Browser makers keep screwing up Web apps
- IT TOPICS:Applications, Development
In a roundtable this afternoon at the MIT Emerging Techologies Conference, panelists agreed that updates to browsers are constantly breaking Web applications, causing endless headaches. Both Internet Explorer and Safari came in for criticism. The exception was Firefox, an open source browser that adheres more closely to standards.
Jason Fried, president of Web application provider 37Signals LLC, was the most outspoken. “From a developer’s point of view, Internet Explorer sucks,” he said flatly. “It’s really bad and every time they introduce a new version it breaks our products.”
“There’s a never ending stream of things that come up that break the application,” said Paul Rademacher, software engineer at Google’s Google Maps business unit. He cited Safari as another culprit.
“It’s time for browser manufacturers to stop innovating around the core stuff and get the core stuff to work,” Fried said. But while both panelists had complaints about browsers breaking their applications, neither wants to see the browser model go away any time soon. “Aside from IE I love the Web browser. It’s fashionable to say ‘let’s get away from it’ but it works really well,” Fried said. The alternative – lots of separate interfaces - just won’t work, he adds. “I don’t want to have 15 different applications on my computer and have a specialized application just for Flickr or Google Maps,” Fried said.
Free Insider Guide