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This is indeed something I've noticed. The discussion about browser engines seems to draw heavily on late-90s folklore while entirely missing the point: browser
by KarlKemp 5y ago
This is indeed something I've noticed. The discussion about browser engines seems to draw heavily on late-90s folklore while entirely missing the point: browser engines today are extremely easy to work with, in the sense that it's entirely possible to develop something on, say, Safari, and expect it to work flawlessly on Chrome and Firefox, as well.
Back in the days, you had to budget twice the time to make something work in two browsers that it took for one. This is not hyperbole. You'd gain a bit from doing something the second time, but lose just as much trying to make it work in more-or-less the same way.
Then, there are the complaints about Chrome: there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way Google manages Chrome, with the possible exception of what they are doing to adblocking. Their approach is to try to make the browser platform an equal among the walled gardens they fear, primarily iOS and, to a lesser degree these days, Facebook. None of the lessons of Internet Explorer apply, because the problem with IE was that it was using Windows-only extensions such as ActiveX.
- notpachet 5y agoIt was even worse than that: you often had to budget for different version numbers of the same browser, or even different versions of a single version number. I'm a little foggy on the details, but I believe IE7 would force pages into "compatibility mode" if they were hosted via intranet. I was working for the government at the time and our apps were all hosted on the agency network. It was hell.
- kingcharles 5y agoEspecially if you were doing anything clever with Javascript. You pretty much had to code from scratch for several versions of every browser. Some you could do client-side and others would have to be rendered server-side. As poster above said, you would spend half your design time on getting the thing to look/run the same everywhere. Things are a lot closer now.
- thrower123 5y agoThat's because Safari is now the laggard that IE used to be
- ratww 5y agoThis is not a fair comparison. IE had several non-standard features and different implementations of standards. Developing in older versions of IE was almost a guarantee that it would be broken in all other browsers, even when you didn't use proprietary features.
- no_way 5y agoNow do the reverse develop something in Chrome or Firefox and expect it to work flawlessly in Safari. It most likely won't.
- kccqzy 5y agoTwo jobs ago when I used to work as a full-stack dev, the rule was to develop in Safari and test in Chrome and Firefox. We pulled the logs and there were way too many people using iPads that the site must work in Safari.