Access has been somewhat reluctant to make BeOS-related material available in the past. For example, they did provide access to the BeOS API documentation (called the Be Book) to the Haiku project, but only under a restrictive no-derivatives license (see [1]). This has caused some pain the past, as extra care must be taken that Haiku's API documentation, the Haiku Book [2], is not a derivative work, so everything had to be rewritten from scratch, even documentation for parts of the API that are largely unchanged.
The BeOS source is not clean. It had loads of third party closed source licensed stuff in the tree. It is also massive, it is a complete OS and most of the supporting apps source code. It would be non trivial to make it open and it would not compile cleanly as massive gobs of drivers and low level stuff (like font rendering engines) would be gone. And there are the unfortunate GPL violations. It would also need a lot of work to manage any opensourcing effort.
While I would normally make my "[citation needed]" joke, I'm sincerely curious about this. I can't find any references to this with an admittedly quick and cursory search. What were the violations?
Adding the thing that complains is a one-time cost. It may work on Firefox now, but making sure that it continues working on Firefox is a continuous resource investment.
And not adding it and not testing for Firefox would cost nothing, and currently improve the user experience - because it actually just works, as a lot of things just do.
But then what if a bug in their code that only affects FF goes unnoticed due to testing, and causes significant problems for a big client, or a journalist reviewing it, or...
Personally I feel a "We don't officially support this browser, it probably works but we only test for full compatibility in <these browsers>" is a better option if you're going to go in that direction.
But I can understand why even that is a bit of a risk as if a user decides to ignore that warning and then some time later encounters a bug that, let's say, causes them to lose half a day of work, they're likely to walk away blaming the company (and maybe go round telling people they know what a shit thing it is) even if the bug wouldn't have happened had they been using one of the browsers that is fully supported and gets tested.
It seems more like the devs at MS know their code works on Firefox but have been asked by exec to push chromium(-esque) because edge is now webkit.
sidenote: this is a multi-billion $ company, no excuse to ignore any platform with their capacity, front face it looks like they can't build a good app anymore, especially if it works anyway with a simple string change in the browser - heck, web devs had to factor in ie7-8 polyfills built by the community only a few years ago. no excuse.
This is part of a very nice larger article by the same author on visualizing algorithms [0]. It covers sampling, shuffling, sorting, and maze generation.
From the paper: "To investigate the noisiness of using Reddit as a source of self-annotated sarcasm we estimate the proportion of false positives and false negatives induced by our filtering. This is done by having three human evaluators manually check a random subset of 500 comments from SARC-main tagged as sarcastic and 500 tagged as non-sarcastic, with full access to the comment’s context. A comment was labeled a false positive if a majority determined that the “/s” tag was not an annotation but part of the sentence and a false negative if a majority determined that the comment author was clearly being sarcastic. After evaluation, the false positive rate was determined to be 2.0% and the false negative rate 3.0%. Although the false positive rate is reasonable, the false negative rate is significant compared to the sarcasm proportion, indicating large variation in the working definition of sarcasm and the need for methods that can handle noisy data in the unbalanced setting."
I've seen people add '/s' to their comment when what they wrote wasn't actually what I'd call sarcastic. Probably quite a few people have seen others use '/s' but they've inferred the wrong meaning of the label and then they use it incorrectly.
Seems from what was said above that this is something that has not been taken into account.
What I mean is, it looks like the researchers only looked at whether or not the "/s" was intentionally placed at the end of the comment, not whether the comment was actually sarcastic or whether the person that wrote it understood that "/s" is meant to convey sarcasm.
Randall Munroe of xkcd had a (humorous) look at when the number of dead people on Facebook surpasses the number of living people a few years ago: https://what-if.xkcd.com/69/
Proof assistants are in some ways very similar to what you described. Coq [1] is a popular example. It helps control complexity of larger proofs and verifies that everything that is derived is correct.
[1] https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/LegalNotice.html
[2] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/index.html