While I agree with the general idea, I completely and utterly disagree with both his examples and approach.
First, it's almost like he's arguing that IE6 was a good thing for the web. This one completely boggles my mind. Yes, some people came up with some pretty creative tricks. Did it stifle innovation? Absolutely. Countless hacks were made that are arguably(?) worse than polyfills. These hacks persist even to this days. Further, modern browsers must take all of these hacks into account when moving the web forward. This is massive technical debt. Additionally, how many man hours were spent creating these hacks to deal with the shortcomings of IE6? That time could have easily been spent working on something awesome.
The other example on page transitions is a bit more reasonable, so I'm being a little pedantic on this one. I agree that page transitions are a bit much, however why is a polyfill really necessary?
All that being said, I agree with the general sentiment. We need to slow down and put thought into the features we're creating. However, I don't think we need to stop working for a year and see how everything plays out. What happens after 5 years? We stop for a year and continue as if none of this ever happened, then continue pushing things forward for 4 more years. Then we run into the same exact problems. We need to have a way to vet experimental features, and a plan to remove them (and old features) if they don't pan out.
We've progressed far enough to where removing legacy features is as (if not more) important as introducing new ones.
First, it's almost like he's arguing that IE6 was a good thing for the web. This one completely boggles my mind. Yes, some people came up with some pretty creative tricks. Did it stifle innovation? Absolutely. Countless hacks were made that are arguably(?) worse than polyfills. These hacks persist even to this days. Further, modern browsers must take all of these hacks into account when moving the web forward. This is massive technical debt. Additionally, how many man hours were spent creating these hacks to deal with the shortcomings of IE6? That time could have easily been spent working on something awesome.
The other example on page transitions is a bit more reasonable, so I'm being a little pedantic on this one. I agree that page transitions are a bit much, however why is a polyfill really necessary?
All that being said, I agree with the general sentiment. We need to slow down and put thought into the features we're creating. However, I don't think we need to stop working for a year and see how everything plays out. What happens after 5 years? We stop for a year and continue as if none of this ever happened, then continue pushing things forward for 4 more years. Then we run into the same exact problems. We need to have a way to vet experimental features, and a plan to remove them (and old features) if they don't pan out.
We've progressed far enough to where removing legacy features is as (if not more) important as introducing new ones.