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When Apple first said they would only allow a single web rendering engine on iOS, at first I was heavily against the idea. But now as a web developer who is abs

When Apple first said they would only allow a single web rendering engine on iOS, at first I was heavily against the idea. But now as a web developer who is absolutely not looking forward to the inevitable "people running around with 10 version out of date Chromium browsers", I'm starting to think Apple had the right idea. I can test a website on a single iOS device and know it will work the same on all devices in that version of iOS even if they are using "Chrome on iOS" or "Opera on iOS" or any other browser. I have no idea how I'm supposed to test a site for 13 different Chromium forks. And as time goes on, they will only grow more and more divergent from the main Chromium branch, which means they won't have bug fixes or new features.

snupples 11y ago
You should develop towards standards rather than a particular platform.
- Xylakant 11y ago
  Standards are nice and dandy, real-world-implementations all suffer from bugs, missing features or implement undefined behavior slightly different. So if you want to support an implementation, you need to test it. If there multiple versions of an implementation you want to support, you need to test them all. Any other approach is "it works on X, it might work on Y, but we're not actively supporting Y."
- jaredsohn 11y ago
  From a practical standpoint, don't you still need to test it against popular platforms though? (If you develop to the standard and a popular browser doesn't support the standards correctly as far as your users are concerned, it is your problem.)
- awj 11y ago
  If every browser vendor fully and correctly implemented a standard on their first try, you'd have an excellent point. As it is right now, even people that develop towards standards still have to choose between deviating from those standards to support a wider audience or sticking to the standards and turning away users.
  - snupples 11y ago
    In the most general sense, deviating from standards does not support a wider audience.
- bsg75 11y ago
  Do any platforms implement the standards completely and consistently however?
  - snupples 11y ago
    No, it's inherently impossible as it's a moving target. However it's important to strive toward that goal. It's part of the whole point of what makes the web successful. Once you give up and start developing for some particular platform you risk corrupting the space.
- silverlight 11y ago
  That's a fine thought, until Chrome adopts a new standard in Chrome v46, but half the Android population is still running Chrome v38. I have no problem with the forks. I have a problem with the fact that they will absolutely not be kept up to date. The article already mentions that new LG phones are being sold with a Chrome fork 4 versions behind the one on the newer LG phones. In time that gap is only going to widen. And that's just the shiny new features. There are constantly bugs (including security issues) being fixed. What about those?
- serve_yay 11y ago
  Hahaha, good one!
rblatz 11y ago
In theory you are correct, but we ran into an issue that only occurred on the iPhone 6+. Basically we were doing a lot of heavy JS and CSS transforms, and it caused the 6+ browser to crash, and if you tried again the actual phone would reboot. We could not recreate this any other version of the iPhone that we tested.
- bgun 11y ago
  No one is saying this doesn't happen on Apple devices, merely that issues like the one you describe happen tenfold (or more) on Android and seem to be escalating.
nobleach 11y ago
It depends on what your business is. The other reply says to develop toward standards, but that is in the hope that browsers will adhere to those standards. What we do is run serious analytics against our page views and see what customers are using. We see that iOS is the highest, and Samsung flavored android are the next highest. So, we cater to those devices. We do test for regressions on a few other devices, but not as heavily, since those are not what our customers are using.

snupples 11y ago

You should develop towards standards rather than a particular platform.

Xylakant 11y ago
Standards are nice and dandy, real-world-implementations all suffer from bugs, missing features or implement undefined behavior slightly different. So if you want to support an implementation, you need to test it. If there multiple versions of an implementation you want to support, you need to test them all. Any other approach is "it works on X, it might work on Y, but we're not actively supporting Y."
jaredsohn 11y ago
From a practical standpoint, don't you still need to test it against popular platforms though? (If you develop to the standard and a popular browser doesn't support the standards correctly as far as your users are concerned, it is your problem.)
awj 11y ago
If every browser vendor fully and correctly implemented a standard on their first try, you'd have an excellent point. As it is right now, even people that develop towards standards still have to choose between deviating from those standards to support a wider audience or sticking to the standards and turning away users.
- snupples 11y ago
  In the most general sense, deviating from standards does not support a wider audience.
bsg75 11y ago
Do any platforms implement the standards completely and consistently however?
- snupples 11y ago
  No, it's inherently impossible as it's a moving target. However it's important to strive toward that goal. It's part of the whole point of what makes the web successful. Once you give up and start developing for some particular platform you risk corrupting the space.
silverlight 11y ago
That's a fine thought, until Chrome adopts a new standard in Chrome v46, but half the Android population is still running Chrome v38. I have no problem with the forks. I have a problem with the fact that they will absolutely not be kept up to date. The article already mentions that new LG phones are being sold with a Chrome fork 4 versions behind the one on the newer LG phones. In time that gap is only going to widen. And that's just the shiny new features. There are constantly bugs (including security issues) being fixed. What about those?
serve_yay 11y ago
Hahaha, good one!

rblatz 11y ago

In theory you are correct, but we ran into an issue that only occurred on the iPhone 6+. Basically we were doing a lot of heavy JS and CSS transforms, and it caused the 6+ browser to crash, and if you tried again the actual phone would reboot. We could not recreate this any other version of the iPhone that we tested.

bgun 11y ago
No one is saying this doesn't happen on Apple devices, merely that issues like the one you describe happen tenfold (or more) on Android and seem to be escalating.

nobleach 11y ago

It depends on what your business is. The other reply says to develop toward standards, but that is in the hope that browsers will adhere to those standards. What we do is run serious analytics against our page views and see what customers are using. We see that iOS is the highest, and Samsung flavored android are the next highest. So, we cater to those devices. We do test for regressions on a few other devices, but not as heavily, since those are not what our customers are using.