Dilbert: The end of the road
I used to be daily a reader of Dilbert - the comic strip. On the website (http://www.dilbert.com) you can read the Dilbert of the day for free. Just as you would do while reading your newspaper. So I subscribed to the blog via RSS. And every morning I'd get my daily dose of Dilbert in the subway. And that's what is good about RSS: You can download your dose of news and read it later, offline.
This morning, the Dilbert entry looked like this:
Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.
This means one thing: I won't be reading Dilbert anymore.
Goodbye. It was good while it last and you provided it in a form that I enjoyed consuming.
Google: developers, developers, browsers !
Is it possible that a single company be responsible for both the best browser out there along with the worst one?
As it turns out, yes it is possible, and yes it does exist: Google.
Since the first release of Chrome, it has become my browser of choice: Fast, fast, stable, fast, versatile, and the easiest to debug. I did not think about it for a minute. Plus, as a developer, it is one of the most advanced browsers and allow many cool things. All in all, kuddos for your browser there, good work.
Then came Android, with a default browser also based on WebKit. I - among many - thought that it was a "mobilized" version of Chrome. But no, they did another browser altogether. Fine.
Now, it isn't as fine as we hoped at the time. It seemed obvious - knowing Google - that their browser would kick ass. But no, it doesn't kick ass: it sucks. In fact, among friends we call it "The IE6 of WebKit". "The IE6" refers to the disabled child in the family. There is a surprisingly homogeneity in the WebKit browsers if you exclude Android's default browser. And once every 5 times, you do something that works on iOS, Chrome, Safari... and Android stumbles on it.
Now, it's been several loooong years for web developers, and still there are so many areas that lag behind all other mobile browsers... that I'm starting to lose hope. Really. Despair crawls into me day after day, week after week, month after month.
So Google, pleeeeeeease, just give it the attention it needs, or replace it with Chrome, but pleeeeeeeease, do it fast. Seeing as 1/3 of the traffic from Android comes from version 2.3, we know one thing for sure: even when Google gets its act together on that front, it'll be quite a while for web developers to be able to forget this pain.
Please. Act quickly.