Funtoo’s Website is Designed for Internet Explorer

Taken from the Funtoo FAQ:

“Is Mozilla Firefox compatible with funtoo.org?”

Mozilla Firefox does not appear to be compatible with the Funtoo.org website, unfortunately. It does not support the insertAdjacentHTML function, and also does not support XML data islands. These features are supported by Internet Explorer and we use both of these features. I think that insertAdjacentHTML is a good idea, and I also think it’s a good idea for the browser to support XML data islands, which are particularly useful for formatting text. Funtoo.org uses its own documentation management method, and these documents are easier to maintain if insertAdjacentHTML is correctly supported by the browser, and XML data islands are a great help to us as well.

We could maintain patched versions of Mozilla Firefox that would be usable with the Funtoo.org website, but I don’t want to get into the business of supporting a non-standard browser as the upstream project does not seem very supportive of getting these compatibility issues resolved, and thus this could turn into a maintenance burden for Funtoo. So I’d rather just not support Mozilla Firefox for now.

I guess I expected open source projects to be more widely aware of the importance of having open standards, coding to a standard rather than an implementation and driving innovation through new, public standards rather than abusing undocumented proprietary extensions.

Update: This post seems to have been exposed to a wider audience than my usual readership. For those who don’t feel like reading the comments, and who don’t understand what’s being discussed here, you can compare the quote above to the Funtoo FAQ entry introduced by this commit (unfortunately there’s no way to link to individual Funtoo FAQ entries).