A fascinating look at the web today with IE8. And it’s worth remembering who might be experiencing the web like this:
Whoever they are, you can bet they’re not using an old browser just to annoy you. Nobody deliberately chooses a worse browsing experience.
The article also outlines two possible coping strategies:
- Polyfilling Strive for feature parity for all by filling in the missing browser functionality.
- Progressive Enhancement Start from a core experience, then use feature detection to layer on functionality.
Take a wild guess as to which strategy I support.
There’s a bigger point made at the end of all this:
IE8 is today’s scapegoat. Tomorrow it’ll be IE9, next year it’ll be Safari, a year later it might be Chrome. You can swap IE8 out for ‘old browser of choice’. The point is, there will always be some divide between what browsers developers build for, and what browsers people are using. We should stop scoffing at that and start investing in robust, inclusive engineering solutions. The side effects of these strategies tend to pay dividends in terms of accessibility, performance and network resilience, so there’s a bigger picture at play here.
Finally! View transitions for multi-page apps (AKA websites) will be landing in Chrome soon—here’s hoping other browsers follow suit. Mozilla are up for it. Apple are, as usual, silent on their intentions.
Nice to see a blog post of mine referenced to show that this is a highly-requested feature. Blogging gets results, folks!
As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.
This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with.
It’s a shame that the newest Safari release is overshadowed by Apple’s shenanigans and subsequent U-turn because there’s some great stuff in there.
I really like what they’re doing with web apps added to the dock:
Safari adds support for the
shortcutsmanifest member on macOS Sonoma. This gives you a mechanism in the manifest file for defining custom menu commands that will appear in the File menu and the Dock context menu.
A solid update to Andy’s four-years old CSS reset. Best of all, every single line comes with an explanation. So if you don’t like the reasoning, don’t use that line.
Safari 18 supports `content-visibility: auto` …but there’s a very niche little bug in the implementation.
Browser are user agents, not developer agents.
Mobile Safari doesn’t support the min and max attributes on date inputs.
Enhance your website, progressively.
Browsers and bugs.