> Its a vast improvement for web developers who have to develop for 1 version of chrome versus 4 versions of ie, Its a vast improvement for web developers who get to use new functionality to deliver better experiences to their users, Its a vast improvement for users who get a faster, smoother, more featureful web experience.
It would be a vast improvement if any of those things were actually true, but unfortunately none of them is.
Web developers aren't developing for one version of Chrome or Firefox now, they're developing for one version every three months. That is far worse than supporting, say, IE8 and IE9. (Please can we drop the IE6 nonsense now? The remaining market share is negligible and the arguments are academic outside of niche markets.)
Web developers can't use the new features if they can't keep up with them, and in any case they are typically not portable, robust or future-proof enough for production work when first released.
That means users don't get a more featureful experience. If anything, they get less, because trendy web sites use trendy CSS3 features and the like to save time, and those features don't work for a very substantial proportion of the web-surfing public where the older but tried-and-tested techniques did.