[HN Gopher] Firefox dev: Encoding override not necessary since m...
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Firefox dev: Encoding override not necessary since most mojibake
still legible
Author : serentty
Score : 16 points
Date : 2022-02-17 22:38 UTC (21 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (bugzilla.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bugzilla.mozilla.org)
| zerocrates wrote:
| Just another casualty of telemetry.
|
| I'm sure it doesn't help that Chrome killed its own encoding menu
| years ago.
| serentty wrote:
| A while back, Firefox removed the ability to override the text
| encoding of pages. If Firefox gets the encoding wrong, you are
| screwed. The thing is, according to the developers themselves,
| detecting various single-byte Latin encodings is very unreliable,
| and they have indicated that making Firefox detect one encoding
| more reliably nearly always means introducing failures at
| detecting another one, so there will be no progress in this area.
| Despite this, they have seen it fit to remove the encoding menu,
| because telemetry shows that most users don't use it, and because
| when they do, it often takes them multiple tries to guess the
| correct encoding? Their solution? To replace it with a "guess
| again" button, completely removing the ability to choose
| manually. Henri, one of the developers responsible for this
| change, has argued that as long as both encodings are Latin-
| script encodings with a common ASCII subset, it is not
| catastrophic for the user to be stuck with the wrong encoding,
| because the text is likely "still legible". To give an example of
| what he is calling an "acceptable" level of mojibake, consider
| this text from the Polish Wikipedia, encoded as Latin-2 and
| decoded as Latin-1.
|
| > Hamidiye turecki kr+-?ownik pancernopok3adowy z pocz+-tku XX
| wieku, wodowany w 1903 roku, zbudowany w brytyjskiej stoczni
| Armstronga. WypornoPae normalna okretu wynosi3a 3904 tony, a
| d3ugoPae siega3a 112 metrow. Naped stanowi3y maszyny parowe o
| mocy 12 000 KM, pozwalaj+-ce na osi+-ganie maksymalnej predkoPci
| 22 wez3y. Artyleria g3owna sk3ada3a sie z dwoch pojedynczych
| dzia3 kalibru 152 mm i oPmiu dzia3 kalibru 120 mm. S3u?y3 w
| marynarce Imperium Osmanskiego podczas wojen ba3kanskich oraz I
| wojny Pwiatowej, a nastepnie w marynarce Republiki Turcji do 1947
| roku.
|
| Personally, I think this change is ridiculous. It has been a few
| versions already since it was rolled out, but people are still
| complaining in the issue tracker. I know one Russian guy who has
| resorted to using an extension which replaces arbitrary strings
| in order to correct common mojibake sequences in order to deal
| with the regression in functionality brought about by this
| change.
|
| If you feel strongly about this like I do, I strongly encourage
| you to comment in the Bugzilla thread. Yes, the web should be
| using Unicode these days, but if it isn't, that is not your fault
| as a user, and making the experience miserable for the end user
| is not justifiable.
| RunSet wrote:
| Good luck but I am not hopeful Firefox's behavior will be
| corrected. See also this 13 year old pearl courtesy of
| Bugzilla:
|
| "Set screen coordinates during HTML5 drag event"
|
| > The current HTML5 spec describes that all DragEvent
| properties should be available during all the events -
| according to editor Ian Hickson.
|
| >> Note though that it doesn't specify what the properties
| should be set to, just that they should be set and we currently
| set them to 0.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505521
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> Hamidiye turecki kr+-?ownik pancernopok3adowy z pocz+-tku XX
| wieku, wodowany w 1903 roku, zbudowany w brytyjskiej stoczni
| Armstronga. WypornoPae normalna okretu wynosi3a 3904 tony, a
| d3ugoPae siega3a 112 metrow. Naped stanowi3y maszyny parowe o
| mocy 12 000 KM, pozwalaj+-ce na osi+-ganie maksymalnej
| predkoPci 22 wez3y. Artyleria g3owna sk3ada3a sie z dwoch
| pojedynczych dzia3 kalibru 152 mm i oPmiu dzia3 kalibru 120 mm.
| S3u?y3 w marynarce Imperium Osmanskiego podczas wojen
| ba3kanskich oraz I wojny Pwiatowej, a nastepnie w marynarce
| Republiki Turcji do 1947 roku._
|
| As a Polish person who has been seeing this sort of mis-encoded
| Polish text for over two decades now, my gut instinct is to
| immediately reach for the encoding menu. That menu is gone now.
|
| We live in the era of almost omnipresent UTF-8, but it simply
| feels wrong to remove backwards compatibility with older
| documents on the Polish web that are mis-encoded like that -
| and there are still some of them out there.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| yep, as someone from the balkans with old sites and iso8859-2
| vs cp1250, I used this feature sometimes too... well.. I
| guess not anymore.
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(page generated 2022-02-17 23:00 UTC)