This content originally appeared on Adactio: Journal and was authored by Adactio: Journal
Four years ago I wrote about something that has long puzzled me in the world of front-end development. Trust:
The mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries.
Developers are more likely to trust, say, Bootstrap than they are to trust CSS grid or custom properties. Developers are more likely to trust React than they are to trust web components.
That post got some thoughtful responses but I never really understood the imbalance of trust and suspicion:
I’m kind of confused by this prevalent mindset of trusting third-party code more than built-in browser features.
But something happened recently that helped me understand that mindset better.
I wrote a while back about how the datalist element on iOS has been completely fucked up. It’s worse than if Safari simply didn’t support it.
Breaking the web like that should be a five-alarm fire, but nobody is in any rush to fix it. I recall a similar lackadaisical attitude when Safari completely broke their implentation of IndexedDB.
I had it in my head that browser features followed a forward path generally. They’d be iterated on and improved on to iron out any glitches, but it was reasonable to expect things to get better with each new version of a browser.
Now I see that’s not necessarily the case.
Had I used an over-engineered JavaScript library instead of the datalist element, I wouldn’t be facing the current situation of having to use browser-sniffing to avoid sending a standard HTML element to any browser on iOS.
Sure, that third-party JavaScript would mean that users are downloading more code, and it probably wouldn’t work well with assistive technology, but as long as I didn’t touch it, it would continue to work. That should be true of web standards—I should be able to use them secure in the knowledge that they won’t suddenly shit the bed.
Perhaps I should be grateful to Apple for dispelling my naïveté. I now have much more empathy and understanding for web developers who are suspicious of web standards and prefer to use third-party libraries instead.
Good job, Apple. Happy anniversary.
This content originally appeared on Adactio: Journal and was authored by Adactio: Journal
Adactio: Journal | Sciencx (2026-04-02T14:57:40+00:00) Mistrust. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2026/04/02/mistrust/
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