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> That's easy to say when you're not responsible for a system where an hour of downtime comes with a seven-figure number in brackets on this quarter's review.

• Silhouette 15y ago
  > In particular if you have such a critical system, you should have a plan on how to upgrade, test, and deploy it. Indeed, but wouldn't such a plan start with building on a firm foundation that isn't going to get EOL'd and no longer support security updates after three months? The reality is that building on FF or Chrome now means trusting potentially critical business functionality to an outside group you can't control with a history of pushing breaking changes. (If anyone is about to pipe up with how they only release useful changes and the community testing is sufficient to prevent regressions, please keep in mind that both Firefox and Chrome have each outright broken both cosmetic rendering details and basic functionality recently, in minor/point releases that you wouldn't normally expect to change user-observable behaviour at all, plus of course there are many widely and less widely reported compatibility issues.) > And having reasonably-well written web apps does help as well Don't tell that to anyone who uses Java applets and has spent significant time over the past few months working around the repeated screw-ups made by major browsers as they implemented new internal details. (If anyone is about to pipe up with how Java applets are yesterday's technology and browser vendors don't need to care about them any more, congratulations, you are a walking example of my point.) > Corporate IT can learn a lot from how application development works on the web, Or web application developers could learn a lot from corporate IT, depending on your point of view. Personally, I can't remember the last time I saw a business critical corporate IT system completely fail or a major deployment of old-fashioned desktop software block a whole company, while I see the trendy style of rapid-development cause major errors with alarming frequency. That applies to everything from Reddit falling over every ten minutes to Google Docs' seeming inability to display even basic documents and spreadsheets properly on all major browsers at any given time.
  • Nitramp 15y ago
    If you are using Java applets, then yes, migrate away. That's a technology that's effectively deprecated since at least 5 years. And yes, my point is: move faster. Regarding stability: yeah sure. Amazon never works, Google.com is always down, ebay doesn't render in half of the browsers. On top of that, all the owners of the millions of websites struggle every day to keep up with all the browsers. Clearly, the web is nonviable and should be shut down.
    • Silhouette 15y ago
      > If you are using Java applets, then yes, migrate away. That's a technology that's effectively deprecated since at least 5 years. That's simply not true, though it is very revealing that you think it is. In fact, every browser has made major developments in Java applet support far more recently than that, Java itself has evolved significantly in that time, and of course there are now several rather advanced programming languages that compile down to Java bytecode and the applet mechanism lets you use those languages in developing web-based tools. Whether or not you personally know anything about it, Java applets are widely used in several significant industries, often for configuration of networked hardware or UIs for in-house tools. The global investment in this technology is probably rather large, and you are basically asking that everyone who has spent time and money on the technology should throw it away because your pet browser can't manage a point release without breaking it? Well, sorry, but other people's browsers can, and you just look like your quality control is broken with that argument. > And yes, my point is: move faster. Why? Quite a few of these tools just work, and need little if any maintenance, because the systems behind them also just work and are still in use. You are arguing that people should completely rewrite systems that are working fine and have no current issues, so your browser can advance into untold new territory without bothering about backward compatibility. Your reality check is about to bounce. > Regarding stability: yeah sure. Amazon never works, Google.com is always down, ebay doesn't render in half of the browsers. You do realise that both Amazon and Google have had major outages recently, taking down huge numbers of sites that rely on their service infrastructure, right? In fact, contrary to all the advocacy about how cloud-based computing is less risky than doing things in-house because the Internet giants have redundant this and scalable that and on-call the other guy, the record so far is pretty poor. As far as their front-line services, of course the real giants manage to keep something up pretty much all of the time, but even then Amazon has suffered from several obvious bugs in recent months, which must be hitting them in the budget for both the PR and customer support departments. Google aren't much better. Their main site works fine, but for example one client of mine uses Google Docs and I'm not sure we have ever managed to get a meeting together when one of the team's systems didn't have basic access or drawing bugs while trying to use it. They fix one thing and break another. So do Facebook. Don't even get me started on smaller sites like Reddit falling over every ten minutes (remind me again what their infrastructure is and how often they've attributed total system failure to that outsourced infrastructure). So yes, I stand by my comments on stability, and I think you have a very rose-tinted view of the reliabilty of big name sites such as those you mentioned. The facts just don't support your argument.