A VC: Fragmentation | Hacker News Reader

A VC: Fragmentation

avc.com

19 pointsbjonathan5 comments

What a load of crap. Represented there are 3 render engines, across however many browsers. Libraries like jquery and compass are making cross browser development easier by the day. Different screen resolutions don't matter - you consider only mobile and desktop, and target minimum resolutions per each. CSS3 is making it even easier to handle different screen sizes without much effort.

I can set my user agent to anything I want, but that doesn't increase fragmentation. As someone who has been developing web apps for over a decade, it's getting easier by the day. Browser features are converging. It's not the wild west where each browser is trying to starve out competitors with proprietary mutually exclusive features.

A large number of user agents does not mean growing fragmentation in browser targets.

I agree with cheald on this. Fragmentation is only a problem if it actually leads to additional difficulty of development for those platforms. And the irony of the current situation is that the "fragmentation" we're seeing now is likely responsible for the fact that web development is "easier by the day."

The worst situation, which we had back in the late 90s, was increasing domination by one player intent on subverting standards to push its own platform. Then innovative platforms get pushed aside for expediency's sake. Wrenching the web back from Microsoft resulted in many years of difficulty, but now we're in a situation where everyone, even Microsoft, must adhere to standards or be left behind. The very best outcome for web users will be for the market to stay as "fragmented" as possible, so everyone will be forced to stick with standards, and nobody ever gains a large share that can be used as a lever to distort the market.

I'd like to argue that fragmentation, in fact, is a positive move forwards, for web development. Ideally, the market becomes fragmented enough, such that developers are no longer targeting platforms, render engines, or screen sizes, but are instead, forced to (through lack of resources to QA on all the disparate environments) throw up their hands and simply develop for common standards.

This transition will, ideally, have a feedback effect in that any browser that wishes to see market uptake, will need to closely mirror the appropriate standards, instead of trying to get too far ahead of them.

The net effect should be an _easier_ world in which to write web applications - as you can now be reasonably certain that your web application will run properly on all platforms.

I see diversity in the chart not fragmentation. It's a good thing that users are able to consume and interact with avc.com using the browser/os of their choice. I think Jeffery Zeldman and other web standards wonks would look at that chart and be proud.

Given his previous throwdown for Android, and because he doesn't come to a point about the challenges facing web developers, I interpret it as a swipe against the existence of fragmentation as a developer challenge on Android.

I sympathize with feeling like one has to prove a negative (rhetorically, it's a bit like being a Mac user in the 90s and always hearing "there's no software for it!"), but this is a thin argument either way. As Android's growth ramps up, it'll be lucky to have as small a set of differentiated targets as there are major browsers, or as deep a bench of strategies to cope with them.

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