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Bundled Internet Explorer was particularly troubling because they were promoting ActiveX as the way to provide interactive content and otherwise extend the brow
by mjw1007 9y ago
Bundled Internet Explorer was particularly troubling because they were promoting ActiveX as the way to provide interactive content and otherwise extend the browser, and ActiveX was very closely tied to the Windows API (so that it would be impractical to make arbitrary ActiveX controls work on other operating systems).
I didn't follow the court case and I don't know if that was a central part of it, but if it wasn't it should have been.
It's easy to think, now that JavaScript has won, that ActiveX in browsers was never going to take off, but I think there was a real risk (and as I understand it in South Korea it did reach critical mass and effectively force everyone to have access to Internet Explorer for a decade and a half).
I don't think Google have done anything similar to that with Chrome.
- styfle 9y agoGoogle has produced APIs that only shipped in Chrome...SPDY, NaCl, WebSQL, chrome extension APIs. I think the difference is Google wants other browsers to implement those APIs by providing a path to standardization. SPDY was replaced with HTTP2. NaCl was replaced with Web Assembly. WebSQL was replaced with IndexedDB. Chrome extensions kind of became Web Extensions.
- mjw1007 9y agoI agree, that's what makes the difference. Not just that standardised forms appear, but that Chrome does switch to them. Contrast CSS, where Microsoft participated in the design (while Netscape tried to push their own different thing) and signed off on the standard, but chose not to update their implementation to match what the final standard said.