Go is unavailable to play on the web client. Is this a bug or by design? If by design, why?

Hello,
I've just noticed Go was added to playroom (awesome news!), and as a Linux user, would like to ask the same question.
I have a feeling about what might be the possible cause, but an official statement would be great anyway.
I guess I'll use a VM in the mean time.

Hello,

Go is currently unavailable on the web client for two reasons:

• I haven't yet made the SVG graphics for it
• You can't play against bots

Playing with bots will never be possible. For graphics, I still need to make something minimal, as some screen readers rely on them, most notably VoiceOver.

Hello,
until it is resolved, you can temporarily create a table of Go from your Windows VM, and save it.
Then, on your Linux machine just restore the game while on the Web client, and you can play. Of course, as Aminiel already said you can only play with humans this way, and it's entirely possible that as said, there are screen reader problems due to missing graphycs, but from my quick testing with VoiceOver on a Mac it seemed to work fine. I could read the grid / hear which stone is on which square. I didn't test with other Goban sizes though...

I'm not sure whether this issue of missing graphycs is really that major to block the entire game from appearing on the web client. Same for missing bots, the situation is really the same in Chess, Connect 4 or Reversi but these games are of course perfectly playable on the web with another human.
It might be worth reconsidering the decision, though it's of course possible with many browser / system combinations that there is indeed a major problem I have missed.

Hello,

If you confirm me that it works well with Safari on iOS and MacOS, then sure, I can allow Go on the web client.

Hmmm,
from what I am seeing, Safari on iOS might be more problematic.
Not sure if it is because of graphycs or the bigger board isn't handled well, but for example, if I try to explore the board with my finger, a 19 x 19 board in this case, and as a white player I go along the bottom row and explore horizontally from left to right, I can see A1, B1, and so on, but then after a certain point the board seems to randomly scroll all the way to the right and I jump to S1. Now the board has completely scrolled, and if I return back to the bottom left I can see Q1, R1 and S1. Scrolling the board back to the right is very annoying and difficult. If I use Voiceover's 3 fingers swipe to the right, VoiceOver reports some page 6 of 7, and scrolls only one line to the right, this means that now all the way to the bottom left is P1, and then I have to perform the gesture again to show O1, and so on until I return all the way back to A1.
I think horizontal scrolling is generally difficult on the web client however, but I can't think of any other game / menu I could test where a lot of elements show up on the screen from left to right.
Vertical scrolling works fine, so on my screen I can see from A1 to A12, and I can swipe down with 3 fingers just once and scroll the board up to a19 correctly.

Of course, none of this matters if you just play using swiping / vertical navigation as VoiceOver automatically scrolls the board correctly in this case as necessary, and the same is true with an external keyboard where you can navigate using arrow keys just fine. Only manually exploring the screen is a little tricky and buggy. Only one complaint here with an external keyboard, before every square, as you navigate, VoiceOver says "game". So for example, it would say, "Game. A8."

Thus, on Mac, where keyboard is used by default, everything works correctly as it would on Windows. Even the game issue here is not present, on Mac VoiceOver only says the square names as you navigate with arrow keys.
To conclude, only touch screen / board display on the web client seems to be a little weird.
As a final thought, there is also something strange with the button to pass your turn. From what I can see, you made it so the button appears only when it is your turn, and it is removed when it's not, but this doesn't work correctly for me. What happens is, when it is my turn, there is no button to pass in the actions menu. However, if I press any other button in the actions menu like to check the last move / check who is playing, then the pass button appears. Similarly, when it is my opponent's turn, the button stays there until I do the same (activate an element in the actions menu ), and then it is removed.
Let me know if something is unclear / you need further testing if there are changes made.