Windows phones cannot render web pages properly

[Fiann]

*sigh* There has always been a problem with some developers and discipline, code management, version control, documentation, and knowing when to use something in production vs development. So called web developers seems to have an abnormally high number of these types of developers, though.

Those developers are coding to webkit not the standards. Heck HTML5 hasn't been standardized - by the strictest sense it shouldn't even be used in production sites at all. But there is a part of the standard that has somewhat stabilized and might be ok to use under strict control and with the understanding that it very much is use at your own risk.

But many Web Developers don't want to understand this. I doubt many of them really understand how HTML, JavaScript, and CSS actually work and interact with each other. I just see way to many that coopt some lame open source library and then complain when it doesn't work perfectly in their environment.

In my experience, if you stick to published standards wherever possible (and it is possible a lot of places, HTML4 is rather capable) and only deviate in extreme cases into the experimental with a good fallback your websites will largely work across browsers the first time and every time. It's programming, not rocket science.

Exactly this. I don't know how many of you remember the days of yore when IE6 was the dominant browser by a significant margin. MS implemented things their own way a lot of the time and things didn't work right. A lot of developers coded websites to MS standards which ended up breaking it for more standards compliant browsers like Firefox. Now webkit is dominant, especially among mobile browsers, and a lot of devs code specifically to it's idiosyncrasies which causes pages to break for other browsers like IE.

Do you have any evidence for that claim? It would seem pretty self defeating for any web developer to deliberately break their site on one browser with significant market share.

To be fair, I don't test my personal web apps on IE very often, as MS can't be bothered to release IE for Android, iOS or Linux, which I use for development and are the OSs I have easy access to at home. But these are projects for my own personal interest, and the small numbers of users don't generally use IE anyway.

It happens. I've been to several sites in IE where it not only tries to get you to switch browsers but it literally says that they won't allow you to access the site with IE. Not, "This site may not work right in Internet Explorer" but "You're using Internet Explorer. We are not going to allow you to access this site. Come back with a different browser." No I don't remember the site at this point, assuming it still exists. If the devs are that stupid it seems likely that it doesn't.