What is Web Compatibility
One week ago, I’ve started my job as Web Compatibility Engineer at Mozilla and it’s been wonderful so far! It’s a very welcoming place here in Berlin and my team is superb! So, summed up in one GIF?
When people ask me, what I actually do, the conversations mostly go like this…
A: “So, Web Compatibility Engineer? Huh... What do you do exactly?”
B: “We make sure websites work in the same way on every platform.”
A: ”So, I can report a bug when I find one?”
B: ”Yes, please! Just hop over to webcompat.com and let us know what you’ve found! We’ll help to fix it.”
A: “Oh, great. So you can fix my broken website, right?”
B: “Well, it depends… Is your bug appearing in one browser, but not another? Then it is a webcompat bug and you should totally report it.”
What is a WebCompat bug? #
If you find a bug on a web site, just ask yourself… Is this happening just in one browser or in all of them? If it’s in more than three common browsers, please report the bug to the website youre browsing. They’ll be happy about some good pointers how to reproduce the bug and which system / browser you are running etc, because everyone deserves good bug reports. ;)
If this is happening in just one or two browsers, this is pretty likely a WebCompat bug, which you should report over at webcompat.com. This could be e.g. a prefix the website is using, but just for one browser and others are left out. Maybe the prefix isn’t even needed anymore. Or the specs are not implemented in a correct way into the browser. (Specs just say what should be implemented, but not how).
Your experience, knowledge and voice is what is the most important thing. Browser vendors need you! Your input. You are the ones building the web, shaping up the web.
Thank you <3
This is the first part of a two part blog post.