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Will we always have shitty browsers?

Editors note: this post was published 2011-06-11, now it’s 2020-12-03, and what the naïve dev (me) wrote back then seems totally silly. Now we have only two browsers to worry: Firefox and Chromium, and there’s isn’t an outdated browser keeping the tail, like we so had used to having. IE 11 maybe dangles there still, but quite easy to handle.

It’s exiting to follow the Global Webstats, to see a new month roll in is "magical". To see IE6 diminish slowly, and IE9 and Chrome climbing up. Slow and tedious process towards a better web, to a better and richer world, filled with wholesome and semantic experiences. It’s like turning a huge tanker, millions and millions of home computers slowly catching up.

In back of my head, I have a feeling that someday things will be better, the tedious times of testing with Microsoft browsers will be history. As I first heard about IE9 to be the first actually good browser from Microsoft, I was exhilarated, one day we will be free from the agony of testing multiple browsers!

The truth could not be more different, it is never over. The only stabile thing in this cosmos we are living in is: change. There will always be browser in the end of the list that you wish would disappear.

But yeah, Internet is like ~17 years old, not very old at all. Web standards not even that long. Imagine what the car industry was when it was 17 years old? One could think that web is very advanced right now. It's not. But it will be! Probably things will get easier as the web matures.