I see. Although filters were implemented in IE4, DirectX filters came about in IE5.5

However, the extend phase wasn't just IE4. They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6. By the time IE7 came out, it was clear the web is here to stay.

I remember when in a past life we were allowed to bump the minimum supported IE version of our SPA framework from 6 to 8. It was a joyful day – but we soon realized that it didn’t really buy us that much because 8 was almost as quirky…

> Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox

I work for a large corporation. A few years ago, they removed FF as a browser people could use at the company and removed it from the internal app store. Then, if you had a version, they forcibly uninstalled it.

As someone who's a developer, I needed access to be able to test on. Never forget going into the tech support office and saying I need this installed to be able to test my code. Support guy says, "Yeah sure mate, let's get that reinstalled for you." Tech guy downloaded it, started the install, and suddenly got a pop-up warning him it was against company policy to have this installed on your machine. It then auto-removed the app files he just downloaded. We sat there dumbfounded. "I guess we're going to have to escalate this mate." he said with a confused look on his face.

Almost four months later, support finally relented, but put in so many barriers to get installed that only a handful of devs have it on their machines now. I get emails almost daily, "Mate, I need you to test this in FF." or "Is this breaking in FF?"

I guess the reason given was FF lags in updating their certs, making a prime target for malware attacks so they just killed it so they wouldn't have to deal with it.

Just kind of strange that my entire career I was constantly told I needed to test this on any and all browsers available because they all have their nuances and you never know what might break something. To moving to a time where I'm testing on a single browser and calling it good? Man, times they are a changing.

The magnitude might be greater in specific sub areas, for example if you are doing chrome first, how is your accessibility on Safari? I don't know myself, but I think there are holes people don't notice with this approach.

Also I agree the thing about Meerita's post being flagged and dead seems wrong. There is evidently nothing wrong with the post and it should not be.

It's easy nowadays to make websites that function perfectly and look beautiful on all devices, browsers, and systems from 10 years ago until today. If somebody cannot deliver that, they should be fired from their job.

That is not quite the same problem. Modern browsers are vastly more standards-compliant than they were in the IE era, and most CSS/JS works across Chrome, Firefox and Safari without browser-specific hacks.

There was a time when we routinely did browser sniffing, maintained IE-specific code paths, used vendor prefixes everywhere, and sometimes shipped completely different fixes depending on the browser. That largely disappeared as browsers converged on standards.

Chrome-first development can still cause bugs elsewhere, but that's usually a "testing/implementation problem" rather than the same compatibility mess we had back then.

Mostly Internet Explorer 7 and 8, some Mozilla Firefox builds. That’s what I had in mind when I said “old browsers.” The last project I worked on that still had to support browsers from that era was in 2018.