Comment by hungryhobbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hungryhobbit | Hacker News Reader

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>Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.

This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, much like how many think standards groups (e.g. W3C) decide how the browsers works.

(Standards groups can invent the best feature ever for the Web ... and it won't matter in the slightest if browser makers don't adopt it. ALL STANDARDS ARE SET BY BROWSER MAKERS ... the standards bodies are just the mechanism they use to do it.)

Likewise, the browser a web developer user uses is already set for them. EVERY web dev (except those at companies big enough to care about the "long tail" of browsers) uses one browser: the most popular one.

It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"

> This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding

No, it doesn't. I wasn't talking about web standards bodies. I'm talking about the practical reality of the web as a platform that is resilient against slight differences between browsers. Such resilience can only come from developers who understand that their job is to target the web and not just Chrome.

It is you who misunderstands:

> It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"

You are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome Platform for the convenience of web developers. Sure we can have other browsers, so long as they're perfectly compatible with Chrome's quirks. This is precisely what it means for the web to be the Chrome Platform, not the open web. We've already reached the point where it's assumed that Chrome is perfect and anything that deviates from Chrome is someone else's bug. It's sad.

I'm not arguing anything, I'm telling you what reality is.

The reality is that 99% of web developers all use the exact same browser, and it isn't Chrome or IE or any one browser its "whatever is the most popular browser currently" (really it's "most popular for your customers but 99% of companies have customers who use the same browsers as everyone else).

You can bury your head in the sand and say "oh the mean web developers aren't using my pet browser" ... but it won't change the fact that no one wants to test on an unpopular browser, then test again on a popular one: EVERYONE is going to test their site with the browser most likely to use that site.

Late to reply, but for the sake of posterity:

You are correct that many developers complain about Safari because they are lazy little shits who would much prefer the whole world be forced to change which browser they use in order to make their jobs a bit easier.

Nobody is saying anyone needs to test on an unpopular browser. Safari on iOS is, by the numbers, very popular.

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