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I generally disagree with the article, but I was also making web apps ten years ago. Trying to write them for IE, Firefox, and Safari.... It was hell. IE was th

I generally disagree with the article, but I was also making web apps ten years ago. Trying to write them for IE, Firefox, and Safari.... It was hell. IE was the centerpiece of it because it was the dominant browser by market share. Now-a-days, I think Chrome was the new IE or rather causing the same type of problems IE created. Why? Developers don't test other browsers by and large. They are choosing to support Chrome, and implement non-standard APIs, because they see it is the browser they use. IE got us into trouble because of its market position, and because it fixed a lot of broken code (so when someone went to use another browser they though the other browser was broken NOT IE). Developers made apps which worked only for IE and not other browsers; most of the time by accident (as their app WAS broken) but still... Now with Chrome, I see this happening again. Websites/web-apps are needlessly broken in Firefox because the devs simply didn't even try it. Maybe, I'm wrong, I fucking hope I'm wrong, but it feels like the shit winds are getting ready to pick up again...

jordanthoms 11y ago
The big difference is that both Chrome and Firefox update very regularly, and a high percentage of users keep at least reasonably up to date - the biggest issue was really that IE had massive market share and was also not updated. We use a lot of chrome-specific APIs, and they allow us to achieve things that otherwise we couldn't (e.g OCR running in the browser through Native Client with no performance penalty vs a native binary). We're often implementing improvements with APIs that are a few weeks or months old. We do test on other browsers though and make sure things either degrade cleanly or we provide an alternative implementation.