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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

> Modern mobile networks work far better if you buy all the gear from one company

The web is a lot easier to build for if you only support one browser! /s

This is for the carrier side of the equation. Even if a carrier uses only one vendor for all their cell tower RAN equipment, they would need to support whatever phones end-users use e.g. Samsung/Apple/etc. It's more like Netflix deciding they'll use Apache on x86 for all their web servers but still accepting standard HTTP connections from Firefox/Safari/Edge/Chrome/etc on x86/ARM/etc as user agents. This is more sensible than you portray and is common in other industries so not sure why OP would think mobile networks are an exception to this rule.

I don't understand the /s tag here. Both statements are categorically true; These facts just have consequences we don't like, and somehow must go out of our way to counteract if we care about our ideals.

No, they aren’t “categorically true”. Anyone who has worked with big vendors know they manage to fuck up fully vertically integrated protocols.

Vendors skipping standards and using proprietary stuff allows them to get way to sloppy and stuff has a habit of becoming unstable or hard to debug.

My statement, at least, is categorically untrue. I had the displeasure of building for the web in the time before Firefox became mainstream. IE6 was essentially the only option. And it sucked! No competition meant bugs didn't get fixed. The web was IE and Microsoft couldn't give a flying fuck whether it followed the standard let alone behaved consistently even between page loads of the same site.

But no matter how good or bad a particular browser is, you still have less work to do if you only care about users on a single browser (compared to that browser _and_ other browsers). Even if the other N-1 browsers have no quirks relative to the first one, that's still more testing to do and support to give. It's objectively easier to target fewer platforms, which is why you see the laziest web developers put up warnings (or even block requests) for clients with the "wrong" User-Agent strings.

Interop ensures healthy competition can feasibly exist.

You're preaching to the choir, but I'm saying this is not the default tendency and it requires active effort to create that kind of ecosystem.

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