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I think they're overstating the browser compatibility problem too. It was really bad 15 years ago, but today it is almost a non-issue. Between significantly imp

I think they're overstating the browser compatibility problem too. It was really bad 15 years ago, but today it is almost a non-issue. Between significantly improved standardization of web technologies, and new tricks like polyfills, I think it has become pretty uncommon for apps to not just work on multiple browsers without any tinkering.

jlokier 6y ago
I use Chrome, Safari and Firefox on a Mac. In my experience, unfortunately it isn't true that apps work with very high reliability. This is why I use multiple browsers. I don't want to use Chrome, and I encounter new websites with functionality that don't work properly in Safari or Firefox quite regularly. Some of this is even quite basic functionality. From things like shopping carts where the final payment button doesn't work in Firefox (nothing happens), to video conferencing that sort-of works in Safari but then the audio breaks while it is reliable in Chrome. Even GitHub doesn't render properly in Safari occasionally (the page is full of weird size text and giant rectangles). But that's almost certainly a Safari bug.
- babypuncher 6y ago
  I think this is more a problem with developers working in Chrome and using Blink-specific features. I stopped having compatibility issues with my apps when I moved to Firefox years ago.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    Some of it is Blink-specific, but some of it is silly Javascript stuff. How else do you explain a shopping cart final payment button not working. I like development in Firefox too. When I was doing it intensively (just ~2 years ago), I found some of the CSS I was using behaved differently between Gecko, WebKit and Blink, though (and differently again in Android's pre-chrome browser), so I reconfirmed that I do need to test some things across all browsers. By differently, I don't mean prefixed browser-specific CSS (although there is that), I mean standardish things like table row height calculations showed up significantly differently, certain border highlights, and a number of WebKit rendering bugs that Gecko did not have. Key-event based text editing and wheel events are also significantly different, even more so when you include the common mobile browsers.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      > How else do you explain a shopping cart final payment button not working. Given the megabytes of JavaScript on many websites, the chances that some of it depends on some random VM internal quirk is quite high.
- brundolf 6y ago
  This is exactly the problem I was suggesting might be improved by an increase in browser diversity. 9/10 times, the issue isn't the browser itself, the issue is that the dev didn't bother to test and find the (handful of often small and easy to fix) bugs in other browsers. If they were forced to do QA - and ideally, had to adhere better to the actual standards to make their own jobs easier - you might have an easier time using those apps (and the libraries they depend on) in other browsers.
ahepp 6y ago
"almost a non-issue" doesn't sound very convincing to me. As someone who doesn't write GUIs often, I just don't want to have to worry about it at all. What's the cost of electron over webviews? 100mb hdd space? On the other side of the trade, never having to worry about cross platform concerns again? Not having to support or test on multiple platforms? Seems like a no brainer to me. But it's entirely possible, even likely, that I'm putting too much faith in electron, or that there are better options I just don't know about.
- norman784 6y ago
  I really don’t share your point of view, but I understand it, for me feels like we as developers are getting worse and worse with the time, we get every year more powerful machines but our software is getting worse every year, who cares about performance if is cheap to develop, maybe if our apps uses less resources it would have less impact in the environment (less energy consumption is better for everyone, except for the lazy developers). I really hate electron apps, for example you have teams, that is written in electron, in linux is somehow better than the web version but is just way worse than the windows/mac versions, in web you can view 2 cams, linux 4 but in mac and windows you have more cams at the same time and also a lot of features that are missing in linux, so I don’t see too much the benefits of electron here, just pure laziness of microsoft not willing to invest in a better cross platform app.
  - ahepp 6y ago
    I also hate electron apps, I refuse to install them on my personal machine, and use a(n independent) web browser. Efficient software is great, the cool parts of the projects I work on are efficient. In my case, the GUI doesn't need to scale in the same way, and I'm pretty confident the customer would rather have better cross platform support (at a lower cost than if we had to test a bunch of OS web views) than 100MB of their disk back. But yeah, there are plenty of examples of software I use where I disagree. Although this is often based on my aesthetic dislike for an inelegant system, than on any kind of resource constraint.
- saagarjha 6y ago
pitay 6y ago
At least with writing uncomplicated web applications it was still quite easy to have it compatible with the major browsers, you just had to test the web application with them as you wrote it to make sure. Compatibility problems didn't even come up very much while building it if you stayed reasonably within the boundaries of standards that were well entrenched. The biggest issue was how little CSS IE6 supported, if you did anything fancy with CSS and it didn't work with IE6 you had to include an IE6 specific hack, fortunately that was easy and worked completely fine with other browsers. There were problems with internal off the shelf applications whose user interface was built for IE6 only. The funny thing is those applications still worked well with the Firefox of the time, but IE9 broke compatibility with them and the applications didn't work on IE9, but IE10 got released and was compatible with them again.

jlokier 6y ago

I use Chrome, Safari and Firefox on a Mac. In my experience, unfortunately it isn't true that apps work with very high reliability. This is why I use multiple browsers. I don't want to use Chrome, and I encounter new websites with functionality that don't work properly in Safari or Firefox quite regularly. Some of this is even quite basic functionality. From things like shopping carts where the final payment button doesn't work in Firefox (nothing happens), to video conferencing that sort-of works in Safari but then the audio breaks while it is reliable in Chrome. Even GitHub doesn't render properly in Safari occasionally (the page is full of weird size text and giant rectangles). But that's almost certainly a Safari bug.

babypuncher 6y ago
I think this is more a problem with developers working in Chrome and using Blink-specific features. I stopped having compatibility issues with my apps when I moved to Firefox years ago.
- jlokier 6y ago
  Some of it is Blink-specific, but some of it is silly Javascript stuff. How else do you explain a shopping cart final payment button not working. I like development in Firefox too. When I was doing it intensively (just ~2 years ago), I found some of the CSS I was using behaved differently between Gecko, WebKit and Blink, though (and differently again in Android's pre-chrome browser), so I reconfirmed that I do need to test some things across all browsers. By differently, I don't mean prefixed browser-specific CSS (although there is that), I mean standardish things like table row height calculations showed up significantly differently, certain border highlights, and a number of WebKit rendering bugs that Gecko did not have. Key-event based text editing and wheel events are also significantly different, even more so when you include the common mobile browsers.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    > How else do you explain a shopping cart final payment button not working. Given the megabytes of JavaScript on many websites, the chances that some of it depends on some random VM internal quirk is quite high.
brundolf 6y ago
This is exactly the problem I was suggesting might be improved by an increase in browser diversity. 9/10 times, the issue isn't the browser itself, the issue is that the dev didn't bother to test and find the (handful of often small and easy to fix) bugs in other browsers. If they were forced to do QA - and ideally, had to adhere better to the actual standards to make their own jobs easier - you might have an easier time using those apps (and the libraries they depend on) in other browsers.

ahepp 6y ago

"almost a non-issue" doesn't sound very convincing to me. As someone who doesn't write GUIs often, I just don't want to have to worry about it at all. What's the cost of electron over webviews? 100mb hdd space? On the other side of the trade, never having to worry about cross platform concerns again? Not having to support or test on multiple platforms? Seems like a no brainer to me. But it's entirely possible, even likely, that I'm putting too much faith in electron, or that there are better options I just don't know about.

norman784 6y ago
I really don’t share your point of view, but I understand it, for me feels like we as developers are getting worse and worse with the time, we get every year more powerful machines but our software is getting worse every year, who cares about performance if is cheap to develop, maybe if our apps uses less resources it would have less impact in the environment (less energy consumption is better for everyone, except for the lazy developers). I really hate electron apps, for example you have teams, that is written in electron, in linux is somehow better than the web version but is just way worse than the windows/mac versions, in web you can view 2 cams, linux 4 but in mac and windows you have more cams at the same time and also a lot of features that are missing in linux, so I don’t see too much the benefits of electron here, just pure laziness of microsoft not willing to invest in a better cross platform app.
- ahepp 6y ago
  I also hate electron apps, I refuse to install them on my personal machine, and use a(n independent) web browser. Efficient software is great, the cool parts of the projects I work on are efficient. In my case, the GUI doesn't need to scale in the same way, and I'm pretty confident the customer would rather have better cross platform support (at a lower cost than if we had to test a bunch of OS web views) than 100MB of their disk back. But yeah, there are plenty of examples of software I use where I disagree. Although this is often based on my aesthetic dislike for an inelegant system, than on any kind of resource constraint.
saagarjha 6y ago

pitay 6y ago

At least with writing uncomplicated web applications it was still quite easy to have it compatible with the major browsers, you just had to test the web application with them as you wrote it to make sure. Compatibility problems didn't even come up very much while building it if you stayed reasonably within the boundaries of standards that were well entrenched. The biggest issue was how little CSS IE6 supported, if you did anything fancy with CSS and it didn't work with IE6 you had to include an IE6 specific hack, fortunately that was easy and worked completely fine with other browsers. There were problems with internal off the shelf applications whose user interface was built for IE6 only. The funny thing is those applications still worked well with the Firefox of the time, but IE9 broke compatibility with them and the applications didn't work on IE9, but IE10 got released and was compatible with them again.