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Comment by ilyt | Hacker News Reader

Sure but Wine is a tool where if 90% of the stuff user wants to run in it works, it's still great. Say if you use it for gaming you can play most of the games and only boot into windows every few months once you hit one you can't.

But that's not how you use web. If 90% of the pages worked in browser I wouldn't use that browser, ever, because chances are I'd hit one that didn't at least once every few days.

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It depends on the types of bugs and inconsistencies that show up in practice. If a page (or worse, the whole browser) crashes, that's a problem. If a column of ads doesn't scale right and gets bumped down to become its own lonely row below the main content, that's kind of ugly but almost a feature.

I've seen pages where buttons outright not worked. In firefox.

> But that's not how you use web. If 90% of the pages worked in browser I wouldn't use that browser, ever, because chances are I'd hit one that didn't at least once every few days.

This is a fact that Microsoft understood and pushed when they tried to get people to build pages for IE instead of working across both Navigator and IE.

I come across a variety of sites that show unusual behaviour every day. And as others pointed out, the page is mostly degraded, not unusable.

There are many grievances when using the web today, some are down to the lack of a set CSS spec. Others due to the complete and utter disregard for browser compatibility. I'm not going to tackle the monopoly of Chrome as a browser. However, there are a number of specific uses of this collection of ever changing specs and implementations that eventually lead to page-breakage in every new browser release.

The web is complex to tackle because everyone seems to think that they've a better idea of what a page is. Some of it is fair, some of it unfair. Nevertheless I would take this approach any day.

> If 90% of the pages worked in browser I wouldn't use that browser, ever

They don't care.

Nor should they. If 100% Chrome compatibility is the only goal that matters for someone ... then there is Chrome for them.

I completely agree. The people advocating for this type of development style are in another universe. Web is incredibly fragile.

There's a vast difference between a page being degraded by all browsers in a consistent manner per W3C specs (especially the critical parts of a webpage such as JS execution or malformed HTML) vs the damn thing breaking in such a unique way that the web devs will never be able to fix the page for this new browser while getting it to work the same for others. Worst case would be security is compromised and that is a very long list of things to implement in both the HTTP layer and browser behavior before you even get started trying to render a page.

Web devs shouldn't be fixing pages for individual browsers but instead using features conservatively and degrading gracefully where features are not available. Browser bugs shuld be fixed in the browser.

And for 99% of websites security doesn't matter at all because it's just a one-off visit to read an article or look at some funny pictures without any user account.

Web browsers tend to degrade a webpage rather than fail to load it. Given that every day using Chrome I'll come across a website that is having issues with rendering, it should be acceptable.

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