NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

On 5/11/2012 3:36 PM, Hans Zaunere wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> So, in a mix of rant-and-feedback-gathering - is it just me, or have
> browsers largely gone downhill in the last few months?
>

Hi!

During the past few months? It is like that for quite longer.

FF 4 and higher just sucks, the UI is horrible and the switch from 3.6 to 4 
broke a lot of things that are still not fixed....unless you happen to know 
the add-on that unfixes the 'fixes'. I also get the impression that the 
Mozilla folks got way more arrogant. They use to be thankful for constructive 
criticism or had at least a good reason for why things are the way they are. 
Now they ignore any user input and if a response comes along it is typically 
along the lines of "Go away!"
You can escape the rapid updating (which Google started with for no reason) by 
installing the FF10 ESR build. That branch is back to the old, reasonable 
update schedule.


Chrome is IMHO crap from the start and it did not get any better. Yes, it 
loads pages faster and uses less memory, but it also doesn't do anything other 
than that. I also like some UI with my fat client.

IE is very dependent on the local settings, when they are a bit harsher than 
mildly restrictive a lot of things just stop working. It also get the 
impression as if we are back to being forced to IE-only development dragging 
around different code for IE while the typical code works just fine everywhere 
else.

Opera is technically nice and can do a lot of things, but I find it utterly 
kludgy to use. Safari is like Chrome, a lot of sauce with not much meat.


As far as getting things to work the way I want I still have most success with 
FF followed by Chrome. I tend to not try it with Opera and IE and Safari are 
not even considered. I have the luxury to consider it the other's loss when 
they use these browsers and things don't come out right. Not everyone is as lucky.

Generally, I agree, browsers are heading back to the stone age, especially 
with Flash getting thrown out all over the place. HTML5 isn't properly 
implemented in most browsers and the pieces that are included are working 
differently. The problem is that HTML always only specified the markup, but 
not the display or functionality. It suggests an option, but really leaves a 
lot to interpretation.



Just my 2 ct.


David


-- Sent from my desktop PC --