For consumers, this is fine, but for IT this is a nightmare. I really don't want to come into work and find all of the machines updated and none of the software working.
If workarounds for buggy web services become more painful, there will be more pressure on those vendors to fix their software.
It's not that the pain isn't real, but the pain already exists and you can either choose a future where more browsers are better leading to more web services being less buggy or a future where browsers stagnate because web services are buggy and their vendors unwilling to fix them.
As a vendor you need to provide compatibility with old outdated browsers because enteprise doesn't want to upgrade because that would break a number of other applications they use. The functional gap between something like IE6 (which is still an enteprise standard in a lot of places) and a modern browser is so wide that you almost end up creating two separate versions of the frontend. And eventually some vendors figure that it's not even worth supporting the modern browsers, so they don't. And so it goes...
I now honestly believe that web browser is a bad platform for entererise apps.
> I now honestly believe that web browser is a bad platform for entererise apps.
Yeah, I am starting to think the same thing. I expect that we might have to go to a traditional application with web services (ala iTunes or maybe TurboTax-like).
At this point that basically means they just need to test against multiple browsers and don't rely on bugs.
Browsers also need to be extra careful about maintaining backwards compatibility. The compatibility rule of thumb I've heard (I think the context was ES5) is that if more than two of the major browsers support a feature or bug then future versions must be backwards compatible.
In the end it should be better for everyone (well, except for browsers that try to lock-in users with non-standard features/bugs, but I think those days are mostly behind us)