Hacker News Reader

Comment by jongalloway2 | Hacker News Reader

As a Microsoft employee who works on conference presentations, works on hands on labs, etc., you can't win on this.

If I use Edge exclusively in screenshots, people assume it's not cross-browser, it's not cross-platform, Microsoft is out of touch with other developers, Microsoft's living in a bubble, etc.

If I use other browsers for screenshots, I get comments like this.

As @dangrossman replied, we all use whatever browser we want for day to day browsing.

As a professional web dev, I make a habit of cycling through the modern browsers because it's just a good practice. I was the annoying guy in my dev team (not Microsoft, a financial services company) in the early 2000's that tested everything in Firefox when everyone else just wanted to use IE6 all the time. I'm typing this in Edge now, last week was a Chrome week.

[please don't downvote the parent comment]

View on HN

A lifetime ago, I used to hock printers for HP (one of those guys in big box stores who would approach you in the printer aisle to ask if you needed help).

It wasn't just me, there were also Canon and Epson reps there. Being that we were all basically coworkers (as we had the same jobs), we were very jovial toward each other, but customers would often remark that we should be more hostile toward each other, usually in jest -- still it made me realize how little they understood our day to day jobs, and how little people consider pragmatism in their observances.

People's mental model of the world doesn't include principal-agent problems[1]. People with actual equity in competing businesses tend to be pretty rivalrous (e.g. owners of small independent restaurants on the same street); naively, if you don't see employees as anything more than extensions of those rivalrous owners, you'd expect them to behave the same. But instead, of course, "it's just a job."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

I do customer-facing sessions too (focusing on Azure and OSS stacks) and quite enjoy the stunned silence when I pop open an SSH session and use it for a demo in their Linux distro of choice ;)

Most people don't realize how things have changed/are changing on a daily basis.

Yep. Last month I was in Moscow for a conference keynote and a workshop. Running through demos the morning before, I spilled coffee on my Lenovo and fried some keys on the keyboard. Thought a bit, pulled out my MacBook Air, and had everything running in time for a keynote rehearsal that evening. Nice stress test of the cross-platform mindset, not quite as nice of a stress test for me though.

I hope you mentioned that at the keynote, or will in upcoming talks. That's a great story.

How about using different browsers for different screenshots?

I do that sometimes, but that's kind of weird too. If you're reading a tutorial that keeps flipping between browsers, it calls attention to the browser rather than what you're learning about. We do sometimes flip between browsers for conference demos - I try not to call attention to it - just use a few different browsers and people who notice that kind of thing will see it.

What next? Different operating systems? :) I suspect the guy just wants to get some work done.

I'm ok with whatever browser works for him, and I will choose whatever browser works for me if IE/Chrome/Firefox does not perform optimally to my own standards.

Not the parent poster, but if he were me: that can easily look inconsistent (and inconsistency is ugly), and it can also be more work (as you need to walk through whatever steps you planned many more times). And of course, if you do show multiple browsers, which ones? E.g. if you want to include both safari and IE, you need at least two platforms (more work). Firefox & chrome can be quite different across platforms when it comes to acceleration, so if that's a factor...

Perhaps one token screenshot to get the message across isn't a bad idea, especially if everything else is chrome - webdevs sometimes seem to think chrome is good enough for everyone, and if there are compat issues in modern sites, it tends to be due to chrome-specific design (IME, but I bet if you've got a particularly windows or apple focus things may be different).

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that everyone should do this. But, if you work at Microsoft, and you think that your choice of browsers is unfairly judged whether or not you use Chrome or Edge, then I'd do the following: Show the first screenshot in two browsers (Chrome and Edge), and then show the remaining screenshots in my browser of choice. Or, show the first screenshot in Edge (or Chrome), and then show the remaining screenshots in the other browser.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com