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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

>So what happens when someone introduces a new whiz bang css feature that Chrome handles badly? Something you might, as a developer, want to disable in Chrome, but leave in for everything else? Or any other browser since they're all prone to introducing flakey implementations of CSS sometimes.

>All this means is we'll have to go back to the old ways of sniffing out browsers, and I fail to see how that's better.

The situation is no different just now, because -webkit- applies to Safari, Opera and many mobile browsers, not just Chrome. :/

>Nor do I look forward to a deluge of websites prompting me to fiddle with a config to "get the full experience". Most web developers have very little sway when marketing or clients demand certain things, and this is likely to be something they demand.

"Use a modern browser [actually, Chrome] to get the full experience" is not an uncommon sight these days.

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I was being polite. I'm talking about IE specifically.

>"Use a modern browser [actually, Chrome] to get the full experience" is not an uncommon sight these days.

Yup, and it's sucky. It's no different to "this site is optimised for Internet Explorer".

>I was being polite. I'm talking about IE specifically.

Well, this won't help you here anyway. By the sounds of things, features won't be enabled by default until they're ready. Things currently aren't unprefixed until they're ready. The only way to avoid IE if the feature is unprefixed is UA sniffing.

No change.

>Yup, and it's sucky. It's no different to "this site is optimised for Internet Explorer".

It's quite different, actually. Chrome is just quick at implementing web standards, they aren't dictating things and people aren't relying on proprietary APIs.

Hardly. Having a site that has buggy coding which has been tweaked to look good in IE's buggy rendering is a far cry from "our site uses cutting edge web-standard features that your browser does not support, please use a more up to date browser for a better experience". Night and day different.

No different. Were you not around when IE was the "cutting edge" and had all the newest features?

I guess you don't remember Netscape.

Ugh, I remember that time, having exactly those arguments. IE having all sorts of non-standard features, so other browsers should probably copy its quirks/bugs also.

To answer your sort-of question, that time was overshadowed when it became obvious that IE6 (and later IE7) was the absolute worst choice. And that's a reputation Microsoft is still trying to clean, years later.

I do, quite well. Proprietary features are miles away from cutting edge web-standards. Being locked into only one browser that works correctly is very, very much different from being able to chose from among many modern browsers (in the typical case).

More so, as I said that particular problem was not nearly as bad as people targeting the rendering of their site to the particular quirks of one particular browser. That was horrible, but it's not even remotely the same problem we face today.

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