Friday, September 19, 2008 10:03 AM
by
nairdo
Here We Go Again
(Note: With this post I'm going to tag any similar, future rants as "angry coder". Although they will be few, I'm doing this just in case you want to take a pass on any of these kinds of entries.)
I love Google, but with their recent announcement I thought I was going to cry. Does the world really need another browser? Aren't the existing set of mediocre ones enough? Opera, Safari, IE, Firefox, Konqueror, AOL TBD, Flock, etc., and now Chrome.
Let me pick on Google for a minute. I'd really like to see them work on support for HTML/CSS in their premiere email client, Gmail. It's arguably among the worst when it comes to CSS support. Perhaps their entry into the browser market will help them with this problem...
I was a staunch Netscape supporter back in the day but, as a web developer, it was never fun being the middleman in the browser display/layout war. When you're just trying to write programs to solve the latest business problem (and do it in a cross-platform, client-lite way), you really don't have the desire or patience to worry about some other vendor's browser. It's inefficient at best and it's certainly not your job. Or is it? Perhaps when we decided to write a web application we also signed on to support any and every web browser that one of our users wants to use? Perhaps there is no place to draw the line. There is no hope.
Enter the 3rd party control developers! Yes, that's right -- it's their job. Pick from Telerik, ComponentArt, Infragistics, Devexpress, etc. Let them worry about the war. They will do it better and more completely than you and I can. You and I can get back to developing solutions for our domain(s) and leave the browser war behind.
Let me summarize with the point that drove me to finally speak up regarding this topic. I think Jon Edmiston's key #7 captures it well. Beware of bright shiny objects. Chrome is definitely shiny. Seriously. Will installing it or twittering it (don't get me started on this ;) help us be successful? Will having it help with the business problems we're getting ready to solve?
[update: only moments after posting this, I happened to visit a link that Scott Miller had sent earlier today. I had to laugh out loud because I don't think I've ever actually had this happen to me. Perhaps this (see image) is another way to deal with it. Hey, where is Chrome in that list?]