"The World Wide Web And The Death Of Graceful Degradation by: Maya Posch"

[Gemmaugr]

https://hackaday.com/2025/05/20/the-world-wide-web-and-the-death-of-graceful-degradation/

Pale Moon mentioned:

"Sometimes these requirements are apparently merely a way to not do any testing on older or alternative browsers, with ‘forum’ software Discourse (not to be confused with Disqus) being a shining example here. It insists that you must have the ‘latest, stable release’ of either Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari. Purportedly this is so that the client-side JavaScript (Ember.js) framework is happy, but as e.g. Pale Moon users have found out, the problem is with a piece of JS that merely detects the browser, not the features. Blocking the browser-detect-* script in e.g. an adblocker restores full functionality to Discourse-afflicted pages."

Good read, and another useful article that highlights how the web have gone wrong.

[andyprough]

From the article:

Functionality in Safari, Pale Moon, etc. often is more a matter of luck as the assumption is made by today’s crop of web devs that everyone uses the latest and greatest Chrome browser version. This ensures that using non-Chromium browsers is fraught with functionally defective websites, as the ‘Web Compatibility Support’ section of the Pale Moon forum illustrates.

While some of this may be true in some cases, it's also important to point out that Chrome gets literally millions of web compatibility complaints, and chromium has tens of thousands of unaddressed bug reports.

If you wanted to be a Dev working on a relatively quiet and stable browser, you'd be far better off on the Pale Moon side of things than on the Chrome side of this monstrous avalanche of complaints and bug reports. Probably the reason web devs use frameworks targeted at latest Chrome is because handcrafting code for that browser makes you navigate a nearly impossible minefield of hidden bugs and bug-related built-in hacks.

[Moonchild]

it's also important to point out that Chrome gets literally millions of web compatibility complaints, and chromium has tens of thousands of unaddressed bug reports

In most cases those are ignored unless there is concerted pushback from several communities - in other cases eventually the web masters will be persuaded to just "satisfy chrome" if it's not addressed in months. The key term in that sentence is "unaddressed". Chromium is exceedingly resistant to changing already established code; often a non-response meaning "won't fix" until Mozilla follows suit and both "votes" leading to a spec change after which the compatibility complaints on the web are "officially wrong".

[suzyne]

I don't mind the web as an infrastructure supporting apps (actually I like that state of affairs and use them regularly!), so I see the problem more as when sites that aren't webapps needlessly require similar amounts of code and processing to function.

Do we know who Maya Posch is and are they active on this forum?

The article is a good read.