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by wwweston 4334 days ago
Most of my professional time these days is spent on mobile/tablet websites for a major automobile manufacturer. And there are days when we absolutely do obsess over layout and other issues introduced by mobile safari itself. On the release of iOS 7, we actually probably burned a month working with a bug that we never found a solution to (which, fortunately, was fixed with iOS 7.1).

That last part underscores that we're fortunate browser makers are issuing regular updates (a big difference from IE). On the other hand, with some of those updates come new bugs and (particularly on Android) fragmentation. Consider that by 2006 there were enough people/resources documenting IE6's quirks that it was pretty rare to run across a bug that someone didn't have a good idea of how to fix/workaround. In 2014 when you run across a mobile bug (particularly one from a recent release, of which there are many), it may well be that nobody knows how to solve your problem, and in some cases nobody seems to even know how to tell you to duplicate it across devices/emulators (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23142762/how-to-identify-... ).

And of course, like IE, many developers code webkit-only, even iOS only (and I know why: at the level of ambition people often have for mobile websites and with the difficulty involved in testing more than a few devices, it can sometimes seem like the only way to get things out the door).

IE6 was no picnic, but there are times I think to myself I'd rather be working on the 2006 desktop web than the 2014 mobile web....

1 comments

I think you forget how bad it was with 2006 desktop. So many CSS hacks. We take our div layouts for granted but if you dared venture away from the standard table layouts of the early 2000s you were in for a lot of debugging for browser quirks.

Nowadays at least I code responsive layouts to target screen resolution, and its gotten leagues better. Sure there's a few quirks in separate browsers and things aren't necessarily ideal, but it sure beats the days of "I wish I could use xxxx CSS property but I can't because only 2% of my users would be able to render it".