That’s a damn one-two punch from Dave. He goes for the ultimate clickbait title¹, then follows up with a pile of epic advice for us all. If you want web browsers to get better, listen up:
Complaining on Twitter sure does feel good but it doesn’t do much other than burning bridges and burning through people’s patience. I guess you may also get hit with the mute button which is probably the opposite effect you were hoping for. Despite how good or valid your complaint is, combativeness results in immediate dismissal by your target audience… not once, but for years. People hold grudges for a shockingly long time.
And so:
The best thing I’ve ever done in my career is blog about my specific problems with browsers (or any software you’re passionate about). This goes for software beyond browsers too. I’ve done this for IE, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Windows 10, WSL and I’ve seen first hand how a “friction log” can become a powerful tool in an organization.
Behind the scenes, your posts will get picked up by external-facing developer advocates and shared internally. A single blog post is worth 10,000 tweets.
- Stay tuned for my upcoming blog post “I fell into a cement mixer and here’s everything I know about Cascade Layers.” ⮑
there are many layers of “browser issues”
there’s the web platform support, there’s the way it’s realized (blink has great coverage but can’t render sharp text!), there’s extensions API, there’s native UX (what the browser UI offers you without extensions)
sadly first Opera then Firefox died and nowadays the only development that happens is in the web platform support layer, everything else either doesn’t move at all or even gets worse