PPK, I'm sorry but you are midair, directly above the shark on this. Its not too late to change course though.
We realize you are a mobile consultant, and standardizing many features in a cross platform is a threat to you and your client base. But getting on your soap box and telling people to not add features to browsers is unhelpful and myopic.
Not everyone uses your stupid mobile platforms. Some people in the world don't even have a phone at all. But they might be able to use a browser once in a while. Do they not deserve features just because you have decided that it would be too difficult to implement in the browser, and will "never be as good as native" or however you put it. Your failure to see how things could be implemented faster/better/cheaper does not preclude others from actually getting things done.
I actually agree with many of the points that you make, but seriously... try to see the forest for the trees and take a look at what you're asking of people, and ask yourself why you are doing that.
I've spent the last two years doing "full stack" [yeah, those words, sorry . . . but going from bare metal to C++ to PHP/JavaScript to frobbing routers all on the same day probably qualifies], coming from a background of C/C++ driver and native code development for 30 years.
What I see is an immature community that cannot make up its mind. I see fads, I see awful tools, and even more awful tools that try to fix the awful tools. I see standards committees that pump out unimplementable garbage and I see device manufacturers who think they are good at writing software (and they are not). I see very bad, widespread and unpatchable security holes. I read, every week, about the latest fad thing that will fix all your problems, just install a list of 30 packages and suffer per-page downloads that are larger than the native apps this mess is trying, badly, to replace.
I guess this will all shake out. But in the mean time, I am shaking my head.
The Firefox and Chrome developers are mostly certainly professional developers who are well qualified to create a standardized cross browser feature set that will obviate the need for the cruft.
Only recently have we started to emerge from the Silverlight-Flash-JavaApplet-ActiveX-webish ghetto that we were mired in for years as Microsoft refused to add new standard features to IE. His suggestion is essentially to return to that paradigm. He should know better... he built a site called 'quirksmode' after all...
Spend a year on standardizing, fixing bugs (like the bug with chrome where it sometimes just "forgets" float-css rules), a year spent on improving issues and making everything behave consistently between browsers.
A year spent so that we won’t have to use jQuery afterwards anymore. Or underscore.js.
A year spent on fixing all the little bugs, and making a consistent roadmap where we actually want to go. Thinking about stuff like the Virtual-DOM of Angular or React and finding a better solution than that.
This is what we need to focus on. Making stuff behave consistently. And with one year, we can make sure that afterwards most of the market will actually use our new version. We can finally get rid of all the polyfills.
You're missing my point. The world won't stop just because you decide to reflect on the situation and have small groups of people unilaterally decide what will someday maybe be standardized in some browsers. In the meantime the new features will get developed as non-standard features and you'll have even more proliferation of cruft, "polyfills" and whatever else PPK is complaining about.
Can I sing a few praises for the ghetto for a minute? It had more features. It was friendlier to non-developers because of things like Flash. It had more features. You could directly port native code through things like ActiveX (which we are now only recently getting back through ASM.js, with performance within an order of magnitude). It had more... you know where I'm going with this. The problem with that paradigm is the rise of resource-constrained mobile devices and security issues. But I'm unconvinced that the new paradigm won't just regrow the security issues and the performance problems as the features catch up.
I have also been doing software for a bit over 2^5 years, and the glass IS half empty. But, it's also half full.
Newer HTML/CSS standards appear to be defined in a somewhat compartmentalized fashion. I'm doing an app rewrite in Angular, and its actually working pretty well so far (1). It's much snappier than java/struts, and we are able to convert the legacy code into REST services for future product integration work.
The author mentioned horrible Chrome documentation. Mozilla / Firefox has EXCELLENT javascript documentation, including listing MS IE compatibility to save you the trip to the MSDN swamp.
Much of this is overkill for "pages", but not for "apps".
(1) "pretty well", with exception of IE, of course -- even 11 won't gzip or cache static files. At least IE 8 dies in Jan 2016, though.
We realize you are a mobile consultant, and standardizing many features in a cross platform is a threat to you and your client base. But getting on your soap box and telling people to not add features to browsers is unhelpful and myopic.
Not everyone uses your stupid mobile platforms. Some people in the world don't even have a phone at all. But they might be able to use a browser once in a while. Do they not deserve features just because you have decided that it would be too difficult to implement in the browser, and will "never be as good as native" or however you put it. Your failure to see how things could be implemented faster/better/cheaper does not preclude others from actually getting things done.
I actually agree with many of the points that you make, but seriously... try to see the forest for the trees and take a look at what you're asking of people, and ask yourself why you are doing that.