People chasing the chimera of the browser as universal app platform have lost the forest for the trees. Do you really expect me to take a dev platform seriously that can't be versioned and is constantly being changed out from underneath users?
I don't envy QA teams working on web apps.
Features are being added, but not removed - at least, not unprefixed ones, even if the vendor prefix process seems to be a little broken. If your app breaks, it's probably either your fault for trying to manually detect browsers or use unsupported features, or a bug that can be fixed relatively quickly (and in the meantime, you can always advise switching browsers, as ugly as that is). If it doesn't work because the user's browser is too old, the advice should just be to use a browser that keeps itself up to date.
It's hardly a secret that building an acceptably performant web app today requires all kinds of browser-specific tweaks and workarounds. Can I really expect that nobody's going to "fix" the code that made them necessary in some future update to browser X?
However I started to get some more serious bugs popping up recently. Last week was the break-points were not hit anymore(a little nightmare, now solved! But made me go back to Firefox for a week). And this week are visual errors, like trailing borders when mouse overing links, round corners that are cut,...
All in all, I find more positive reasons than negative to live on a moving platform, and knowing that my clients will run the same and last version as I do.
If you're a hacker, you can use Firefox until Google resolves the bug and pushes a new update. But if you're an end user at a bank, your PC is locked down and you can't install another browser (even if you knew how). That little bug in Chrome 26.0.0.1 that got fixed in Chrome 26.0.0.2 the next day could cost the bank millions of dollars as 15,000 people sit at their desks for a day unable to enter transactions.
Businesses like this have to be able to install browsers using a controlled process in which all their web apps get tested with the new version of the browser. And installing a new browser on 15,000 machines takes a lot of IT man-hours (remember, the users don't know how or aren't allowed to install their own software), so there has to be a pretty good justification to upgrade.
Welcome to the grim realities of corporate computing...
By the way, you don't have to be a large bank for something like this to affect you. You could be some tiny business like a real estate broker that depends on a web app but is not big enough to be able to afford a full-time IT staffer to maintain your software for you. I guess my point is that once you're out of the world of software developers, minor problems with browsers can be very costly and upgrading to a new version constantly can be risky.
Exactly. I have to assume the people that don't get this have never worked in these environments.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/ http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1...
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all.html