The web is deteriorating right in front of us, and a big contributor to that is Google

The web is deteriorating right in front of us, and a big contributor to that is Google

The web is nominally an open platform. Whichever team built this decided to build it in a way that it would only support Google’s own web browser. It’s not unreasonable to expect a massive web company to build cross-browser support for their user-facing demos, especially in cases where there is obviously no reason that it needs to be incompatible.

clearly the marketing page of a feature service for a major cloud vendor should be accessible to as many as possible. There's no real reason something as simple as an audio player to play samples doesn't work well on all browsers.

I appreciate the quality of the offering, and indeed I'm excited because I am currently building a product that uses Google's synthesis!

But it's the lack of care displayed here that's really disappointing. It's like nobody involved with this demo went "Hey, maybe people aren't using Chrome and we should at least not totally fail when that happens". It's disappointing; as a mostly front-end dev at a small company, I put a lot of time into making sure that things work cross-platform, even if I don't always get it right. It's disappointing that Google's culture doesn't rate that highly enough.

There are four or five out there. I would expect the average modern web app to be compatible with Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and possibly IE11 if that’s appropriate for the particular use case.