Some time ago I wrote about why I think every browser should show the alternative text while images are loading. I opened issues for every major browser engine and was looking forward to hear positive replies as I was really sure there couldn’t be a negative aspect about it. Some kindly people replied, said they already tested it and the user experience was not improved, pointed me to edge cases I haven’t thought about and made me rethink. It’s one of the cases where I say to myself “Hey, this should be really easy to implement” without thinking about the whole picture.
There is no easy #
At a first glance many things look easy to implement/fix, but in the end it is probably not easy, but really hard. So before you shout “Implement this now, that’s easy” make sure you really thought about all possible use and egde cases. I also have been complaining about browsers not implementing a feature, often because I needed the feature for a special use case right now and thought everybody wants this and it shouldn’t be more than a day of work for an engineer to implement it. I have to say I was wrong every single time. If you really want to have a feature implemented do a lot of research first: What’s the use cases for the feature? Are there any edge cases which makes it hard/impossible to implement? Do other people also want this feature or is something you probably only need now for the current project you are working on?
Thanks to everyone working on browsers; Thank you!