June 25, 2011

Vendor Dependencies

By Issac Kelly

24 hours ago, I squashed one of the oldest bugs in an otherwise very stable piece of software. The bug was this, we bet on Google, and were wrong.

In 2008, I was in the very early stages of building our first major software product, servee.com. I was the only Full-Time employee of the company, and I went to Google IO (on a student pass..I cheated because I was broke.. and technically still enrolled in school when I bought the ticket). Anyway, They showed off Google Gears which did many things, but the one that we had a use for was FileIO in JavaScript[1]. We used this feature to create a large file, and multiple-file uploader for our CMS. It was awesome at the time, as good as whatever YouTube was doing. By 2010 though, Google had abandoned Gears completely.

They stopped supporting it for new browser, and they stopped updating it, and they didn't roll all the features into Chrome.

This was a disappointment, but mostly a lesson. I had to tell the clients who used that feature, NOT to upgrade FireFox until I fixed this "bug" (vendor dependency). Should I have fixed it as soon as I knew there would be no more browser support? Absolutely, but I bet on a technology that bit me later.

Be careful about who you pick, and what you use, because ultimately, it's your job to support it.

1. This is something that you still can't really do, various security concerns aside, which makes browser based development of certain types of applications very difficult/impossible.