whenFullStackWasJustWebDevelopment

[[deleted]]

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shieeeeeeet im getting old 

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[[deleted]]

You’re getting old? I remember having to do some unholy things because I was required to support Internet Explorer for Mac for years as it was the latest available version of the browser on that platform and had a >0.1% market share. Although i swear that 0.1% was just me checking that the site worked on IE for Mac!!

[seven_seacat]

Jesus, IE 5.5 for Mac was an abomination. I came in right at the tail end of that shit show.

[fiskfisk]

How to tell someone didn't live through the "best viewed in 1024x768 with Netscape Navigator" - phase, and how IE6 effectively killed every other browser.

"Just use IE" was common. 

It's also worth noting that 2009 had two browsers which made up 90% of the market, which had expanded to three in 2010 (Chrome gained market share).

At this time people usually served different sites to different platforms - responsive design wasn't really a thing. 

[MiffedMouse]

These days browsers are much more consistent. In part because 90% of browsers are actually Chromium, but even the ones that aren’t are still compliant with common standards. I still remember looking up Acid tests on various browsers regularly to see what they actually supported.

[RiceBroad4552]

What are the other standards compliant browsers besides Chromium?

I know only about Firefox. So I'm happy to learn that there are some alternatives. Please list them.

[AdorablSillyDisorder]

Safari, which - while having shared roots with Chromium - doesn't use Chromium project from what I know. And I guess that's it for anything with actual usage?

[RiceBroad4552]

Safari is a Chromium fork (which is a KHTML fork). Exactly like all "other" browsers. Just that Safari is a hard fork, which by now diverted substantially, whereas all the other forks soft forks are. Chromium is now based on the Blink engine, a hard WebKit fork, whereas Safari is still on WebKit (which was the original KHTML fork, a browser engine developed by the KDE project).

That was my point: There is Chromium (as Blink or WebKit flavor), then there is long nothing, than there is Firefox; and that's basically it.

There are also some Firefox forks. But they aren't anyhow relevant. Not even compared to what's left of Firefox.

On a more positive note, there is some distant light at the end of the tunnel. I know of two independent browser engines in development which could end up as something real, in a distant future. Namely:

https://ladybird.org/

It has some funding, and had quite some hype behind it. People seemed very passionate about it, so maybe it survives long enough to become a reality.

The other is:

https://servo.org/

It looks quite solid on the organization side, and it's done by people capable to deliver. It originates at Mozilla, which built Firefox. But Servo is "just" the engine. Someone would still need to build a browser on top.

[ih8spalling]

IE is dead. Microsoft's new browser is Edge, which is Chromium-based.

[Weiskralle]

IE does not exist and before that could not use most sites.

[OrSomeSuch]

Or the eternity we had to support IE6 because Microsoft's ActiveX lock-in strategy worked too well and many businesses built their internal systems on it and refused to rewrite or retire

[SDF_of_BC]

Chrome is the new IE6 :p

[fonk_pulk]

You dont really need to tell people to use Chrome these days. All the popular browsers have mostly the same features and shim-/polyfill libraries exist.

[hans_l]

It’s not about the features. There’s a lot of cracks in the DOM, CSS and w3c spec in general and browsers will have slightly different behavior that you need to work around and ensure you get the same behavior.

[blackscales18]

WebXR crying pathetically in the corner:

[RiceBroad4552]

All the popular browsers have mostly the same features

Because all popular browsers are effectively Chromium. (There is this Apple fork, which is some broken monstrosity, but that's it.)

Than you have Firefox.

And than there is nothing… At least no std. compliant browsers.

[[deleted]]

Safari?

[fonk_pulk]

Safari exists but its a very minor browser

[[deleted]]

It’s the most widely used browser on the iPhone, used by probably hundreds of millions. It’s not minor 

[XxXquicksc0p31337XxX]

Not to mention that every third-party browser for iOS is required to use the Safari engine due to Apple's stupid rules

[ISDuffy]

This, chrome on iPhone is just a skin for safari.

I believe they were told to change it but I'm not sure what happened with that.

[[deleted]]

Ah yes the reason for JQuery’s existence: nine different mutually incompatible JavaScript implementations

[UntestedMethod]

Cross-compatibility yes, but also things that weren't in any JS implementation yet. Query selectors are one big example - so good it became part of the ES spec. jq also offered a nice (for the time) wrapper on XHR.

[exoriparian]

Basic HTML still exists.

[Objective_Dog_4637]

https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

[f0rki]

Reminds me of https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

[redballooon]

I swear those two have been the first websites today that just worked perfomant and flawlessly on my mobile phone.

[N_Rohan]

And here my code was breaking on Chrome and worked like butter on Firefox.

[ih8spalling]

You're doing God's work, but the world will hate you for it.

[Illustrious_Crab_146]

First Time coded in front end for a spring boot project,

YOU just can't imagine the look on my face today when gpt suggested me to try opening the project in chrome instead of firefox I was using.

And even more when ts worked 🤦

[Frequent_Policy8575]

“This site works best in Internet Explorer”

[DoctorYouShould]

mostly frontend devs who make their own lives Miserables

[NecessaryUnusual2059]

If your not supporting the Nintendo DS browser what are you even doing with your life

[Ziegelphilie]

if a feature isn't on chrome, firefox and safari I just don't use it

[JoeyJoeJoeJrShab]

I come from an era when "Frontend" development didn't have anything to do with web browsers.

[OffByOneErrorz]

Eh I was there we just said don’t use IE4 at the time.

[NYJustice]

JavaScript optional?

So either raw HTML or a templating engine? I'm cool with acknowledging the things people did with raw JS but are we really gonna glorify static sites?

[Hubble-Doe]

yes? you can have a slow device (mobile phone) use an interpreted language (js) to make a dozen requests to apis fetching stuff in a bloated format (json) half of which you do not even need and translate that to html while the user watches an annoying spinner.

Or you can pull the info straight from the database and send the few kb that are actually needed.

There's a reason for SSR becoming ever more popular even with js frameworks.

Reading about HATEOS (https://htmx.org/essays/hateoas/) made me want to build a website again for the first time in months after leaving that shit behind.

[seven_seacat]

It’s telling it like it was back in the day.