I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does.<p>It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in their Chrome.<p>This mindset makes me angry. The same applies when developers think that if your browser blocks google tracking it is ok to just fuck up the whole website.<p>The web should be<p>- progressive<p>- standards-compliant.<p>Some years ago this was widely believed to be right way forward.
Nowadays it seems that developers think that Chrome on OS X is the world we all should live in.<p>Loosely related: I am not going to switch to Chrome. I would never use a browser from an Ad Company like Google, as I don't trust them at all.
"Who is correct isn’t important. What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first."<p><i></i>No way<i></i> - The only way we'll end up with compatibility across browsers is to have unambiguous (as much as possible) specifications that define how they should behave and for browser users to insist their browser vendor aligns with the standard. I lived through that past and have no desire to repeat it.<p>If you think about it from a network theory perspective, each of the browsers is only trying to be compatible with one other party (the specification) in this mode. The alternative is that each browser is trying to be compatible with "n - 1" other parties where n is the number of browsers in the pool. And the total effort is the classic (n * (n - 1)) / 2 "connections", so the browser industry would be wasting a lot of effort.<p>Worse yet, there's no single release point. Consider that browser A makes changes to be compatible with browser B (because that behavior seems correct compared to browser C). Unbeknownst to them, browser B is about to change their behavior to be compatible with browser C. Now the A-team's work is either wasted or yet another incompatibility.<p>Browser-focused standards are the best thing that happened to the web in the last 10+ years.<p>- <a href="http://caniuse.com/" rel="nofollow">http://caniuse.com/</a><p>- <a href="http://html5readiness.com/" rel="nofollow">http://html5readiness.com/</a> (now a bit dated)
Weird layout.<p>The article text on the far left, and the side column on the far right with a LOT of white space between. The white space in the middle is as wide as the article text itself.<p>BTW, I'm on a 2560 width screen, using Firefox.<p>And this is what it looks like:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png</a><p>If this is considered good web design, I'm going back to Lynx ...
I might be crazy, but I think that the dotted version of the colored lines (from Firefox/Safari) looked better than the dashed ones he was so insistent on achieving.
title should be "the hypocrisy of the so called web developers"<p>let's see. they blatantly ignore most browsers to focus on the one they use. and then cames up with excuses ("its over 50% of my visitors") just like IE6.<p>then they get confortable with things that browser does that are proprietary, just like with IE6.<p>then they blame all the other browsers in the word for not dropping everything else and go imitate the proprietary behaviour. they even points out that chrome is the only one not following the standard, and still gets praised, just like IE6.<p>"What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves first" is what they say on the article about other browsers not ignoring standards and following the proprietary browser they like.<p>google arrogance over standards and this developer lack of memory and abundance of hypocrisy will give us IE6 all over again.<p>damn you all
I don't necessarily agree with the article as a whole, but I do like this bit very much:<p>> Humans will seldom use different browsers. Unless there are gross differences across browsers, like using entirely different sets of font faces, humans are not going to care. We need to learn to let go.<p>Sometimes, the cost/benefit calculation comes out so squarely in the "let's just not" column that even though it may feel <i>wrong</i> to discriminate so blatantly, the economics are just not there. Important to consider whether this discrimination amounts to technical debt which proves costly over time, or whether they are in fact tailored experiences that makes sense to keep around. In any event I agree with the authors sentiment, that chasing the identical look everywhere unicorn often just isn't worth the bother.
The bugs we have to deal with today are a gift from god compared to the bugs we had to deal with 15 years ago when CSS was just getting traction and then we went through 7-8 years of stagnation due to Microsoft trying to leverage their position to hold back the web. Frustrating as multiple engines is to deal with, it's a small price to pay for the benefits of a true open standard. I've been burned enough by WONTFIX bugs in proprietary software (Adobe Flash I'm looking at you) that I know which double-edged sword I'll put my weight behind.
The browser stats used as the foundation for the post is useless because he does not state how many total users was the sample based and what time frame was it taken at.<p>At the limit of this kind of "logic" I could equally say that 100% of google search visitors use TorBrowser (out of 1: me in a very precise time frame).