i’m not sure how much they use GWT over handwriting code, but that wouldn’t be an excuse as I’ve worked with the GWT guys to help them make it work in Opera, and they even report Opera issues when they find them. They even wanted to try to get it working on all sorts of devices like the DS.

Actually that was also my firt thought when Firefox 3 came out.

And Firefox 2.

Sigh.

“I’m looking forward for them to take the open web seriously by removing their browser sniffing that blocks us and other browsers from their services. They have started on the right foot recently by removing the sniffing on Docs and in the process of removing it on spreadsheets, but there is quite a lot more. I’ve seen services where they block Safari too, which they really can’t get away with if they accept their own browser but not one based on the same engine.”

(I sense, perhaps incorrectly, that there’s the underlying implication that browser sniffing is being done for non-technical reasons)

Google has loads of engineers and loads of people with Phds and other weird leet-speak-like credentials. People who can do funny things with the two thousandth digit of pi. But it seems like there’s not much depth in web development.

From what I can see, the Google web development approach is to write everything in Java, and use GWT which ‘abstracts’ the HTML, CSS and JavaScript away from them. In effect, GWT is their web developer.

Unfortunately that web developer can’t, or doesn’t have the experience to deal with cross-browser issues – the code is only as good as the compiler can generate. And that leads to browser sniffing as a mitigating approach – easy solution when you don’t understand the implications and impact of it.

I see the same issue over and over where an engineer (as in ‘not a web developer’) or a piece of software tries to emulate the skills and experience of a web developer. They don’t have a good understanding of concepts like rendering differences and browser quirks, progressive enhancement, accessibility. And browser sniffing is used to paper over those shortcomings.

So many smart people can’t all be that stupid to think that browser sniffing is a tolerable practice. I’d hope.

And I did absolutely love Opera’s Swedish Chef response to Microsoft’s deliberate blacklisting of the Opera user-agent string via browser sniffing a few years back. Hands down, that was the best response ever.

Mike.