> By the way, if you are a web developer, I strongly encourage you to use the Firefox Beta or Aurora channel:
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but if you're really expecting a lot of professional web developers to do that, I think you're crazy.
Now that both Chrome and Firefox are on silly release schedules, we waste enough time just keeping up with the breaking changes and random UI rearrangements in day-to-day work. Who has time to spend reading yet another set of release notes every few days, when there's a good chance that nothing in them will be usable in production projects for several years anyway?
If you really want to drive progress, I implore you to stop this madness, and allow a few months for the industry to consolidate so we have some sort of standards to work with. You've made your point: the W3C is a dinosaur chasing a snail riding on a tortoise and you can go faster. But until the new technologies are standard enough that we only have to develop for them once and we can rely on that development still working in a couple of years, all your hard work is being wasted because we still have to write to the lowest common denominator.
You are the new Netscape, Microsoft are the new Microsoft, and now there are several other major browsers we all have to cope with as well. Going it alone just doesn't cut it, whichever of you does it.
Actually, one reason web developers can benefit from running pre-release browsers is that you are in the best position to prevent breaking changes from happening. If a bug that breaks your web site makes it out to the 400 million people on our stable channel, then it's too late stop your users from seeing it. But if you report the bug to the vendor when it first appears in alpha or beta, you improve the chance it will be fixed before your mainstream users ever see it.
I appreciate what you're saying, but unfortunately my clients pay by the hour, and they aren't paying me to be a beta tester for your organisation. Even if I wanted to help you, it would be deeply unethical for me to do so while charging my clients for the time. And even if it weren't, please consider what a huge amount of time it would take to download and install development builds of every major browser regularly enough for this to matter. It's just not practical for me, and I don't see how it ever could be for any other professional web developer in a similar position.
Maybe if we were talking about a team of in-house developers responsible for a single application or something it would be more realistic, but not for freelancers or small agencies who get paid time and materials, which seems to be most of us these days if my experience is at all representative.
> we still have to write to the lowest common denominator.
You have to write to your customers. If your customers are the lowest common denominator I would advice rethinking your business plan.
People around here think it is a perfectly viable business plan to write to only iOS, which has 63 million users, so why isn't a viable business to write only to WebKit (Chrome has 160 million users alone)? And if you write to WebKit it's not much work to make it also work in Firefox and Opera.
The idea that we have to write to the lowest common denominator is the one aspect of web development that I wish would go away. You don't have to, you choose to.
> You have to write to your customers. If your customers are the lowest common denominator I would advice rethinking your business plan.
The most popular operating system in the world today is Windows XP, and the most popular browser on Windows XP is Internet Explorer. If you can afford to rule out anyone using IE below version 9, I envy you your business plan, but most of us can't.
It is bad enough that Microsoft creates this problem for us for unrelated commercial reasons. There is no need for the Firefox and Chrome teams to sink to the same level.
> People around here think it is a perfectly viable business plan to write to only iOS
People around here think a lot of things are perfectly viable business plans. Most of them will fail, often because they overlooked some obvious, common sense test they should have considered on day one but didn't.
> The idea that we have to write to the lowest common denominator is the one aspect of web development that I wish would go away. You don't have to, you choose to.
We all wish it would go away, but on my planet the web developer is rarely in a position to determine the requirements of a job for a paying client, nor to dictate the browsing software to be used by the general public. If you are one of the lucky ones, please understand that you in a very small niche. Somehow I doubt the guys working hard on all these new features for Firefox and Chrome and Safari want their work to be useful to only a tiny fraction of the web-using world.
I'm with you. FWIW, I had the option of jumping ship from the web development industry, and took it because of stuff like this. The build-test-rebuild-testagain-fix-tweak-test cycle for web development is horrible, and aggravating, and life's too short to deal with that kind of nonsense.
Now there are multiple browsers that are going to modify their rendering engines every few months. Yeah, fuck everything about that. I no longer give even two turds' worth of a care what browsers a particular project works in, as long as it works for me. This is just stupid.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but if you're really expecting a lot of professional web developers to do that, I think you're crazy.
Now that both Chrome and Firefox are on silly release schedules, we waste enough time just keeping up with the breaking changes and random UI rearrangements in day-to-day work. Who has time to spend reading yet another set of release notes every few days, when there's a good chance that nothing in them will be usable in production projects for several years anyway?
If you really want to drive progress, I implore you to stop this madness, and allow a few months for the industry to consolidate so we have some sort of standards to work with. You've made your point: the W3C is a dinosaur chasing a snail riding on a tortoise and you can go faster. But until the new technologies are standard enough that we only have to develop for them once and we can rely on that development still working in a couple of years, all your hard work is being wasted because we still have to write to the lowest common denominator.
You are the new Netscape, Microsoft are the new Microsoft, and now there are several other major browsers we all have to cope with as well. Going it alone just doesn't cut it, whichever of you does it.