creating those.
We can totally invite you to the GitHub organization so that you are able to add and remove labels on issues. Help in such triaging is always welcome. Just let me know what your GitHub username is.
I opened an issue a while back to rewrite that description: Update information regarding browser support · Issue #204 · OpenRefine/openrefine.org · GitHub
I don’t think it reflect the reality very well nowadays, it might be because I’m blind to issues in my usual browser but I personally notice more “issues” on Chromium & co than in Firefox.