23 ms·

Yeah. It boggles my mind how quickly and totally the amnesia has set in; where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created is perfectly fi

Yeah. It boggles my mind how quickly and totally the amnesia has set in; where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created is perfectly fine with "Just use Chrome" as a solution. I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?!

pcwalton 10y ago
> I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?! This has been a meme for years now. I remember John Resig suggesting this in 2013—ironically, right before the Blink fork that ended mainline WebKit dominance.
- dherman 10y ago
  Wasn't it Joe Hewitt?
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    I'm thinking of http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engines/ http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engine...
jhpriestley 10y ago
This would leave the browser world with one high-quality, open-source implementation as the de facto standard. I don't think this is so self-evidently awful. There are a number of big open-source projects in this sort of position, like git, TeX, linux, GHC. What is special about browsers that we need multiple competing implementations of the standard?
- soperj 10y ago
  git really? there are tons of big projects that don't use git. Java for instance.
  - graphememes 10y ago
    They use it when multiple people code on the same codebase. It's either in Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket and uses git. I haven't seen someone use anything other than git in a long time, and those that do are ancient projects.
    - jordigh 10y ago
      I suppose Firefox is ancient too. They use Mercurial canonically. :-(
      - ergo14 10y ago
        So does Facebook... My company also uses mercurial - I know plenty of people that prefer it over git - but there is no github equivalent for it.
        ori_b 10y ago
        There's bitbucket. It also has free private repositories.
        ergo14 10y ago
        It never reached the mass that github has unfortunately.
        ori_b 10y ago
        Why does that prevent you from using it?
        ergo14 10y ago
- pikzen 10y ago
  mmmmh, delicious delicious high quality open source implementation completely controlled by Google. Because Chrome is definitely not known for implementing stuff on their own and ignoring standards. Same way Google is not known for purposefully worsening performance and experience on their websites to non-Chrome users, and same way Google is not transitioning all important Android capabilities into Google Play Services, which itself is closed source. What could happen with Chrome if they were the only ones on the market, I wonder.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    Have any citations for those bold Anti-competitive claims?
    - pcwalton 10y ago
      Google Earth.
      - sqeaky 10y ago
        That is a noun, please expand.
    - pikzen 10y ago
      - Implementing the newest Google Earth through pNaCl, basically ActiveX by Google - Play Store website threw you out if you were using Firefox on Android | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1131601 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1131601 - Gmail delivered an inferior mobile version to Firefox on Android | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668275 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668275 - Actually, Google fucks with Firefox on Android all the time https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668288 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668288 - Inbox is still Chrome only - Youtube refused to serve webm to Firefox for a while | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970 Is that enough for now? Google is no better than old Microsoft/IE team often. But hey, since you get a shiny browser that implements non standard things, it's okay, right?
- pcwalton 10y ago
  Because defining the Web as a legacy pile of mostly sequential C++ code dating back to the '90s is not a forward-thinking idea. Is your position that Blink's architecture is well suited for getting performance out of modern hardware? Or that C++ is a good foundation on which to build some of the most security-critical software on the planet?
  - 2bitencryption 10y ago
    > Or that C++ is a good foundation on which to build some of the most security-critical software on the planet? I don't care what it's written in. I care who is writing it and how well it is tested. Write it in Brainfuck for all I care, if it works, is efficient, and is safe.
    - pcwalton 10y ago
      And if the language has a direct impact on the efficiency and safety of the product, then what? A memory-safe language dramatically reduces the frequency of memory safety bugs, which are the foremost cause of security vulnerabilities in software like browsers. This is an inconvenient conclusion that everyone wants to deny, because it's, well, inconvenient. But that doesn't make it less true.
      - Spivak 10y ago
        And taking the train dramatically reduces the risk of being in an automobile accident. Another inconvenient conclusion that's being denied is that memory safety errors are at their core due to bad assumptions and logic errors which sadly can't be caught by compilers yet. Memory safe languages make it harder to create a specific types of vulnerabilities and can even keep them in check when they occur which is real a tangible benefit, but those same assumptions and errors will just produce different vulnerabilities. I love Rust -- it's quickly becoming a favorite language of mine, but at some level we have to be realistic that it doesn't solve all the world's problems and evangelizing that everything be rewritten in it or another memory safe language is the programming language equivalent of saying, "you should try using machine learning."
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- cwyers 10y ago
  Most of those aren't interchange formats. You can use Mecurial or Perforce instead of Git; PDF is the interchange format in TeX's space; Linux is an OS, so I don't even know what you're talking about here; for GHC, you can use ML or C or Python or PHP or whatever instead of Haskell. HTML is supposed to be an actual standard for interchange of hypertext.
  - mbel 10y ago
    > or GHC, you can use ML or C or Python or PHP or whatever instead of Haskell. Well there are also other Haskell interpreters and compilers (JHC, UHC, Hugs). Although of course GHC is de facto standard due to it's numerous extensions of the language.
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  I strongly disagree. HTML is used for long-term text archival in science, education, administration, politics, literature, for personal notes and memories, and so on. Do you want to leave all this to a single browser implementation dominated by an ad company?
- pdkl95 10y ago
  When a market with competition becomes a monoculture, every security problem that used to affect only one product becomes a class break[1] that affects everything. Just like the potato famine, software monocultures can fall to a single attacker, who also benefits from the consistent interface. > What is special about browsers Nothing. We need multiple implementations of all software that is relied upon for anything remotely important. It still amazes me that so many businesses critically depend on something that is only available from one source. Without a second source[2], the business lives or dies at the whim of the company they depend on. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source
endorphone 10y ago
where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created While a web monoculture isn't ideal, it's rational that people might have differing comfort levels between an OS-tied, closed-source project actively used to undermine the web, and an OS-agnostic, overwhelmingly open-source project that has been a principal contributor to the web moving forward (and arguably delayed or prevented the wholesale app-ification of the industry).
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I think you're granting way too much favor to a company that uses changes in Chrome to force other companies to do what they want, or as with yesterday's news, to actively block their market competition. Even as an open source project, the fact that decision making and control comes from Google, and the dominant distribution of it is a proprietary version built around Google's corporate needs, it is no more trustworthy than IE at heart.
  - endorphone 10y ago
    One of the fun differences between the Chrome and IE FUD is that the former is based upon "but what if!?!?!" (usually ignoring that there is effectively zero lock-in, everything is standardized and open, etc), while the latter is based upon what actually happened. That you mention the news from yesterday, and report on some cynical, nonsensical comments as if they are fact is a perfect example. I want to be cynical about Google and Chrome. But thus far I have absolutely nothing to actually criticize them on. They literally have kept the web alive, and their attempts to try to clear up the advertising market is yet another example. Or just be cynical about it while everyone migrates to apps.
    - pcwalton 10y ago
      NaCl and Dart are things that actually happened. They were decidedly not standardized.
      - endorphone 10y ago
ng12 10y ago
Uh, the difference is Chrome is usually right. Dealing with Firefox bugs is starting to feel like dealing with IE. Favorite example: a 9 year old bug where a select's option menu will render in the wrong location if there's a transform in the DOM above it (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164)
- pcwalton 10y ago
  I find problems in Gecko much less often than I find problems in Blink. For example, WebKit handles border-collapse by drawing borders on top of one another, which is totally bogus when transparent borders are involved. While not a spec violation per se, Blink's behavior when absolute containing blocks are split across multiple lines is really bizarre (objects parented to that containing block just disappear). WebKit violates the HTML spec when the top margin of an element at the top of the document is queried in quirks mode. Etc. etc.
  - esprehn 10y ago
    Can you file these bugs at crbug.com?
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  I just tried reproducing that bug. It's fixed in multiprocess Firefox, which is the default configuration for most users. It'll be the only configuration a few months for now, once add-ons that are not multiprocess-compatible are no longer supported. Also, Chrome is not usually right in my experience. A lot of times they don't even manage to implement the specs they themselves write correctly... Then someone else has to come along and file bugs on them, and maybe they fix them. Sometimes. All of which is anecdote. Actual data would be much better, of course.
  - ng12 10y ago
    It doesn't matter if it's fixed in some configuration of Firefox; point is it shouldn't take nine years to fix an app-breaking bug. Even early 2000's IE had a better track record than that. It's not like this is the only instance either, here's a 17(!) year old issue about Firefox not supporting option's label attribute: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=option-label https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=option-label Could you specify some issues you ran into on Chrome that affected user space this directly or took anywhere near this long to fix? I've been doing all of my development in Chrome for ~6 years and have done very, very few Chrome-specific workarounds. On the other hand, I ran into both the Firefox bugs mentioned in the last half year.
fooey 10y ago
To be fair, IE was awful and held back the industry. Likely, it was awful and held by the industry by design. To this day, the versions of IE in use by actual people are awful. MS finally has Edge, which isn't awful, but absolutely no one uses it. If I tell an end user to get Chrome or Firefox, that's the end of the problem, whatever system they have it will work. If I try to tell someone to update their IE or to get Edge, I'm stepping into a black hole of trying to divine which version of Windows they're on and how recent their updates are. None of my mac loving coworkers can easily test against IE or Edge and headless unit testing against IE isn't a thing.
- z3t4 10y ago
  You can get a free copy of windows for testing purpuse. you cant do that for mac.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  IE invented nice things like AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) and the "modern" border-box sizing model that has become almost a CSS boilerplate requirement (* { box-sizing: border-box; }), which was how IE originally interpreted the CSS spec. IE wasn't awful at the time it was built. It was ahead of its time in some areas. It became awful because of tech debt: people building for it and only it. Companies having key line of business apps built solely for IE that locked everyone into a compatibility nightmare. It is the same thing with the "Just install Chrome" crowd. If all anyone uses is Chrome, then no one else can move forward without first guaranteeing "Chrome compatibility" rather than spec compatibility. How soon until even Chrome has to maintain compatibility with ancient Chrome bugs because some Fortune 500 company relies on that specific bug for LOB software, willing to throw money at dumb bugs? (That Fortune 500 company could even be Google at this point, because they very much seem to have invested in an internal monoculture.) (Your Mac coworkers can find free Edge testing VMs from Microsoft. There's also "headless" tools like BrowserStack.)
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    > How soon until even Chrome has to maintain compatibility with ancient Chrome bugs because some Fortune 500 company relies on that specific bug for LOB software, willing to throw money at dumb bugs? Too late. This has already been happening for years in the mobile space. It's why WebKit refuses to remove -webkit prefixes, and other browsers are now forced to implement them.
amelius 10y ago
W3C should write machine readable specs and vendors should transform those specs into working browsers, where the transformation is mechanically provably correct.
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  That ship has sailed a long time ago, though I'm all for a formal semantics for CSS, safe JavaScript subsets, etc. Also it's not W3C who do browser and HTML specs these days but WHATWG (eg. Google).
shurcooL 10y ago
People didn't like primarily because IE was fixed version, tied to operating system version, Windows-only. Chrome is evergreen, cross platform, open source. That makes a big difference. Chrome gets bug fixes, implements new standards, etc.
- pcwalton 10y ago
  When IE took over the market, it was implementing new features at a breakneck pace. The browser wars were not "IE sits still and gains market share"--they were "IE develops rapidly, takes over the market, and then stops development".
- hashhar 10y ago
  AJAX, bi-directional text, most conformant CSS 2.0 browser, border-box sizing CSS model are all things where IE was ahead of the times. The reason people hated IE was because it implemented only "just enough" to get ahead and then sat on their asses until someone catched up. That's where the antitrust came from.
  - blackoil 10y ago
    I believe, order is reverse. IE team was dismantled after the antitrust suit.
- zp-j 10y ago
  Sorry, Chrome is not open-sourced, Chromium is.
  - shurcooL 10y ago
    That is a valid point, thank you for bringing it up.
moron4hire 10y ago
It's not the same crowd. We've been pumping and dumping tons of "bootcamp" programmers on the field. With the way things go, experienced professionals who know the old gods and the new will always be an extreme minority, just from attrition.
staticassertion 10y ago
>where the same crowd who vilified IE It's a different crowd, I think.
paulddraper 10y ago
You have a point, but at least Chrome doesn't need me to install a specific OS at a specific version to make it work. Installing a new OS to view a webpage was a tall order.

pcwalton 10y ago

> I've seen people seriously claim that every browser should use WebKit and all the other rendering engines should be thrown out, and that this would be "for the good of the web". What?! This has been a meme for years now. I remember John Resig suggesting this in 2013—ironically, right before the Blink fork that ended mainline WebKit dominance.

dherman 10y ago
Wasn't it Joe Hewitt?
- pcwalton 10y ago
  I'm thinking of http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engines/ http://ejohn.org/blog/webkit-is-the-jquery-of-browser-engine...

jhpriestley 10y ago

This would leave the browser world with one high-quality, open-source implementation as the de facto standard. I don't think this is so self-evidently awful. There are a number of big open-source projects in this sort of position, like git, TeX, linux, GHC. What is special about browsers that we need multiple competing implementations of the standard?

soperj 10y ago
git really? there are tons of big projects that don't use git. Java for instance.
- graphememes 10y ago
  They use it when multiple people code on the same codebase. It's either in Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket and uses git. I haven't seen someone use anything other than git in a long time, and those that do are ancient projects.
  - jordigh 10y ago
    I suppose Firefox is ancient too. They use Mercurial canonically. :-(
    - ergo14 10y ago
      So does Facebook... My company also uses mercurial - I know plenty of people that prefer it over git - but there is no github equivalent for it.
      - ori_b 10y ago
        There's bitbucket. It also has free private repositories.
        ergo14 10y ago
        It never reached the mass that github has unfortunately.
        ori_b 10y ago
        Why does that prevent you from using it?
        ergo14 10y ago
pikzen 10y ago
mmmmh, delicious delicious high quality open source implementation completely controlled by Google. Because Chrome is definitely not known for implementing stuff on their own and ignoring standards. Same way Google is not known for purposefully worsening performance and experience on their websites to non-Chrome users, and same way Google is not transitioning all important Android capabilities into Google Play Services, which itself is closed source. What could happen with Chrome if they were the only ones on the market, I wonder.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  Have any citations for those bold Anti-competitive claims?
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    Google Earth.
    - sqeaky 10y ago
      That is a noun, please expand.
  - pikzen 10y ago
    - Implementing the newest Google Earth through pNaCl, basically ActiveX by Google - Play Store website threw you out if you were using Firefox on Android | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1131601 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1131601 - Gmail delivered an inferior mobile version to Firefox on Android | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668275 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668275 - Actually, Google fucks with Firefox on Android all the time https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668288 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668288 - Inbox is still Chrome only - Youtube refused to serve webm to Firefox for a while | https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233970 Is that enough for now? Google is no better than old Microsoft/IE team often. But hey, since you get a shiny browser that implements non standard things, it's okay, right?
pcwalton 10y ago
Because defining the Web as a legacy pile of mostly sequential C++ code dating back to the '90s is not a forward-thinking idea. Is your position that Blink's architecture is well suited for getting performance out of modern hardware? Or that C++ is a good foundation on which to build some of the most security-critical software on the planet?
- 2bitencryption 10y ago
  > Or that C++ is a good foundation on which to build some of the most security-critical software on the planet? I don't care what it's written in. I care who is writing it and how well it is tested. Write it in Brainfuck for all I care, if it works, is efficient, and is safe.
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    And if the language has a direct impact on the efficiency and safety of the product, then what? A memory-safe language dramatically reduces the frequency of memory safety bugs, which are the foremost cause of security vulnerabilities in software like browsers. This is an inconvenient conclusion that everyone wants to deny, because it's, well, inconvenient. But that doesn't make it less true.
    - Spivak 10y ago
      And taking the train dramatically reduces the risk of being in an automobile accident. Another inconvenient conclusion that's being denied is that memory safety errors are at their core due to bad assumptions and logic errors which sadly can't be caught by compilers yet. Memory safe languages make it harder to create a specific types of vulnerabilities and can even keep them in check when they occur which is real a tangible benefit, but those same assumptions and errors will just produce different vulnerabilities. I love Rust -- it's quickly becoming a favorite language of mine, but at some level we have to be realistic that it doesn't solve all the world's problems and evangelizing that everything be rewritten in it or another memory safe language is the programming language equivalent of saying, "you should try using machine learning."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cwyers 10y ago
Most of those aren't interchange formats. You can use Mecurial or Perforce instead of Git; PDF is the interchange format in TeX's space; Linux is an OS, so I don't even know what you're talking about here; for GHC, you can use ML or C or Python or PHP or whatever instead of Haskell. HTML is supposed to be an actual standard for interchange of hypertext.
- mbel 10y ago
  > or GHC, you can use ML or C or Python or PHP or whatever instead of Haskell. Well there are also other Haskell interpreters and compilers (JHC, UHC, Hugs). Although of course GHC is de facto standard due to it's numerous extensions of the language.
tannhaeuser 10y ago
I strongly disagree. HTML is used for long-term text archival in science, education, administration, politics, literature, for personal notes and memories, and so on. Do you want to leave all this to a single browser implementation dominated by an ad company?
pdkl95 10y ago
When a market with competition becomes a monoculture, every security problem that used to affect only one product becomes a class break[1] that affects everything. Just like the potato famine, software monocultures can fall to a single attacker, who also benefits from the consistent interface. > What is special about browsers Nothing. We need multiple implementations of all software that is relied upon for anything remotely important. It still amazes me that so many businesses critically depend on something that is only available from one source. Without a second source[2], the business lives or dies at the whim of the company they depend on. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/class_breaks.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_source

endorphone 10y ago

where the same crowd who vilified IE and the web monoculture it created While a web monoculture isn't ideal, it's rational that people might have differing comfort levels between an OS-tied, closed-source project actively used to undermine the web, and an OS-agnostic, overwhelmingly open-source project that has been a principal contributor to the web moving forward (and arguably delayed or prevented the wholesale app-ification of the industry).

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I think you're granting way too much favor to a company that uses changes in Chrome to force other companies to do what they want, or as with yesterday's news, to actively block their market competition. Even as an open source project, the fact that decision making and control comes from Google, and the dominant distribution of it is a proprietary version built around Google's corporate needs, it is no more trustworthy than IE at heart.
- endorphone 10y ago
  One of the fun differences between the Chrome and IE FUD is that the former is based upon "but what if!?!?!" (usually ignoring that there is effectively zero lock-in, everything is standardized and open, etc), while the latter is based upon what actually happened. That you mention the news from yesterday, and report on some cynical, nonsensical comments as if they are fact is a perfect example. I want to be cynical about Google and Chrome. But thus far I have absolutely nothing to actually criticize them on. They literally have kept the web alive, and their attempts to try to clear up the advertising market is yet another example. Or just be cynical about it while everyone migrates to apps.
  - pcwalton 10y ago
    NaCl and Dart are things that actually happened. They were decidedly not standardized.
    - endorphone 10y ago

ng12 10y ago

Uh, the difference is Chrome is usually right. Dealing with Firefox bugs is starting to feel like dealing with IE. Favorite example: a 9 year old bug where a select's option menu will render in the wrong location if there's a transform in the DOM above it (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=455164)

pcwalton 10y ago
I find problems in Gecko much less often than I find problems in Blink. For example, WebKit handles border-collapse by drawing borders on top of one another, which is totally bogus when transparent borders are involved. While not a spec violation per se, Blink's behavior when absolute containing blocks are split across multiple lines is really bizarre (objects parented to that containing block just disappear). WebKit violates the HTML spec when the top margin of an element at the top of the document is queried in quirks mode. Etc. etc.
- esprehn 10y ago
  Can you file these bugs at crbug.com?
bzbarsky 10y ago
I just tried reproducing that bug. It's fixed in multiprocess Firefox, which is the default configuration for most users. It'll be the only configuration a few months for now, once add-ons that are not multiprocess-compatible are no longer supported. Also, Chrome is not usually right in my experience. A lot of times they don't even manage to implement the specs they themselves write correctly... Then someone else has to come along and file bugs on them, and maybe they fix them. Sometimes. All of which is anecdote. Actual data would be much better, of course.
- ng12 10y ago
  It doesn't matter if it's fixed in some configuration of Firefox; point is it shouldn't take nine years to fix an app-breaking bug. Even early 2000's IE had a better track record than that. It's not like this is the only instance either, here's a 17(!) year old issue about Firefox not supporting option's label attribute: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=option-label https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=option-label Could you specify some issues you ran into on Chrome that affected user space this directly or took anywhere near this long to fix? I've been doing all of my development in Chrome for ~6 years and have done very, very few Chrome-specific workarounds. On the other hand, I ran into both the Firefox bugs mentioned in the last half year.

fooey 10y ago

To be fair, IE was awful and held back the industry. Likely, it was awful and held by the industry by design. To this day, the versions of IE in use by actual people are awful. MS finally has Edge, which isn't awful, but absolutely no one uses it. If I tell an end user to get Chrome or Firefox, that's the end of the problem, whatever system they have it will work. If I try to tell someone to update their IE or to get Edge, I'm stepping into a black hole of trying to divine which version of Windows they're on and how recent their updates are. None of my mac loving coworkers can easily test against IE or Edge and headless unit testing against IE isn't a thing.

z3t4 10y ago
You can get a free copy of windows for testing purpuse. you cant do that for mac.
WorldMaker 10y ago
IE invented nice things like AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) and the "modern" border-box sizing model that has become almost a CSS boilerplate requirement (* { box-sizing: border-box; }), which was how IE originally interpreted the CSS spec. IE wasn't awful at the time it was built. It was ahead of its time in some areas. It became awful because of tech debt: people building for it and only it. Companies having key line of business apps built solely for IE that locked everyone into a compatibility nightmare. It is the same thing with the "Just install Chrome" crowd. If all anyone uses is Chrome, then no one else can move forward without first guaranteeing "Chrome compatibility" rather than spec compatibility. How soon until even Chrome has to maintain compatibility with ancient Chrome bugs because some Fortune 500 company relies on that specific bug for LOB software, willing to throw money at dumb bugs? (That Fortune 500 company could even be Google at this point, because they very much seem to have invested in an internal monoculture.) (Your Mac coworkers can find free Edge testing VMs from Microsoft. There's also "headless" tools like BrowserStack.)
- pcwalton 10y ago
  > How soon until even Chrome has to maintain compatibility with ancient Chrome bugs because some Fortune 500 company relies on that specific bug for LOB software, willing to throw money at dumb bugs? Too late. This has already been happening for years in the mobile space. It's why WebKit refuses to remove -webkit prefixes, and other browsers are now forced to implement them.

amelius 10y ago

W3C should write machine readable specs and vendors should transform those specs into working browsers, where the transformation is mechanically provably correct.

tannhaeuser 10y ago
That ship has sailed a long time ago, though I'm all for a formal semantics for CSS, safe JavaScript subsets, etc. Also it's not W3C who do browser and HTML specs these days but WHATWG (eg. Google).

shurcooL 10y ago

People didn't like primarily because IE was fixed version, tied to operating system version, Windows-only. Chrome is evergreen, cross platform, open source. That makes a big difference. Chrome gets bug fixes, implements new standards, etc.

pcwalton 10y ago
When IE took over the market, it was implementing new features at a breakneck pace. The browser wars were not "IE sits still and gains market share"--they were "IE develops rapidly, takes over the market, and then stops development".
hashhar 10y ago
AJAX, bi-directional text, most conformant CSS 2.0 browser, border-box sizing CSS model are all things where IE was ahead of the times. The reason people hated IE was because it implemented only "just enough" to get ahead and then sat on their asses until someone catched up. That's where the antitrust came from.
- blackoil 10y ago
  I believe, order is reverse. IE team was dismantled after the antitrust suit.
zp-j 10y ago
Sorry, Chrome is not open-sourced, Chromium is.
- shurcooL 10y ago
  That is a valid point, thank you for bringing it up.

moron4hire 10y ago

It's not the same crowd. We've been pumping and dumping tons of "bootcamp" programmers on the field. With the way things go, experienced professionals who know the old gods and the new will always be an extreme minority, just from attrition.

staticassertion 10y ago

>where the same crowd who vilified IE It's a different crowd, I think.

paulddraper 10y ago

You have a point, but at least Chrome doesn't need me to install a specific OS at a specific version to make it work. Installing a new OS to view a webpage was a tall order.