Before getting into web dev I spent a lot of time doing development in C/C++. That code needed to be portable across systems and versions but it was an entirely

Before getting into web dev I spent a lot of time doing development in C/C++. That code needed to be portable across systems and versions but it was an entirely different kind of portable than we grapple with on the web. For C code we could handle the issue with conditional compilation, build scripts, or dynamic loading. On the web it's all dynamic; all the code for handling every situation you might encounter comes down to the client when the page loads and you sort out the details at runtime while the user taps their fingers on the table. If there is a large amount of code to fix one specific browser you can break that out and pull it down only for that browser, but the kind of bugs that jQuery works around tend to be of the death-by-a-thousand-little-cuts variety where it just doesn't pay to refactor that way.