Quote:
Originally Posted by Toxaris
Not quite the same. Browser could be fixed with an update. That will not happen with readers, as updates are scarce.
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To be fair, part of what makes web development so problematic is the sheer number of people who have to keep using an old version of a browser (IE comes to mind) because some business-critical system doesn't work with the newer version, so you had (and still have) a fair bit of that problem in the browser world, too.
The bigger difference is that even in the early days of the web, there were only a handful of browsers that you really had to care about—Netscape, Internet Explorer, maybe Mosaic, maybe Lynx, and that was about it. You might have to care about a couple of versions of a couple of browsers from each vendor (Communicator vs. Navigator, for example), but either way, it was pretty much bounded at a single-digit number of browsers.
These days, many companies manufacturer multiple readers that don't use the same reader software (Amazon, I'm looking at you in particular), each with a different set of bugs. The resulting fragmentation in the eBook reader space today makes web development in the 90s seem positively tame by comparison.
But in concept, it's very much the same sort of situation, just turned up to 11.
