> You have to write to your customers. If your customers are the lowest common denominator I would advice rethinking your business plan.
The most popular operating system in the world today is Windows XP, and the most popular browser on Windows XP is Internet Explorer. If you can afford to rule out anyone using IE below version 9, I envy you your business plan, but most of us can't.
It is bad enough that Microsoft creates this problem for us for unrelated commercial reasons. There is no need for the Firefox and Chrome teams to sink to the same level.
> People around here think it is a perfectly viable business plan to write to only iOS
People around here think a lot of things are perfectly viable business plans. Most of them will fail, often because they overlooked some obvious, common sense test they should have considered on day one but didn't.
> The idea that we have to write to the lowest common denominator is the one aspect of web development that I wish would go away. You don't have to, you choose to.
We all wish it would go away, but on my planet the web developer is rarely in a position to determine the requirements of a job for a paying client, nor to dictate the browsing software to be used by the general public. If you are one of the lucky ones, please understand that you in a very small niche. Somehow I doubt the guys working hard on all these new features for Firefox and Chrome and Safari want their work to be useful to only a tiny fraction of the web-using world.
I'm with you. FWIW, I had the option of jumping ship from the web development industry, and took it because of stuff like this. The build-test-rebuild-testagain-fix-tweak-test cycle for web development is horrible, and aggravating, and life's too short to deal with that kind of nonsense.
Now there are multiple browsers that are going to modify their rendering engines every few months. Yeah, fuck everything about that. I no longer give even two turds' worth of a care what browsers a particular project works in, as long as it works for me. This is just stupid.
The most popular operating system in the world today is Windows XP, and the most popular browser on Windows XP is Internet Explorer. If you can afford to rule out anyone using IE below version 9, I envy you your business plan, but most of us can't.
It is bad enough that Microsoft creates this problem for us for unrelated commercial reasons. There is no need for the Firefox and Chrome teams to sink to the same level.
> People around here think it is a perfectly viable business plan to write to only iOS
People around here think a lot of things are perfectly viable business plans. Most of them will fail, often because they overlooked some obvious, common sense test they should have considered on day one but didn't.
> The idea that we have to write to the lowest common denominator is the one aspect of web development that I wish would go away. You don't have to, you choose to.
We all wish it would go away, but on my planet the web developer is rarely in a position to determine the requirements of a job for a paying client, nor to dictate the browsing software to be used by the general public. If you are one of the lucky ones, please understand that you in a very small niche. Somehow I doubt the guys working hard on all these new features for Firefox and Chrome and Safari want their work to be useful to only a tiny fraction of the web-using world.