this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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I'm an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn't a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven't had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I've personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven't gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:
The other browsers don't implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections. Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap. Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about "Firefox specific bugs" because they haven't implemented non standard APIs.
Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they've caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there's a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it's version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you're in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
Thank you for this explanation! I was so confused by people saying Firefox causes problems because my experience and AFAIK, Firefox adheres to standards the most. I always had the easiest time with Firefox and always built sites using Firefox then tricks to make other browsers work the same. Maybe it's because as a designer/dev I have always been more particular about sticking to standards.
sigh And here I thought after how many decades of standards, we would be past this shit by now. <insert rant about monopolising big corps forcing their moneygrubbing crap on people>