Developers (and me as one of them) seek their sanity. They try to achieve what they've been asked to, by following the specs. There are some browsers that are always up-to-date with the specs, and there are other browsers that still have 5 year old bugs to fix.
If those browsers are still in popular use, and you call yourself a professional web developer, you test and ensure things work in those old and terrible browsers too though.
But like I said, there are plenty of amateur-hour gigs following your play-book.
You decide which group you want to identify with. For me part, I know which I represent.
And thus for a small rant:
On a side note, I love how web-developers these days have the nerve to tell people how hard their job is because they have to support several browsers. Cry me a river. Nobody's job has ever been easier than yours.
Do you have to deal with messages not getting through in a message pump when threads are involved? Do you have to deal with how GPU accelerated graphics frameworks magically sometimes not showing windows when run in a Citrix TS, but with faulty Intel GPU drivers on the server? Have you ever tried to figure out why your code isn't getting the correct registry-entries, which you can see is there in a mixed 32-64 registry mess? Why that setting a configured was never shell-expanded, causing your script to break 3 layers in? Have you ever tried to debug why the file you just released a handle for is still locked, by yourself? Etc etc. These things a million times every day.
Web-developers have it so easy peasy as no other programmer in the history of programmers. I'll admit that's an opinion, but I'm pretty sure it closer to a fact.
Signed someone who has delivered cross-platform products, on-premise software across several versions and decades, with demands that nothing should ever be broken no matter what.
I'm so tired of hearing this. Just because web developers need to solve different problems doesn't mean it's easy.
This kind of crab mentality of "you aren't a real developer until you are miserable like me" is really getting old and it only serves to make the whole industry look standoffish and bad.
Yes, some of the work I do on the web is easy, but so is the view components of any other system. The time spent bit twiddling to try and get a little more performance out of a browser to be able to render a game at 60 FPS or spending time understanding what each browser compiles my JS to under the hood (after it was "transpiled" [i hate that word] from another JS dialect) so that I can figure out why what should be a simple copy is taking so fucking long is just as difficult as some of the shit you have to deal with.
> If those browsers are still in popular use, and you call yourself a professional web developer, you test and ensure things work in those old and terrible browsers too though.
That's not my decision to make as it impacts production costs. The person paying the bills should be the one that makes the decision and my job is to inform him of the probable costs and provide statistics so he can measure the cost vs benefit for his intended audience.
And yes my job is 'easy'. And I personally try to always serve legacy browsers too. And yes I will always complain until those browsers will finally fix their bugs and implement what the specs say.
That applies when you build websites. But when you build web apps, you care more about providing the best optimal experience for the up-to-date browsers and if you have enough time you can provide a graceful degradation for the old browsers. But most of the time it depends on what you've been ordered to build and which users you want to focus.
Keyword: enough time. Spent two day working around a firefox outline bug only to have it break on mobile safary because their absolute positioning of pseudo elements is relative to the parent and not the element.
Browsers are making my day to day work miserable. I wish O could target a reference css3 platform and browser specific bugs be damned.
