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End users should always have the newest browser without having to work on it and thus get new features when they are ready and hotfixes and security fixes in th

End users should always have the newest browser without having to work on it and thus get new features when they are ready and hotfixes and security fixes in the fastest way possible. People chasing the chimera of the browser as universal app platform have lost the forest for the trees. Do you really expect me to take a dev platform seriously that can't be versioned and is constantly being changed out from underneath users? I don't envy QA teams working on web apps.

comex 14y ago
In a word: yes. Features are being added, but not removed - at least, not unprefixed ones, even if the vendor prefix process seems to be a little broken. If your app breaks, it's probably either your fault for trying to manually detect browsers or use unsupported features, or a bug that can be fixed relatively quickly (and in the meantime, you can always advise switching browsers, as ugly as that is). If it doesn't work because the user's browser is too old, the advice should just be to use a browser that keeps itself up to date.
- cageface 14y ago
  This seems like a very handwavy dismissal of the difficult problem of backwards compatibility. It's hardly a secret that building an acceptably performant web app today requires all kinds of browser-specific tweaks and workarounds. Can I really expect that nobody's going to "fix" the code that made them necessary in some future update to browser X?
  - comex 14y ago
    Yeah, it's a bit handwavey (I'm a little tired)... but your claim that the web platform can't be taken seriously is exaggerated in turn. Unless you're using unstable features (or possibly writing for mobile devices - but that's a separate issue), you really don't need "all kinds of browser-specific tweaks and workarounds". The definition of "unstable features" is a bit nebulous, and it depends on whether you're trying to support all browsers - WebKit is apparently dragging their feet on unprefixing, say, CSS transitions, but Internet Explorer doesn't support them at all - but for most of the relatively old features like that, the spec is settled, so a combination of shims for existing browsers, which libraries can and do provide, and preferred use of the unprefixed feature should pretty much work forever.
tchvil 14y ago
It worked well so far with Chrome. You get your development environment refreshed regularly, often gaining in productivity. However I started to get some more serious bugs popping up recently. Last week was the break-points were not hit anymore(a little nightmare, now solved! But made me go back to Firefox for a week). And this week are visual errors, like trailing borders when mouse overing links, round corners that are cut,... All in all, I find more positive reasons than negative to live on a moving platform, and knowing that my clients will run the same and last version as I do.
- greenyoda 14y ago
  Let's say you're a large business, like a major bank, and you have 15,000 people running Chrome. They all come in at 8:30am one morning, turn on their PCs, and the latest version magically installs itself (let's pretend there's some way that a whole bunch of clerical workers who might have access only to an intranet can do this, and that their bandwidth can support 15,000 simultaneous downloads of Chrome at 8:31am). Now, what happens if the latest version of Chrome happens to have a bug that disables some mission-critical web app that this bank uses? If you're a hacker, you can use Firefox until Google resolves the bug and pushes a new update. But if you're an end user at a bank, your PC is locked down and you can't install another browser (even if you knew how). That little bug in Chrome 26.0.0.1 that got fixed in Chrome 26.0.0.2 the next day could cost the bank millions of dollars as 15,000 people sit at their desks for a day unable to enter transactions. Businesses like this have to be able to install browsers using a controlled process in which all their web apps get tested with the new version of the browser. And installing a new browser on 15,000 machines takes a lot of IT man-hours (remember, the users don't know how or aren't allowed to install their own software), so there has to be a pretty good justification to upgrade. Welcome to the grim realities of corporate computing... By the way, you don't have to be a large bank for something like this to affect you. You could be some tiny business like a real estate broker that depends on a web app but is not big enough to be able to afford a full-time IT staffer to maintain your software for you. I guess my point is that once you're out of the world of software developers, minor problems with browsers can be very costly and upgrading to a new version constantly can be risky.
  - 14y ago

comex 14y ago

In a word: yes. Features are being added, but not removed - at least, not unprefixed ones, even if the vendor prefix process seems to be a little broken. If your app breaks, it's probably either your fault for trying to manually detect browsers or use unsupported features, or a bug that can be fixed relatively quickly (and in the meantime, you can always advise switching browsers, as ugly as that is). If it doesn't work because the user's browser is too old, the advice should just be to use a browser that keeps itself up to date.

cageface 14y ago
This seems like a very handwavy dismissal of the difficult problem of backwards compatibility. It's hardly a secret that building an acceptably performant web app today requires all kinds of browser-specific tweaks and workarounds. Can I really expect that nobody's going to "fix" the code that made them necessary in some future update to browser X?
- comex 14y ago
  Yeah, it's a bit handwavey (I'm a little tired)... but your claim that the web platform can't be taken seriously is exaggerated in turn. Unless you're using unstable features (or possibly writing for mobile devices - but that's a separate issue), you really don't need "all kinds of browser-specific tweaks and workarounds". The definition of "unstable features" is a bit nebulous, and it depends on whether you're trying to support all browsers - WebKit is apparently dragging their feet on unprefixing, say, CSS transitions, but Internet Explorer doesn't support them at all - but for most of the relatively old features like that, the spec is settled, so a combination of shims for existing browsers, which libraries can and do provide, and preferred use of the unprefixed feature should pretty much work forever.

tchvil 14y ago

It worked well so far with Chrome. You get your development environment refreshed regularly, often gaining in productivity. However I started to get some more serious bugs popping up recently. Last week was the break-points were not hit anymore(a little nightmare, now solved! But made me go back to Firefox for a week). And this week are visual errors, like trailing borders when mouse overing links, round corners that are cut,... All in all, I find more positive reasons than negative to live on a moving platform, and knowing that my clients will run the same and last version as I do.

greenyoda 14y ago
Let's say you're a large business, like a major bank, and you have 15,000 people running Chrome. They all come in at 8:30am one morning, turn on their PCs, and the latest version magically installs itself (let's pretend there's some way that a whole bunch of clerical workers who might have access only to an intranet can do this, and that their bandwidth can support 15,000 simultaneous downloads of Chrome at 8:31am). Now, what happens if the latest version of Chrome happens to have a bug that disables some mission-critical web app that this bank uses? If you're a hacker, you can use Firefox until Google resolves the bug and pushes a new update. But if you're an end user at a bank, your PC is locked down and you can't install another browser (even if you knew how). That little bug in Chrome 26.0.0.1 that got fixed in Chrome 26.0.0.2 the next day could cost the bank millions of dollars as 15,000 people sit at their desks for a day unable to enter transactions. Businesses like this have to be able to install browsers using a controlled process in which all their web apps get tested with the new version of the browser. And installing a new browser on 15,000 machines takes a lot of IT man-hours (remember, the users don't know how or aren't allowed to install their own software), so there has to be a pretty good justification to upgrade. Welcome to the grim realities of corporate computing... By the way, you don't have to be a large bank for something like this to affect you. You could be some tiny business like a real estate broker that depends on a web app but is not big enough to be able to afford a full-time IT staffer to maintain your software for you. I guess my point is that once you're out of the world of software developers, minor problems with browsers can be very costly and upgrading to a new version constantly can be risky.
- 14y ago