Why you should never code for new browsers

A quick, very short post today.

First, I should preface this by saying that I've been writing human/computer interfaces for a very long time...and for a good part of that time - it's been more than two decades now, I've been writing for these crazy user-agents we call browsers. The Mosaic Wars are a little fuzzy, but I remember the First Browser War vividly.

Every great once in a while, I see a question along the lines of "is x compatible with some-really-old-browser" and there's always a response along the lines of "no one uses that browser anymore, if you're coding for anything older than n - 1, then you're wasting money".

I can say with 100 percent certainty, that if you're coding for specific browsers - be they old or new - then you're wasting money.

Browsers are released very frequently - for Chrome and Firefox, it's typically about every 6 weeks. The specs they claim to support are release much less frequently...for example, a new HTML spec was release every 1 or 2 years between 1995 and 1999 when HTML 4.01 came out, but the next spec - HTML5 - didn't come out for 14 years. CSS first came out in 1996 and was updated about every 2 years until CSS 3 came out (in 1999). 

What's that I hear? A host of voices singing the popular refrain "but we use JavaScript"? JavaScript is finally to the point where it is currently being updated annually - which makes it the fastest changing language of front-end development and still much slower than 6 to 8 times a year.

Add into this mix of rapidly updating browsers the mix of assistive technology (with its own specifications), and we begin to get a picture of extremely volatile user-agents and very stable specifications.

If there was one thing we should have learned from the First Browser War, it's that we should be not be coding according features that are available in one browser that we then try to port to another browser with extra work. Determine what your needs (and wants) are, code to the specification, and let the browsers catch up. Browsers update much faster and are very likely to render your code as you want it to look within the year without additional work from you. Also, this approach is as backwardly-compatible as possible (what in the accessibility world we call being robust)...and if you're not attempting to deliver a product to every end user, regardless of the user-agent they use, then you really are wasting money.

Happy coding.