First of all, the browser is not catching up fast enough, I guess we can blame on Microsoft. Because IE has the biggest market share and killed all other players around and not improving IE for more innovations for many years. Firefox has done much better job than Microsoft, and I have to say that IE 8 is just a copycat of Firefox and Safari.
All web developers will agree with me that developing a Web Application is getting more and more complicated, especially when new Browser version keep coming out (IE 8 has done a good and right job this time, the IE7 compatible mode). The advantage of Web Application than Client Application is that it have no version issue, just update your codes on server and the client will have most updated version. But this is wrong. I wonder if this will still work when IE9 and IE10 comes out? From my point of view, working on web application has become a harder work than Client Application because you have to keep maintain multiple versions of your applications, especially when you are doing a business on Internet, and most of time we do it in the same file (like using CSS hacks).
For an example, currently most of the browsers does not support multiple file upload (Weird, nobody wants to upload 100 files 1 by 1?). The best solution is to use Flash component to enable “multiple select files” dialog and pass selected files to application to do upload. So you have to take care at least 5 parts: the Flash, the HTML, the CSS, the Javascript and of course the back-end scripts like PHP or JSP. Each has its own version issue and each has compatibility issue with different Browser versions. Fortunately we now have many framework to ease our jobs but it is still not easy to study and maintain a framework (WHAT! Framework HAS its own version!?).
Web worker is becoming a more challenging work than ever before. And I can see some kind of revolution will coming to web worker very soon.
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