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I'd prefer multiple vendor collaboration on a 1 spec > reference impl, than 1 spec > multiple incompatible impls. Innovation and experimentation could happen in "feature branches" of a master repo, and accepted once a majority of vendors are satisfied.

IMO supporting and testing against multiple rendering engines is the biggest PITA / productivity loss in web dev today. Being unproductive takes the joy out of developing software and having to support multiple impls is a sunk cost that creates no end-user value. Knowing about quirks of each rendering engine increases the cognitive overhead developers need to know when developing for the web, further stifling productivity and reducing the end-result quality of websites.

I'd rather only have to know and develop against a single implementation in the same way I prefer there is a primary UI SDK/toolkit for each OS.




I can understand where your argument comes from but in my experience with the web developing for webkit+gecko+(whatever powers opera) is pretty painless. It's only adding IE in the mix where things get hairy. I generally just build solely in chrome, and things end up fine when i test in firefox/opera. In the rare case where something is different, the dev tools help narrow down the issue quickly. Contrast this with IE which often breaks and has horrible tools. If we could get rid of IE, I really would not mind having to support the remaining browsers.


The irony being that 10 years ago you'd be saying the exact opposite. Most shops supported IE only.

IE's tools aren't "horrible" either, they're just different and pretty much have the exact same functionality. In fact they were much better than Chrome's tools until about 2 years ago. Chrome's tools still even have some annoying features that are better in IE. Yes, I'm looking at you watch variables. Also much prefer their 'trace styles' over Chrome's massive list of every selector ever.

With all that said, Chrome's my development browser of choice these days. The right click inspect element is the killer feature over IE's dev tools. For some reason I've never got on with Firebug. For a long time I'd actually be using all 3 at once due to needing different logins, but Chrome's multi-profile support has stopped that.


Agreed. My current project is focused on mobile, so I do the development using Chrome and Safari.

That said, I do test it on Firefox periodically and when something breaks it's usually an easy fix.

I'm not even attempting to make it work on IE.


Yes, it is a PITA. But if we didn't, we'd end up with a massive amount of code that was relying not on spec, but on quirks of implementation of that single implementation. This is the real benefit of multiple independent implementations. One implementation does not just lock in users, but it also locks that implementation into a far more rigid situation, where far smaller changer can break massive amount of code.




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