Tuesday, September 02, 2008 7:44 AM
Normally I’d look at any new announcement from Google like a kid unwrapping a present on Christmas morning: they’re typically cool, and at worst good for 10 min of attention until I put it aside to focus on something else.
But their announcement of Chrome made me want to pick up my iMac and throw it out the window.
One of the biggest banes to a web developer’s existence has always been the plethora of browsers that we have to test our applications against. Keith Elder recently blogged about how CodeZone renders differently depending on which browser you use, so this problem is still alive and well in 2008. And now its getting worse.
Let’s go through the list shall we:
IE 6 (yes, its still out in the wild)
IE 7
IE 8
FF 3
FF 2 (? Maybe? Some that haven’t jumped to 3 yet?)
Safari
Opera
Did I miss any? I probably did. Let’s stick with this list though so I don’t delve into a deeper sense of woe and depression.
Here in 2008, with software as a service being one of the key buzzwords, and cloud computing being another, the web is poised to continue skyrocketing as a target medium for launching new applications. There are tonnes of new web apps launching all the time with rich user experiences, typically achieved through javascript and ajax. However, Flash isn’t dead and Silverlight is just emerging.
But as developers, we now have to ensure that we consider all the options for usability that our target market might engage. An application like Twitter can be accessed by all of those browsers. Same with CodeZone. Same with Gyminee, or whatever other online app we’re talking about. That’s a *lot* of testing. I know some software shops that have a Mac in their office for the sole purpose of testing out their web apps on Safari on a Mac…think about that: a purchase of an entire computer *just* to test out an app on a browser.
But back to the point of this post. Many will be hitting the beta download today of Chrome and oooing and aaaahhhing about it, not realizing that for web developers we’ve now added another variable that we have to take into consideration when developing and testing our app, especially since many users will jump on board simply because its a Google product.
For most users, they won’t see what the big deal is. For us, we realize that browsers are not all alike…that they have different rendering engines, different code bases, different features. If the 90’s internet was Pangea, then we’re seeing the continental drift of the internet happening before our eyes and the result will be more browser-specific web applications.
So go ahead, check out Chrome (hell, I’ll probably still download it and try it out). As an end user, I’m sure people will find lots to love. As a web developer, I’m not so enthralled.
D