I've been doing web application development since the mid-90's... If you think browser discrimination is new, so are you. NN4 and IE4 were so different from each other it wasn't funny. And by the time IE6 was released it was a godsend. Four years later, it was crap... by the time MS finally picked up development there was far better.
Just the same, pushing to abandon anything before IE9 is a hard sell... but when your mobile users are crossing 40% of traffic, it's an easier thing to do. Mobile devices take more time than some older browsers... just the same, developing for them is easier.
But I think there is a difference. IE6 was so far away from the standard that you had real difficulty supporting both, and really couldn't embrace a lot of features other browsers supported well. This was of course by design, intended to keep us from moving away, but it was so rubbish that designers moved anyway.
IE9 in contrast is pretty decent. In fact it's perfectly fine for most sites. For me, it's Chrome that is now aggressively pushing its own agenda. It doesn't really concern itself with standards any more than IE did, but because it's open source, nobody really notices.
By the time IE6 landed, it had over 90% market share... I wasn't about to support edge cases that weren't in IE6 at the time... I do agree in principle though.
I think things are fragmenting a bit, but the core is at least more in line among browsers... after ES6/7 take hold a bit better it will be nice.
I really wish the browser vendors would chose to use UTF8 under the covers for JS strings, and simply fix string handling for characters > 2^16 instead of additional regex flags, and string methods. I think it would fix far more bugs in end user code than those it might create.
NN4 and IE4 were so different from each other it wasn't funny.
On the other hand, those differences are likely to be mostly cosmetic - this was a time when JavaScript was very little-used and pages were still mostly static with little in the way of style, so they were still quite usable across browsers despite looking different.
Now that pages are more "appified" there is far more than can break, because of the larger dependence on JavaScript and CSS.
As I said... web based applications... In other words, I had to interact with both models.. I created some simple box abstractions, but something as simple as a dynamic form (certain inputs visible based on others) was pretty much a pain, since you couldn't break a <form/> across multiple segments in NN4.
That doesn't even get into more complex interactions, or the flicker when making UI changes dynamically. For some things I simply re-wrote frame content client-side as it was faster with less "flicker" than trying to manipulate the DOM nodes.
Doing async stuff was interesting, post queues to frames, with the response wrapped similar to jsonp.
Comments
I've been doing web application development since the mid-90's... If you think browser discrimination is new, so are you. NN4 and IE4 were so different from each other it wasn't funny. And by the time IE6 was released it was a godsend. Four years later, it was crap... by the time MS finally picked up development there was far better.
Just the same, pushing to abandon anything before IE9 is a hard sell... but when your mobile users are crossing 40% of traffic, it's an easier thing to do. Mobile devices take more time than some older browsers... just the same, developing for them is easier.
But I think there is a difference. IE6 was so far away from the standard that you had real difficulty supporting both, and really couldn't embrace a lot of features other browsers supported well. This was of course by design, intended to keep us from moving away, but it was so rubbish that designers moved anyway.
IE9 in contrast is pretty decent. In fact it's perfectly fine for most sites. For me, it's Chrome that is now aggressively pushing its own agenda. It doesn't really concern itself with standards any more than IE did, but because it's open source, nobody really notices.
By the time IE6 landed, it had over 90% market share... I wasn't about to support edge cases that weren't in IE6 at the time... I do agree in principle though.
I think things are fragmenting a bit, but the core is at least more in line among browsers... after ES6/7 take hold a bit better it will be nice.
I really wish the browser vendors would chose to use UTF8 under the covers for JS strings, and simply fix string handling for characters > 2^16 instead of additional regex flags, and string methods. I think it would fix far more bugs in end user code than those it might create.
NN4 and IE4 were so different from each other it wasn't funny.
On the other hand, those differences are likely to be mostly cosmetic - this was a time when JavaScript was very little-used and pages were still mostly static with little in the way of style, so they were still quite usable across browsers despite looking different.
Now that pages are more "appified" there is far more than can break, because of the larger dependence on JavaScript and CSS.
As I said... web based applications... In other words, I had to interact with both models.. I created some simple box abstractions, but something as simple as a dynamic form (certain inputs visible based on others) was pretty much a pain, since you couldn't break a <form/> across multiple segments in NN4.
That doesn't even get into more complex interactions, or the flicker when making UI changes dynamically. For some things I simply re-wrote frame content client-side as it was faster with less "flicker" than trying to manipulate the DOM nodes.
Doing async stuff was interesting, post queues to frames, with the response wrapped similar to jsonp.
I don't miss those days at all...