[nofunsir]

I'm of the strong opinion that there simply does not exist, as you say, 'a huge chunk of problems around delivering updates and clients on old versions.' It's certainly not a win for users, but for lazy developers. Good software engineers are much more than fast-churn developers. In fact, they are different people.

[progmetaldev]

I'm 100% with you on this, but good software engineers are also much more expensive than fast-churn developers, and it seems to come down to how much spend these companies want to invest in their technology. There is just an overabundance of web developers out there, and the tech companies are taking advantage of that.

[remus]

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. I just don't see barriers in getting updates out to people as a good thing.

It seems your argument is that it encourages developers to be sloppy, but in practice I think it just ends up as a net loss for users as the average user just isn't interested in updating software, however critical the bugs in their current version. Maybe I'm different from the average user, but for me the fact that chrome has gone through 90+ versions over 10+ years without me having to think about it is great (and, I suspect, strongly correlated to the relative lack of security issues over the years despite it having a huge surface area).