I disagree. The marginalising, discriminatory effects of web developers using the state of the art is critical to moving web technology forward as quickly as possible. By penalising users who use antiquated browsers or computing devices, it helps create pressure and demand for:
a) more affordable modern computing devices
b) more intelligent auto-updating browsing software
c) more educated and engaged consumers
Mollycoddling stragglers only hurts everybody in the long run.
Then let's just dispense with the silly idea of having open standards. The idea was to allow graceful degradation. But if you're just going to block out people, just dump the baggage of HTML and CSS and truly move everything forward.
I'm not really sure how the rest of your points follow, however. Modern browser features have led to higher battery consumption on the whole. The number of sites that can peg a CPU core is staggering (and naturally terrible for batter life). The motivating factor for auto-updating browsers is to deal with security matters, not jamming features consumers aren't really asking for down the pipe. No one really needs drop shadows badly enough to risk instability every 6 weeks. And I'm not sure how constantly trying to get people to download Chrome makes them either more educated or engaged. It strikes me to be the opposite.
I'd like to mention that there's a whole class of HTTP clients that aren't end user browsers that get impacted by this sort of thing. It kinda sucks having to fire up a hefty PhantomJS or SlimerJS process because the standard HTTP clients for whatever language of choice can't do anything meaningful with certain sites any longer.
The motivating factor for auto-updating browsers is to deal with security matters, not jamming features consumers aren't really asking for down the pipe.
Absolutely. I don't think anyone would disagree to updates for fixing memory leaks, buffer overflows, and similar security-related bugs. But when they come with disruptive changes including removal of valuable features and increased system requirements, it becomes more of a dilemma and in some ways almost feels like they're using security as an excuse, a "tool of obedience" to pull all the rest of the unwanted changes along too.
To me, the whole "we must move the Web forward" notion (I've heard it far more recently than before) is increasingly looking more like change for the sake of change; an indication that Web technology is reaching a saturation point - progress is outpacing demand - for a lot of use cases, and hence the stronger attempts to promote newer technologies that are adding more complexity while yielding diminishing returns.
The increasing browser requirements for websites is not unlike that of increasing hardware requirements for software - the average user probably doesn't require anywhere near a machine as powerful as the ones today to serve their needs (mostly email and realtime chat, watching videos, reading webpages, etc.), but is basically forced into upgrading due to newer versions of software requiring more resources than before. (The machine I'm using is currently ~6 years old, and it still serves my needs just fine.) This "progress" is arguably beneficial for the economy of those in the business, but it also creates enormous amounts of waste for everyone else, and I don't think it's sustainable either.
"Moving the web forward" has always been the push of content designers to have more control over what happens on the user's machine; to control the exact display and interaction. Designers always wanted the power of flash -- full audio/video/interaction control.
Modern browser features have, like all change in the world, opened up some potentially problematic paths. But your frustration is misguided. Be upset with the people/sites that abandon standards or suck up processing power for an article.
The idea of the Web as it was sold to many of us was that it allowed for cross-platform access without having to deal with hardware requirements or DLL hell. The best part, was it was completely open and you didn't need to constantly upgrade because the technology degraded. Nowadays, if you run a browser older than 6 weeks old, you're treated with utter disdain by a non-insignificant portion of web developers. We've done a complete about-face on this one.
It also appears since new APIs are constantly being made available that devs are in a constant state of learning how to use them. While I appreciate that eventually some of this solidifies and we're better off for it, in practice a portion of the user experience always suffers. And as mentioned, this becomes really bothersome when this comes at the expense of battery life. If everything is to become a web app, and I have N tabs running, then I have N different opportunities for a web site to completely drain my battery. In practice, there's usually more than one site responsible.
And then there's the fun matter where auto-updating browsers sometimes just don't work. And since the update occurs silently, it can take a while to figure out that's what happened and that the failure isn't related to something else. Chrome 36 simply didn't work for me, so I had to change browsers until Chrome 37 rolled out.
For what it's worth, I've spent close to five years working on a Web Consistency Testing service, where we've tested millions of unique pages across tens of thousands of sites. I understand the quirks of browsers better than many. I've measured the performance and memory impact of new browser releases. I've had to debug quite a few customer issues. So, while a large part of my frustration is certainly personal, I'm also coming at this having looked at actual data.
Right. And that ties back into my original comment. If we want the Web to be something different and feel constrained in supporting what it was originally intended to be, we may as well make a clean break.
Modern browser features have led to higher battery consumption on the whole. The number of sites that can peg a CPU core is staggering
If people are having consistently poor mobile experiences because of poor battery optimisation across websites, that should create market demand for smarter devices/mobile browsers, better development tools and modern standards etc., right?
I'm not sure how constantly trying to get people to download Chrome makes them either more educated or engaged. It strikes me to be the opposite.
Well of course. When Google nags people to download Chrome, they're advertising their own services and fostering ecosystem lock-in. It might technically equate to a public service if their primary target market is out-of-date IE users, but that's incidental. It's an entirely different issue to what's at discussion here. Regardless, it does at least raise awareness of browser choice and habituate people to such (to users such as us) very basic actions as downloading, installing and trying out alternative software programs.
If people are having consistently poor mobile experiences because of poor battery optimisation across websites, that should create market demand for smarter devices/mobile browsers, better development tools and modern standards etc., right?
Well, my point is these problems are created by "converting" what would traditionally have been static content into dynamic. I'm not sure there will ever be a way to make that as efficient as static. Creating a problem and then fixing it doesn't mean you've actually advanced anything. But I suppose you're right in that it'll create demand for devices with longer battery life, if not in a roundabout way. There are probably easier ways to achieve that.
Hands down the most common case I come across is constant DOM changes without any growth cap using something like a circular buffer. Eventually the browser just churns doing constant GC. Travis CI was a big example of this, but the huge set of blog widgets out there are typical culprits as well. I'm not sure how new hardware could possibly address that.
that should create market demand for smarter devices/mobile browsers, better development tools and modern standards etc., right?
Web standards are not really about efficiency of rendering, and never will be. Hence 'cloud rendering' in Opera Mini. The minimum system requirements to browse the web are only going to increase.
Comments
I disagree. The marginalising, discriminatory effects of web developers using the state of the art is critical to moving web technology forward as quickly as possible. By penalising users who use antiquated browsers or computing devices, it helps create pressure and demand for:
a) more affordable modern computing devices b) more intelligent auto-updating browsing software c) more educated and engaged consumers
Mollycoddling stragglers only hurts everybody in the long run.
Then let's just dispense with the silly idea of having open standards. The idea was to allow graceful degradation. But if you're just going to block out people, just dump the baggage of HTML and CSS and truly move everything forward.
I'm not really sure how the rest of your points follow, however. Modern browser features have led to higher battery consumption on the whole. The number of sites that can peg a CPU core is staggering (and naturally terrible for batter life). The motivating factor for auto-updating browsers is to deal with security matters, not jamming features consumers aren't really asking for down the pipe. No one really needs drop shadows badly enough to risk instability every 6 weeks. And I'm not sure how constantly trying to get people to download Chrome makes them either more educated or engaged. It strikes me to be the opposite.
I'd like to mention that there's a whole class of HTTP clients that aren't end user browsers that get impacted by this sort of thing. It kinda sucks having to fire up a hefty PhantomJS or SlimerJS process because the standard HTTP clients for whatever language of choice can't do anything meaningful with certain sites any longer.
The motivating factor for auto-updating browsers is to deal with security matters, not jamming features consumers aren't really asking for down the pipe.
Absolutely. I don't think anyone would disagree to updates for fixing memory leaks, buffer overflows, and similar security-related bugs. But when they come with disruptive changes including removal of valuable features and increased system requirements, it becomes more of a dilemma and in some ways almost feels like they're using security as an excuse, a "tool of obedience" to pull all the rest of the unwanted changes along too.
To me, the whole "we must move the Web forward" notion (I've heard it far more recently than before) is increasingly looking more like change for the sake of change; an indication that Web technology is reaching a saturation point - progress is outpacing demand - for a lot of use cases, and hence the stronger attempts to promote newer technologies that are adding more complexity while yielding diminishing returns.
The increasing browser requirements for websites is not unlike that of increasing hardware requirements for software - the average user probably doesn't require anywhere near a machine as powerful as the ones today to serve their needs (mostly email and realtime chat, watching videos, reading webpages, etc.), but is basically forced into upgrading due to newer versions of software requiring more resources than before. (The machine I'm using is currently ~6 years old, and it still serves my needs just fine.) This "progress" is arguably beneficial for the economy of those in the business, but it also creates enormous amounts of waste for everyone else, and I don't think it's sustainable either.
"Moving the web forward" has always been the push of content designers to have more control over what happens on the user's machine; to control the exact display and interaction. Designers always wanted the power of flash -- full audio/video/interaction control.
Modern browser features have, like all change in the world, opened up some potentially problematic paths. But your frustration is misguided. Be upset with the people/sites that abandon standards or suck up processing power for an article.
I'm curious what prompts this frustration?
The idea of the Web as it was sold to many of us was that it allowed for cross-platform access without having to deal with hardware requirements or DLL hell. The best part, was it was completely open and you didn't need to constantly upgrade because the technology degraded. Nowadays, if you run a browser older than 6 weeks old, you're treated with utter disdain by a non-insignificant portion of web developers. We've done a complete about-face on this one.
It also appears since new APIs are constantly being made available that devs are in a constant state of learning how to use them. While I appreciate that eventually some of this solidifies and we're better off for it, in practice a portion of the user experience always suffers. And as mentioned, this becomes really bothersome when this comes at the expense of battery life. If everything is to become a web app, and I have N tabs running, then I have N different opportunities for a web site to completely drain my battery. In practice, there's usually more than one site responsible.
And then there's the fun matter where auto-updating browsers sometimes just don't work. And since the update occurs silently, it can take a while to figure out that's what happened and that the failure isn't related to something else. Chrome 36 simply didn't work for me, so I had to change browsers until Chrome 37 rolled out.
For what it's worth, I've spent close to five years working on a Web Consistency Testing service, where we've tested millions of unique pages across tens of thousands of sites. I understand the quirks of browsers better than many. I've measured the performance and memory impact of new browser releases. I've had to debug quite a few customer issues. So, while a large part of my frustration is certainly personal, I'm also coming at this having looked at actual data.
This only happens because it was a broken idea to start with.
The web should be about interactive documents, not trying to bend it into a color version of VT100s.
Right. And that ties back into my original comment. If we want the Web to be something different and feel constrained in supporting what it was originally intended to be, we may as well make a clean break.
Modern browser features have led to higher battery consumption on the whole. The number of sites that can peg a CPU core is staggering
If people are having consistently poor mobile experiences because of poor battery optimisation across websites, that should create market demand for smarter devices/mobile browsers, better development tools and modern standards etc., right?
I'm not sure how constantly trying to get people to download Chrome makes them either more educated or engaged. It strikes me to be the opposite.
Well of course. When Google nags people to download Chrome, they're advertising their own services and fostering ecosystem lock-in. It might technically equate to a public service if their primary target market is out-of-date IE users, but that's incidental. It's an entirely different issue to what's at discussion here. Regardless, it does at least raise awareness of browser choice and habituate people to such (to users such as us) very basic actions as downloading, installing and trying out alternative software programs.
If people are having consistently poor mobile experiences because of poor battery optimisation across websites, that should create market demand for smarter devices/mobile browsers, better development tools and modern standards etc., right?
Well, my point is these problems are created by "converting" what would traditionally have been static content into dynamic. I'm not sure there will ever be a way to make that as efficient as static. Creating a problem and then fixing it doesn't mean you've actually advanced anything. But I suppose you're right in that it'll create demand for devices with longer battery life, if not in a roundabout way. There are probably easier ways to achieve that.
Hands down the most common case I come across is constant DOM changes without any growth cap using something like a circular buffer. Eventually the browser just churns doing constant GC. Travis CI was a big example of this, but the huge set of blog widgets out there are typical culprits as well. I'm not sure how new hardware could possibly address that.
Web standards are not really about efficiency of rendering, and never will be. Hence 'cloud rendering' in Opera Mini. The minimum system requirements to browse the web are only going to increase.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-con...
Ah, you mean the desktop we already enjoy!