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.
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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.