10 ms·

We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era. Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so

by paol 4y ago

We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era. Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google. In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing. They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years. Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stagnant because the web is their platform, but on the other hand they have a lot more to gain by abusing control of it.

wdb 4y ago
Personally, I think Google already does whatever it wants similar to what Microsoft did. They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit.
- remus 4y ago
  > They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit. Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareCats=JS%20API https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    They have every incentive to NOT implement things to force devs to create apps. If they wanted to create an actual browser vs. bare bones browser, they'd still offer it on other operating systems.
    - corrral 4y ago
      Please. I've been using the Web since '95, and working on the Web nearly as long. Safari's where I do almost all my browsing, work and personal. It's a fine browser. If I could use it on Windows and Linux, I wouldn't hesitate to choose it over Firefox and Chrome and their derivatives.
      - withinboredom 4y ago
        That doesn't change their incentives. They might make a nice browser, for you. On every other OS, Apple's software is so slow as to be borderline useless. Watching iTunes struggle to download album art is almost as entertaining as listening to the music. I do use a MBP daily, and the software there is amazing. But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all.
        corrral 4y ago
        > But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all. I don't think very many of their customers run any of their software anywhere other than on Macs and iDevices, so I expect that doesn't have much effect. Aside from the apple TV app on Roku and various TV operating systems and such. And still, none of this makes Safari not an "actual browser".
        withinboredom 4y ago
        I think by their decision not to implement so many APIs we can say it is /not/ an “actual browser” and more of “check the box” browser.
        wdb 4y ago
        Maybe. I think implementing APIs like WebUSB, WebHID API, Web Serial API, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI API etc. is not a big issue. Missing Filesystem Access API and Push API, WebGPU API would be nice to have. But the latter two would need to implement in a way to protect privacy of the user.
  - wdb 4y ago
    Luckily they don't :) In my opinion Chromium/Chrome is the new IE and not Safari
    - horsawlarway 4y ago
      I'm sorry - but this is just not a realistic take. Call me when I can install Safari on linux (or any platform other than macOS/iOS). Until then - the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their control and revenue from the App store. It's there because "they have to have a browser" not because they're doing anything novel or clever. And many of the things they refuse to implement aren't related to ads or Google's control at all - they're things that would have narrowed the gap between what a website can do on iOS, and what the App store apps could do. Again - Apple is acting EXACTLY like microsoft here. Underinvesting in the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their best revenue stream - much like how MS ignored IE when the focus was all on local apps (the king of which was still MS office).
      - threeseed 4y ago
        > the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser That's not a truth that's an opinion. And one I would definitely disagree with. When it comes to speed, privacy and battery life I am always choosing Safari over Chrome. And many of us care about those three things over new features that often just make the web worse.
        wdb 4y ago
        Same here. Safari is my preferred browser for content consumption but not for development work
      - timw4mail 4y ago
        KDE's Konqueror is a webkit browser, and there are others. Safari is not available on Linux, but it doesn't need to be. I disagree that Apple is underinvesting: their slower, more deliberate pace can be an advantage: you can see the pitfalls of implementations in other browsers. I am not disagreeing that Apple has had their own share of bugs, though.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    And I am eternally grateful to them for it. Many of those features can be used to comprehensively fingerprint your device allowing advertisers to track you across sites even without cookies. Forget about any laws or privacy efforts it would all be moot. And many of us value privacy far too much. Apple even implemented the "do not track" API and advertisers completely ignored it.
  - nimajneb 4y ago
    Can you explain you explain what I'm looking at in your link? I only sort of understand, but I'm not confident I'm understanding it correctly. (sorry, this is probably a stupid question)
    - remus 4y ago
      It is a website that compares which features are available in which browsers. On the linked page it's comparing the availability of web APIs in the latest versions of chrome and safari to demonstrate that safari has not implemented many of the web APIs chrome has implemented. These APIs are one of the big areas where chrome/google have tried to expand the remit of what's possible with web apps, for example the file system api can be used by a web app to access files directly on a users machine.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    And Firefox also doesn't follow suit (to some extent). But Apple is the only organization with any influence because of their captive market.
- ajross 4y ago
  Not engaging on the Google side here, but... that is not "what Microsoft did". IE shipped a ton of its own features, yes. But in general that was a good thing for the industry. IE is where we got the original AJAX flows, for example. Where things went off the rails was the things Microsoft refused to implement due to their monopoly position. They had a binary component architecture, but it wasn't sufficient to run Java. They had Java, but it was a vestigial and crippled version. Their HTML/CSS engine was just "odd", incompatible not only with emerging standards but with any published standard at all. Basically "the problem" with IE wasn't that Microsoft "did whatever it wants", it was that it did (or didn't do) very specific things intended to prevent users from wanting to use IE at all, in a vain attempt to favor desktop applications or IE-specific implementations.
MikusR 4y ago
Ajax?
- paol 4y ago
  Yep, XMLHttpRequest was literally the only thing to come out of years of Microsoft tenure. Fun fact: it was added so that they could make the Outlook web interface. Edit: well, that and ActiveX, but that's not a good thing...
  - fullstop 4y ago
    Microsoft exposed virtually all elements in the DOM. Netscape was extremely limited in this regard.
    - p_l 4y ago
      They also definitely advanced the CSS more than Netscape. modern DOM, Ajax, modern CSS, bunch of other small details of JS, all iirc came from IE.
      - scotty79 4y ago
        Development between IE4 and 5.5 was massive.
        paol 4y ago
        You and the grandparents are thinking of a slightly earlier time. Yes IE jumped over Netscape massively in technical terms. Then Netscape died an MS, having mission accomplished, basically stopped touching the browser.
        layer8 4y ago
        The problem wasn’t per se that MS stopped (having a stable platform that doesn’t change continuously is in principle a good thing), it was most of all the many quirks, inconsistencies and bugs that IE had.
aaa_aaa 4y ago
Comparing it with MS-IE is unfair. It was not Mozilla or Firefox, but Chrome and Android broke the hegemony of IE in many countries. Where I lived, bank or government sites were IE-Windows only until Chrome appeared. In countries like Korea it was a total shit show. I understand it is a shame that only 3 engines left and but please it is not even close to what MS did.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  I think you're conflating two different things. One thing is Google's decisions when it comes to standards, another one is websites' decision on which browsers to support. Your conclusion that "websites support more than one browser therefore Google's behavior is not that bad" doesn't follow, even if those things are somewhat correlated in the long run. It's perfectly possible for Google to be engaging in similar behavior to Microsoft during IE era, while websites decide to support more than one browser for the moment. In the long run, Google's behavior could contribute to more websites deciding to support fewer browsers. I'm already seeing the occasional website that doesn't work properly on Firefox - for the moment this is rare, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more common.
  - aaa_aaa 4y ago
    Yet you are only hypothesizing. MS-IE broke standards and stagnate deliberately, I have yet to see such a deliberate behavior from Google. There are hiccups and f*-ups but it is nothing compares to MS.
fauigerzigerk 4y ago
You fail to mention that IE was closed source while Chromium is open source. That's a completely different situation. We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match. Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, might pose an alternative.
  - paol 4y ago
    Exactly. Even further, without market share it means very little. You could fork and fund a parallel browser, but if it has no market share then it has no influence on the web. That's where Firefox is right now, unfortunately.
    - esclerofilo 4y ago
      Maybe if Mozilla had just forked Chromium in ~2015, its market share wouldn't have gotten as low as it is right now. I've told some people to switch to Firefox. A lot of them switch back to Chrome after a while, simply because it's faster.
  - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    >Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different. I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.
leononame 4y ago
I don't know if Google continuing to develop the web is really better than leaving it stagnant. A stagnant product can be picked up and improved later, but Google pushing their stuff onto the web can leave damage that is much harder to undo. Ironically, Safari is more similar to IE in that regard. The web isn't Apple's platform, either, so they're not too interested in continuing to develop it.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
We've also seen how it looks like with Google, with a lot of features that later did become standardized - or obsolete - being implemented in either Chrome, or in their Gears addon (http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/stopping-gears.html http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/stopping-gears.html), which led to application caches, IndexedDB, File API, geolocation, web workers, notifications, etc. Oh and early on they had URL prefetching, but that led to badly written web interfaces from executing operations that shouldn't happen.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
It's a blessing and a curse, because since Google only builds web and mobile apps, it means their web apps that require specific features will have to be updated in the browser, so indirectly we got amazing tech like Slack and Discord out of it.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  Some of Google's web apps (for example: Stadia) only work on Chrome, so this doesn't always help anyone else.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    If it doesn't run on Firefox, you're not getting my visit. That is sad, but its always the case when they introduce bleeding edge features, whats even worse is people've been able to make Google "Chrome Only" Google Apps work with Firefox if you lie about your web browser agent.
solardev 4y ago
I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion, but, IMO, the web was better for users and devs back then. For users, IE6 was an era of unrivaled simplicity where the essential hypertext purpose was already fulfilled. Trident (its layout engine) wasn't great but it got the job done. And that same era spawned alternative browsers around that engine, the same way we have Chromium derivatives today, where the real innovation happened. Tabs, ad/popup blocking, easy per-site searching, auto-cookie cleaning, etc. were all present in browsers like NetCaptor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor) or Maxthon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon), which all used IE. Nobody had to worry about "will this page work in my browser". For devs, IE6 was the closest thing to a real standard the Web ever saw... more than at any time before or since. Its monopoly created a much stronger de facto web standard than anything the W3C has tried to coerce or the WHATWG has tried to suggest. It allowed innovation around a common web layout, in terms of browser features, instead of overloading the DOM with flashy interactives that nobody asked for. Then ActiveX came and went, competed with Java applets, Flash took over, Firefox and Webkit started taking off, Javascript got more powerful... and Microsoft's beautiful walled garden collapsed. What do we have to show for it, two decades later? Slower pages with unnecessary complexity, written in transpiled languages ten layers deep, with a UX more focused on dark patterns than getting to the point. What's your typical complex web app... Gmail? It's good, sure, but in replacing Eudora, we ended up with the messiest, jankiest, hackiest ecosystem in the history of consumer computing. It was really too bad Microsoft was the one who got away with IE6's monopoly. If it had been a proper browser vendor who took (and maintained) control from the early days, the web would be a much cleaner ecosystem, like the walled garden app stores we have today. Even today, we're back in the same situation with on iOS, where every browser is just WebKit underneath. iOS web browsing is thus a lot cleaner than than crapfest on Android, where every browser ships their own renderer and no two cheap Android phones ever render the same website the same way. <old man yells at cloud>Frankly, I'm just not sure it's worth it? Twenty years of web dev later, and honestly I think it's just gotten worse. Most people still just want to look up restaurant hours or send a message to their friends or whatever. The rest is crust.</old man rant>

by paol 4y ago

wdb 4y ago

Personally, I think Google already does whatever it wants similar to what Microsoft did. They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit.

remus 4y ago
> They do offer standards for discussion but it will implemented and expect other vendors to follow suit. Safari definitely does not just follow suit (see https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareCats=JS%20API https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+102,safari+15.5&compareC... for example).
- withinboredom 4y ago
  They have every incentive to NOT implement things to force devs to create apps. If they wanted to create an actual browser vs. bare bones browser, they'd still offer it on other operating systems.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Please. I've been using the Web since '95, and working on the Web nearly as long. Safari's where I do almost all my browsing, work and personal. It's a fine browser. If I could use it on Windows and Linux, I wouldn't hesitate to choose it over Firefox and Chrome and their derivatives.
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      That doesn't change their incentives. They might make a nice browser, for you. On every other OS, Apple's software is so slow as to be borderline useless. Watching iTunes struggle to download album art is almost as entertaining as listening to the music. I do use a MBP daily, and the software there is amazing. But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all.
      - corrral 4y ago
        > But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all. I don't think very many of their customers run any of their software anywhere other than on Macs and iDevices, so I expect that doesn't have much effect. Aside from the apple TV app on Roku and various TV operating systems and such. And still, none of this makes Safari not an "actual browser".
        withinboredom 4y ago
        I think by their decision not to implement so many APIs we can say it is /not/ an “actual browser” and more of “check the box” browser.
        wdb 4y ago
        Maybe. I think implementing APIs like WebUSB, WebHID API, Web Serial API, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI API etc. is not a big issue. Missing Filesystem Access API and Push API, WebGPU API would be nice to have. But the latter two would need to implement in a way to protect privacy of the user.
- wdb 4y ago
  Luckily they don't :) In my opinion Chromium/Chrome is the new IE and not Safari
  - horsawlarway 4y ago
    I'm sorry - but this is just not a realistic take. Call me when I can install Safari on linux (or any platform other than macOS/iOS). Until then - the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their control and revenue from the App store. It's there because "they have to have a browser" not because they're doing anything novel or clever. And many of the things they refuse to implement aren't related to ads or Google's control at all - they're things that would have narrowed the gap between what a website can do on iOS, and what the App store apps could do. Again - Apple is acting EXACTLY like microsoft here. Underinvesting in the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their best revenue stream - much like how MS ignored IE when the focus was all on local apps (the king of which was still MS office).
    - threeseed 4y ago
      > the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser That's not a truth that's an opinion. And one I would definitely disagree with. When it comes to speed, privacy and battery life I am always choosing Safari over Chrome. And many of us care about those three things over new features that often just make the web worse.
      - wdb 4y ago
        Same here. Safari is my preferred browser for content consumption but not for development work
    - timw4mail 4y ago
      KDE's Konqueror is a webkit browser, and there are others. Safari is not available on Linux, but it doesn't need to be. I disagree that Apple is underinvesting: their slower, more deliberate pace can be an advantage: you can see the pitfalls of implementations in other browsers. I am not disagreeing that Apple has had their own share of bugs, though.
- threeseed 4y ago
  And I am eternally grateful to them for it. Many of those features can be used to comprehensively fingerprint your device allowing advertisers to track you across sites even without cookies. Forget about any laws or privacy efforts it would all be moot. And many of us value privacy far too much. Apple even implemented the "do not track" API and advertisers completely ignored it.
- nimajneb 4y ago
  Can you explain you explain what I'm looking at in your link? I only sort of understand, but I'm not confident I'm understanding it correctly. (sorry, this is probably a stupid question)
  - remus 4y ago
    It is a website that compares which features are available in which browsers. On the linked page it's comparing the availability of web APIs in the latest versions of chrome and safari to demonstrate that safari has not implemented many of the web APIs chrome has implemented. These APIs are one of the big areas where chrome/google have tried to expand the remit of what's possible with web apps, for example the file system api can be used by a web app to access files directly on a users machine.
- NoGravitas 4y ago
  And Firefox also doesn't follow suit (to some extent). But Apple is the only organization with any influence because of their captive market.
ajross 4y ago
Not engaging on the Google side here, but... that is not "what Microsoft did". IE shipped a ton of its own features, yes. But in general that was a good thing for the industry. IE is where we got the original AJAX flows, for example. Where things went off the rails was the things Microsoft refused to implement due to their monopoly position. They had a binary component architecture, but it wasn't sufficient to run Java. They had Java, but it was a vestigial and crippled version. Their HTML/CSS engine was just "odd", incompatible not only with emerging standards but with any published standard at all. Basically "the problem" with IE wasn't that Microsoft "did whatever it wants", it was that it did (or didn't do) very specific things intended to prevent users from wanting to use IE at all, in a vain attempt to favor desktop applications or IE-specific implementations.

MikusR 4y ago

Ajax?

paol 4y ago
Yep, XMLHttpRequest was literally the only thing to come out of years of Microsoft tenure. Fun fact: it was added so that they could make the Outlook web interface. Edit: well, that and ActiveX, but that's not a good thing...
- fullstop 4y ago
  Microsoft exposed virtually all elements in the DOM. Netscape was extremely limited in this regard.
  - p_l 4y ago
    They also definitely advanced the CSS more than Netscape. modern DOM, Ajax, modern CSS, bunch of other small details of JS, all iirc came from IE.
    - scotty79 4y ago
      Development between IE4 and 5.5 was massive.
      - paol 4y ago
        You and the grandparents are thinking of a slightly earlier time. Yes IE jumped over Netscape massively in technical terms. Then Netscape died an MS, having mission accomplished, basically stopped touching the browser.
        layer8 4y ago
        The problem wasn’t per se that MS stopped (having a stable platform that doesn’t change continuously is in principle a good thing), it was most of all the many quirks, inconsistencies and bugs that IE had.

aaa_aaa 4y ago

Comparing it with MS-IE is unfair. It was not Mozilla or Firefox, but Chrome and Android broke the hegemony of IE in many countries. Where I lived, bank or government sites were IE-Windows only until Chrome appeared. In countries like Korea it was a total shit show. I understand it is a shame that only 3 engines left and but please it is not even close to what MS did.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago
I think you're conflating two different things. One thing is Google's decisions when it comes to standards, another one is websites' decision on which browsers to support. Your conclusion that "websites support more than one browser therefore Google's behavior is not that bad" doesn't follow, even if those things are somewhat correlated in the long run. It's perfectly possible for Google to be engaging in similar behavior to Microsoft during IE era, while websites decide to support more than one browser for the moment. In the long run, Google's behavior could contribute to more websites deciding to support fewer browsers. I'm already seeing the occasional website that doesn't work properly on Firefox - for the moment this is rare, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more common.
- aaa_aaa 4y ago
  Yet you are only hypothesizing. MS-IE broke standards and stagnate deliberately, I have yet to see such a deliberate behavior from Google. There are hiccups and f*-ups but it is nothing compares to MS.

fauigerzigerk 4y ago

You fail to mention that IE was closed source while Chromium is open source. That's a completely different situation. We already have a number of Chromium based browsers that go against some of Google's most fundamental interests (e.g Brave).

dredmorbius 4y ago
Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Costs matter, and Web development costs are high. Google benefits from coordination, funding, and one migh presume, cost advantages, which would be exceedingly difficult for any comparable US or EU effort to match. Development in lower-cost-of-living regions, perhaps most viably China, might pose an alternative.
- paol 4y ago
  Exactly. Even further, without market share it means very little. You could fork and fund a parallel browser, but if it has no market share then it has no influence on the web. That's where Firefox is right now, unfortunately.
  - esclerofilo 4y ago
    Maybe if Mozilla had just forked Chromium in ~2015, its market share wouldn't have gotten as low as it is right now. I've told some people to switch to Firefox. A lot of them switch back to Chrome after a while, simply because it's faster.
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  >Open source without the option for an alternate development organisation to drive or steer development direction means vey little. Open source is that option. The economics of starting from scratch vs starting from Chromium's latest commit are fundamentally different. I'm not saying that it's easy, only that it is not remotely comparable to the IE situation.

leononame 4y ago

I don't know if Google continuing to develop the web is really better than leaving it stagnant. A stagnant product can be picked up and improved later, but Google pushing their stuff onto the web can leave damage that is much harder to undo. Ironically, Safari is more similar to IE in that regard. The web isn't Apple's platform, either, so they're not too interested in continuing to develop it.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

We've also seen how it looks like with Google, with a lot of features that later did become standardized - or obsolete - being implemented in either Chrome, or in their Gears addon (http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/stopping-gears.html http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/stopping-gears.html), which led to application caches, IndexedDB, File API, geolocation, web workers, notifications, etc. Oh and early on they had URL prefetching, but that led to badly written web interfaces from executing operations that shouldn't happen.

giancarlostoro 4y ago

It's a blessing and a curse, because since Google only builds web and mobile apps, it means their web apps that require specific features will have to be updated in the browser, so indirectly we got amazing tech like Slack and Discord out of it.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago
Some of Google's web apps (for example: Stadia) only work on Chrome, so this doesn't always help anyone else.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  If it doesn't run on Firefox, you're not getting my visit. That is sad, but its always the case when they introduce bleeding edge features, whats even worse is people've been able to make Google "Chrome Only" Google Apps work with Firefox if you lie about your web browser agent.

solardev 4y ago

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion, but, IMO, the web was better for users and devs back then. For users, IE6 was an era of unrivaled simplicity where the essential hypertext purpose was already fulfilled. Trident (its layout engine) wasn't great but it got the job done. And that same era spawned alternative browsers around that engine, the same way we have Chromium derivatives today, where the real innovation happened. Tabs, ad/popup blocking, easy per-site searching, auto-cookie cleaning, etc. were all present in browsers like NetCaptor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor) or Maxthon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon), which all used IE. Nobody had to worry about "will this page work in my browser". For devs, IE6 was the closest thing to a real standard the Web ever saw... more than at any time before or since. Its monopoly created a much stronger de facto web standard than anything the W3C has tried to coerce or the WHATWG has tried to suggest. It allowed innovation around a common web layout, in terms of browser features, instead of overloading the DOM with flashy interactives that nobody asked for. Then ActiveX came and went, competed with Java applets, Flash took over, Firefox and Webkit started taking off, Javascript got more powerful... and Microsoft's beautiful walled garden collapsed. What do we have to show for it, two decades later? Slower pages with unnecessary complexity, written in transpiled languages ten layers deep, with a UX more focused on dark patterns than getting to the point. What's your typical complex web app... Gmail? It's good, sure, but in replacing Eudora, we ended up with the messiest, jankiest, hackiest ecosystem in the history of consumer computing. It was really too bad Microsoft was the one who got away with IE6's monopoly. If it had been a proper browser vendor who took (and maintained) control from the early days, the web would be a much cleaner ecosystem, like the walled garden app stores we have today. Even today, we're back in the same situation with on iOS, where every browser is just WebKit underneath. iOS web browsing is thus a lot cleaner than than crapfest on Android, where every browser ships their own renderer and no two cheap Android phones ever render the same website the same way. <old man yells at cloud>Frankly, I'm just not sure it's worth it? Twenty years of web dev later, and honestly I think it's just gotten worse. Most people still just want to look up restaurant hours or send a message to their friends or whatever. The rest is crust.</old man rant>