Fair warning. You’re going to hate this one. I want to stop pushing the web forward for a while. I want a moratorium on new browser features for about a year or so.
featuritis = polyfill hell
Recently I’ve been having serious doubts about the whole push the web forward thing. Why should we push the web forward? And forward to what, exactly? Do we want the web to be at whatever we push it forward to? You never hear those questions.
Pushing the web forward currently means cramming in more copies of native functionality at breakneck speed — interesting stuff, mind you, but there’s just too much of it.
Quick, name all the new features browsers shipped in 2015! You see? You can’t. That’s the problem.
We get ever more features that become ever more complex and need ever more polyfills and other tools to function — tools that are part of the problem, and not of the solution.
To me, Navigation Transitions exemplifies what’s wrong with new browser features today. Its purpose is to allow for a smooth transition from one web page to another, to the point of synchronising the animations on the source and destination pages.
This sounds cool, but why would we want to do that? We’ve done without for years. More importantly, end users have done without for years, and are quite used to a slight delay when they load another page.
Jake Archibald puts it best:
I think most people value features over experience. Hence why perf / offline / progressive enhancement is a hard sell, but push messaging = insta-hit.
We’re pushing the web forward to emulate native more and more, but we can’t out-native native. We are weighed down by the millstone of an ever-expanding set of tools that polyfill everything we don’t understand — and that’s most of a browser’s features nowadays. This is not the future that I want to push the web forward to.
Therefore I call for a moratorium on new browser features of about a year. Let’s postpone all completely new features that as of right now don’t yet work in any browser.
