[shadowgovt]

In this case, it's not even his salary: it's his comfort and ease of labor.

It's hard to support a heterogeneous space of user agents running on a heterogeneous set of platforms. Eventually, abstractions break and you end up with a weird bug that only manifests on such-and-such browser in so-and-so configuration.

How much easier life is if you only have to support a few browsers on hardware that checksums to have a known-good configuration...

[somsak2]

You think people care more about that than their salary?

[shadowgovt]

It'd vary from person to person, but to a first approximation: Googlers are well-compensated and can be well-compensated at a lot of places. The next best compensation the company can offer them is minimizing drudgework.

Chasing down render errors in the deep interactions between declarative HTML rendering and an esoteric-but-important hardware / software configuration is drudgework.

[dleeftink]

On the other side, drudgework, in all its dullness and frustration, is still work. If there's less of it, some jobs may be disappear--cushy salary or not.

Some of my best ideas even, came out of clearing drudge.

[dleeftink]

In the end, does ease of development outweigh all secondary parties affected in this case?

[echelon]

Distribution of power is worth the overhead.