Archive for March, 2010

Nobody at Twitter does any testing in a WebKit browser, such as Safari or Chrome. I’ve noted this before, but you’d think they’d realise eventually that not everyone uses Firefox (or whatever they use to “test”).

I just logged into the Failoption twitter account for the first time in a while, and it is explaining to me what a retweet is:

This was tested well…

It looks just like that in both Chrome and Safari – not too surprising since they both use the WebKit rendering engine.

Is it really so much effort to test out the one or two new features they come up with each year in another browser? It would only take a minute. Literally.

Or perhaps they did test it, but just don’t care. It’s your problem, not theirs.

Fail.

The last few times I’ve visited Twitter I’ve been asked to update my description – the bit of text that appears at the top right of your profile page.

You can’t write very much, so each time I work away until I fill the box right up to the 140 character limit it allows, then submit it.

And then it’s gone.

Permanently.

Turns out (I eventually discover, after several attempts), that the Javascript code will accept a certain number of characters, but the underlying site discards the content at a lower limit.  You can see this by going to your account settings and doing the same – this time it tells you you have exactly 140 characters (= okay) but when you submit it you’re told it is too long.

So a nasty bug.  It’s not as if Twitter’s “limit to 140 characters” functionality is a core part of the site, is it?

Fail.