Experience tells me this is not a huge problem and my personal opinion is that it won't become one - don't have any references though just IMO. What I mean to say is that basically if you're making a production level app, you just build it to work cross-browser that's the way it is, you rarely do things based on UA if you know what you're doing and opt for feature testing instead. Maybe some provide neat little extras if a browser has a specific feature like webgl, but you're going to make sure all functionality is provided for every browser so you hit the widest audience.
I find it hard to believe you get clients that think everyone uses Chrome, that's never happened to me. I've also rarely had a client ask for something to only work in a specific browser, the few exceptions have been making things work for IE6 or older browsers that were used internally by larger corps.
These are just my thoughts, discussion is welcomed :)
Well yes, I completely agree with you. That is what we should do. But each time I see more developers that leave production level apps like this. And not even small websites like http://absolutmexico.com (Has a fallback to other browsers but the developer consciously decided to not offer the same functionality for browsers other than Chrome, even after been pointed to a few plug ins that would do it for him); but also huge Frameworks, like Appian, which forces you to use IE for administration.
And there's another side of the story, in both of the above scenarios, the product/site where developed by Engineers and Web Developers. But each time, plug ins make it easier for "non-code-savy" people to implement (for example) effects on their websites that would be really complicated any other way; which is cool until the moment you notice most of those plug ins are poorly coded. The problem grows as this people sell themselves as web developers and usually charge (as freelancers) much less than the full implementation of the job would be worth. I know this happens a lot, and by a lot I mean that 85% of the independent projects I had this year were about fixing this websites or making them bigger.
I think the problem might be that, in general, we talk about all the marvels of the internet and our work with it that it just makes people want to jump in. We give tutorials, plug ins, API's, and any other tool that makes the job easier, without really pointing out all that should be needed to actually deploy to production.
Comments
Experience tells me this is not a huge problem and my personal opinion is that it won't become one - don't have any references though just IMO. What I mean to say is that basically if you're making a production level app, you just build it to work cross-browser that's the way it is, you rarely do things based on UA if you know what you're doing and opt for feature testing instead. Maybe some provide neat little extras if a browser has a specific feature like webgl, but you're going to make sure all functionality is provided for every browser so you hit the widest audience.
I find it hard to believe you get clients that think everyone uses Chrome, that's never happened to me. I've also rarely had a client ask for something to only work in a specific browser, the few exceptions have been making things work for IE6 or older browsers that were used internally by larger corps.
These are just my thoughts, discussion is welcomed :)
Well yes, I completely agree with you. That is what we should do. But each time I see more developers that leave production level apps like this. And not even small websites like http://absolutmexico.com (Has a fallback to other browsers but the developer consciously decided to not offer the same functionality for browsers other than Chrome, even after been pointed to a few plug ins that would do it for him); but also huge Frameworks, like Appian, which forces you to use IE for administration.
And there's another side of the story, in both of the above scenarios, the product/site where developed by Engineers and Web Developers. But each time, plug ins make it easier for "non-code-savy" people to implement (for example) effects on their websites that would be really complicated any other way; which is cool until the moment you notice most of those plug ins are poorly coded. The problem grows as this people sell themselves as web developers and usually charge (as freelancers) much less than the full implementation of the job would be worth. I know this happens a lot, and by a lot I mean that 85% of the independent projects I had this year were about fixing this websites or making them bigger.
I think the problem might be that, in general, we talk about all the marvels of the internet and our work with it that it just makes people want to jump in. We give tutorials, plug ins, API's, and any other tool that makes the job easier, without really pointing out all that should be needed to actually deploy to production.