Device & browser quirks: tracking the weirdness

April 2020 note: Hi! Just a quick note to say that this post is pretty old, and might contain outdated advice or links. We're keeping it online, but recommend that you check newer posts to see if there's a better approach.

We do a lot of browser testing, and we often see ourselves and others running into buggy behavior without knowing if an issue is already known, or perhaps if a workaround is available. Problem is, there’s no good place (that we know of) to easily search for known HTML, CSS, and JS quirks and bugs in browsers – particularly issues that occur in mobile devices, or require more explanation than a simple, “feature xyz isn’t supported in browser xyz.”

The Device Bugs project on Github is an attempt to address this problem. It’s an open, generic bug tracker where we can keep track of the browser issues we commonly face, and make note of various related information and workarounds. While it’d be silly to suggest that it could ever be comprehensive, we think there’s a good chance for it to become a useful resource – especially with the help of the broader community. As such, we’ve begun filing some of our favorite quirks, and we hope you will too!

While Device Bugs is a normal Github project, it is only meant to be used via its issue tracker. You’ll need a Github account to start adding issues, but you can browse and search them without an account. Please feel free to add any legitimate non-framework-specific browser issues to the tracker – desktop browser issues are indeed helpful as well. If an issue deals with a browser in active development, please remember to file the issue with that browser’s tracker as well (but please still file it at Device Bugs too). The Move the Web Forward site gives more information on where popular browsers’ trackers are found; some of which are not public, making a resource like Device Bugs all the more useful.

Lastly, the Device Bugs project contains an issue template to make issue filing faster. If you don’t want to use it, that’s fine, but including any of the information suggested in the template would be very helpful to all.

Happy filing!

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