Evergreen Browsers

…Exponential growth is seductive, starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative. The future is widely misunderstood…

Today, we anticipate continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow. But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

—Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

I am privileged in two ways that are very rewarding for me:

• I have some insight into the web standards process, due to my friendship with people driving it, and have a notion of the exciting features that are soon to come.
• I get to travel around the world and talk to boots-on-the-ground developers who are building amazing stuff on the web platform, today. Often, I’ll express excitement about some new feature coming to the web platform—whether it’s ES6 features like object proxies or modules, or W3C-specified features like Web Components. But, it’s easy for in-the-trenches developers to dismiss these features as cool but far-off; unhelpful in their current plight; and worse, they are shell-shocked: they have lived through the dark times of Internet Explorer 6, and an out-of-touch W3C. That pain is marked indelibly on their soul.

  Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos. Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

  That’s all. In the distance, someone sings. In the distance.

  My soul is not at peace with having lost her.

  —Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor: 20, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems I’m here with a message of hope. I don’t know who coined the term, but I heard it first from Paul Irish: evergreen browsers. What’s an evergreen browser? One that updates itself without prompting the user.

If you’re like me, when you’re developing a new web application, you put features into mental buckets. There’s the “works in IE7” bucket, the “works in IE8” bucket, “(I think) works in IE9,” and of course, “works in MobileSafari.”

The one bucket I don’t have is the “works in Chrome” bucket. That’s too much mental overhead. Instead, if I want to test whether something works in Chrome, I just pop open a new JS Bin and try it out. I don’t worry about which version they’re on—I assume that by the time my code makes it to production, my users will be on more-or-less the same version as me.

What would the web platform look like if every browser with significant market share updated itself at the same pace—and lack of user intervention—as Chrome?

The good news is that both Internet Explorer and Firefox have adopted this strategy, and now we just have to wait for the last generation of non-evergreen browsers to die out. But even that is happening more rapidly than you might think.

There are, of course, some sticking points. On mobile devices, old versions of Android’s pitiful browser continue to linger. But now that Chrome for Android is ascendant, this too should soon be no more than a painful memory. The only large entity still casting a shadow, from where I sit, is Apple. But given the adoption rates of new iOS versions, we’ll just have to hope that the competitive pressure from Chrome for Android will force them into once again being good citizens of the web.

I am excited to be a web developer. Not only is the pace of innovation increasing, so too is the pace of delivering new features to the end user. My advice: start preparing for the future. It will be here sooner than you think.