
The Double Edged Sword of the Web - macandcheese
https://ponyfoo.com/articles/double-edged-sword-web?
======
exceptione
I wish I could downvote this article. It is from a developer who is married
with Google Chrome and who is trying to tell us that other browsers are stupid
because they don't have the same bugs as Chrome does.

It's especially unnerving for me as a firefox user since these days I come
across a lot more sites that make stupid mistakes that just works fine in
their Chrome.

This mindset makes me angry. The same applies when developers think that if
your browser blocks google tracking it is ok to just fuck up the whole
website.

The web should be

\- progressive

\- standards-compliant.

Some years ago this was widely believed to be right way forward. Nowadays it
seems that developers think that Chrome on OS X is the world we all should
live in.

Loosely related: I am not going to switch to Chrome. I would never use a
browser from an Ad Company like Google, as I don't trust them at all.

~~~
morkro
I have to agree on this one. I have lots of respect for Nicolás and his work,
but I think this article shows a little bit of arrogance towards users who
don't use Chrome as their primary user.

On top of that he disabled accessibility on Firefox entirely in favour of
design preferences. Many developer might not care, but it's an attitude which
needs to stop.

~~~
cptskippy
It's more than a little arrogance, it's a superiority complex. My jaw dropped
when I read the following because it speaks volumes about his mindset.

> As such, visitors are mostly privileged web developers using macOS and
> Google Chrome.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Meet the new bullies. Same as the old bullies.

There's a lot of this going on in the tech community. Far cry from when
<geeks|nerds|smart people> got pushed around... Now they're (we? I hope I'm
not like this) the ones doing the pushing.

~~~
digi_owl
Meh. The nerds still get pushed around. Most web devs these days are not nerds
in any traditional sense. Web dev has long since left the computer labs and
entered the art and media departments. And with it has come the every
increasing use of Apple products in web dev circles.

~~~
wmichelin
I'm not an artist, I came from a Computer Science background, and I still use
Apple products. I don't think using Linux as a desktop environment is
enjoyable. I don't get the Apple hate.

~~~
cptskippy
It's highly contextual. Macs gained a lot of popularity with OSX because of
it's BSD underpinnings that allowed developers to go mobile and disconnected
without having to run Linux Desktops. However Macs have always been popular
with designers, artists, and creative nontechnical users because of their
simplicity and intuitiveness.

A lot of the hate comes from having to deal with the later group, not the
former.

~~~
s_kilk
And, crucially, OSX is the only real option for running both unixy programs
and high-grade commercial software such as the Adobe Suite on the same machine
without dual-booting

~~~
WorldMaker
Define "real". Cygwin has been an option on Windows for a long time. It has
its complications and issues, but isn't exactly "fake".

Besides that, Windows 10's Bash on Ubuntu on Windows is a very interesting
step in this direction. It's going to increasingly be a "real" option.

ETA: Also, Virtual Machines and Remote Login are blurry edges of "real" that
aren't dual-booting.

~~~
cptskippy
How about not half baked, incomplete, or restricted?

Lets be honest, Cygwin is a joke if you're doing *nix development.

Windows 10's Bash on Ubuntu is months old, we're talking historically on the
order of 5-10 years.

VMs and remote systems are fraught with compromises.

------
smoyer
"Who is correct isn’t important. What should be important is that browsers put
consistency across themselves first."

 __No way __\- The only way we 'll end up with compatibility across browsers
is to have unambiguous (as much as possible) specifications that define how
they should behave and for browser users to insist their browser vendor aligns
with the standard. I lived through that past and have no desire to repeat it.

If you think about it from a network theory perspective, each of the browsers
is only trying to be compatible with one other party (the specification) in
this mode. The alternative is that each browser is trying to be compatible
with "n - 1" other parties where n is the number of browsers in the pool. And
the total effort is the classic (n * (n - 1)) / 2 "connections", so the
browser industry would be wasting a lot of effort.

Worse yet, there's no single release point. Consider that browser A makes
changes to be compatible with browser B (because that behavior seems correct
compared to browser C). Unbeknownst to them, browser B is about to change
their behavior to be compatible with browser C. Now the A-team's work is
either wasted or yet another incompatibility.

Browser-focused standards are the best thing that happened to the web in the
last 10+ years.

\- [http://caniuse.com/](http://caniuse.com/)

\- [http://html5readiness.com/](http://html5readiness.com/) (now a bit dated)

~~~
gnud
"Who is correct isn’t important. What should be important is that browsers put
consistency across themselves first."

I saw that quote too, and thought that's a weird way to look at it. The other
way to look at it, which makes quite a lot more sense to me, is that Chrome is
creating the inconsistency by being flat out wrong...

------
SNvD7vEJ
Weird layout.

The article text on the far left, and the side column on the far right with a
LOT of white space between. The white space in the middle is as wide as the
article text itself.

BTW, I'm on a 2560 width screen, using Firefox.

And this is what it looks like:

[http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png](http://i.imgur.com/bWwMuNH.png)

If this is considered good web design, I'm going back to Lynx ...

~~~
bhauer
It's even more weird on a 40 inch 4K monitor. But it's tuned for a _different_
kind of privileged web developer. The specific privilege that you and I are
bringing (large, high resolution displays) evidently makes us not the target
audience.

Jokes aside, virtually no sites are tuned for large displays, and there's
widespread consensus that you shouldn't simply use the full width of the
window for text because lines would be too wide to read comfortably. Still, I
think my expectation is that most sites just end up centered within large
windows.

The layout seen here, with columns anchored on the left and right sides, is
unfamiliar and looks weird to my eye as well.

~~~
SNvD7vEJ
I don't know about the "widespread consensus", but forcing people to manually
resizing their browser window to fit whatever they currently are reading is
bad design in my book.

Most good sites, I think, (strangely not Hacker News though) have a width
limiting, centered layout which makes it easy to read and browse.

~~~
WorldMaker
I'll be that odd person to point out that width limiting in a world of
widescreens is a strange use of space. I'd personally like to see more love
put into CSS3 multi-column support and gentle horizontal scrolling (a standard
spec ready equivalent to -ms-scroll-translation, perhaps). I get the feeling
I'm in a not very vocal minority of people that currently thinks horizontal
scrolling could be a useful answer for an easier to read web on widescreen
displays.

I find it strange how many sites seem to be more horizontal gutters than
content space these days due their fixed width containers recreating a square
virtual monitor inside my widescreen monitor. Admittedly it is good for ad
space, I guess, because those gutters can be and often are filled with plenty
of ads.

------
fhood
I might be crazy, but I think that the dotted version of the colored lines
(from Firefox/Safari) looked better than the dashed ones he was so insistent
on achieving.

~~~
onli
Not crazy, I though the same, maybe apart from how the border ends with too
much whitespace. But we would have to see how it looks in the overall design
to properly judge that.

------
gcb0
title should be "the hypocrisy of the so called web developers"

let's see. they blatantly ignore most browsers to focus on the one they use.
and then cames up with excuses ("its over 50% of my visitors") just like IE6.

then they get confortable with things that browser does that are proprietary,
just like with IE6.

then they blame all the other browsers in the word for not dropping everything
else and go imitate the proprietary behaviour. they even points out that
chrome is the only one not following the standard, and still gets praised,
just like IE6.

"What should be important is that browsers put consistency across themselves
first" is what they say on the article about other browsers not ignoring
standards and following the proprietary browser they like.

google arrogance over standards and this developer lack of memory and
abundance of hypocrisy will give us IE6 all over again.

damn you all

------
mstade
I don't necessarily agree with the article as a whole, but I do like this bit
very much:

> Humans will seldom use different browsers. Unless there are gross
> differences across browsers, like using entirely different sets of font
> faces, humans are not going to care. We need to learn to let go.

Sometimes, the cost/benefit calculation comes out so squarely in the "let's
just not" column that even though it may feel _wrong_ to discriminate so
blatantly, the economics are just not there. Important to consider whether
this discrimination amounts to technical debt which proves costly over time,
or whether they are in fact tailored experiences that makes sense to keep
around. In any event I agree with the authors sentiment, that chasing the
identical look everywhere unicorn often just isn't worth the bother.

------
dasil003
The bugs we have to deal with today are a gift from god compared to the bugs
we had to deal with 15 years ago when CSS was just getting traction and then
we went through 7-8 years of stagnation due to Microsoft trying to leverage
their position to hold back the web. Frustrating as multiple engines is to
deal with, it's a small price to pay for the benefits of a true open standard.
I've been burned enough by WONTFIX bugs in proprietary software (Adobe Flash
I'm looking at you) that I know which double-edged sword I'll put my weight
behind.

------
HugoDaniel
The browser stats used as the foundation for the post is useless because he
does not state how many total users was the sample based and what time frame
was it taken at.

At the limit of this kind of "logic" I could equally say that 100% of google
search visitors use TorBrowser (out of 1: me in a very precise time frame).

