Deep dive into top web developer pain points | Articles

|Challenge|Q1 2021|Q2 2021|Q3 2021|Q4 2021| |--|--|--|--|--| |Keeping up with changes to the web platform or web standards.|27%|26%|27%|22%| |Keeping up with a large number of new and existing tools or frameworks.|26%|26%|25%|21%| |Making a design or experience work the same across browsers.|26%|28%|24%|21%| |Testing across browsers.|23%|24%|20%|20%| |Understanding and implementing security measures.|23%|25%|20%|19%| … Another area of ambiguity is the definition of web standards. When asked about examples around keeping up with standards, many developers pointed out difficulties with keeping up with best practices instead. This is another area we need to clarify on the survey. Developers look for best practices when implementing specific use-cases and patterns. Blog posts and StackOverflow are mentioned as sources for best practices, but developers often wonder if the information they are reading is indeed the best practice and if it is up to date with the latest features and APIs. They would like a more official source to read those. Keeping up with features and APIs that enable new use-cases is a smaller problem. Developers struggle more with features, APIs, and changes to the platform that result in a change in best practices. Most developers agree that compatibility is one of the biggest challenges. Things are improving via efforts like Compat 2021 and Interop 2022, but it's clear that developers don't see it as a solved problem yet. Most developers use polyfills in one way or another. In many cases, however, usage is transparent to developers, since the polyfill can be automatically added by a tool like Babel or a framework. For those who are managing their polyfills themselves, figuring out if a polyfill is "good" can be a problem. Developers mentioned using the number of installs on NPM and the creator of the polyfill as signals. A couple of developers mentioned doing work to remove polyfills that became unnecessary due to dropping support for IE 11. Frameworks introduce fragmentation issues. We heard reports where developers were "stuck" into an older version of a framework, and limited on the features they could use because of that, but that migrating to a newer version of the same framework could be costly and hard to justify.