7 ms·

How unbelievably short-sighted. This is how you end up with the situation that happened with Internet Explorer in the 90s most of the 2000s. (Of course, I'll re

How unbelievably short-sighted. This is how you end up with the situation that happened with Internet Explorer in the 90s most of the 2000s. (Of course, I'll readily admit Chromium is far better than IE, but the comparison still holds.) It's not in the best interest of the users or developers for there to be a single web browser. Chromium is not the world wide web. I've seen several articles like this lately and it surprises me that developers aren't aware of the fields in which Mozilla is leading the charge. WebAssembly, for example, is seeing a large portion of development coming from Mozilla. Is Mozilla perfect? Of course not. I could list probably a dozen mistakes and missteps they've made just off the top of my head. But I'm not advocating for everyone to switch to Firefox. I simply prefer options and competition in the browser space. In fact, I wish there were more meaningful browser alternatives out there instead of just a bunch of different GUI wrappers around Chromium.

stephenr 8y ago
> I'll readily admit Chromium is far better than IE This is the part that's often forgotten. IE is how we got XHR. You could even argue IE is how we got `box-sizing: border-box;` (which is essentially IE's legacy box model). IE was once considered better than Netscape (the only real competitor at the time).
- LocalH 8y ago
  It was better, in the early days. IE3 and IE4 were a dream, at least as an enduser. It wasn't until closer to IE6 that it truly became shit
- Lowkeyloki 8y ago
  Not considering speed/efficiency, I don't recall scripting being the worst in IE. (Although, alerting users to scripting errors with alert modals was pretty unforgivable.) My biggest gripe was the poor CSS support. And though it gave us the border-box model, as you mentioned, it was legacy IE's normal box model, which didn't comply to standards. Which is the whole point. Because IE was the most popular browser by a landslide for many years, developers would code specifically to deal with IE's non-standard interpretations of web standards. It was a sad time. Either your site looked like crap in IE or in everything else. Depending on the year or era, that meant developers would make it look right in IE and shrug their shoulders for everyone else since they were just playing the odds. But no matter your outlook on which users you defer to, that's not a choice any developer should have to make.

stephenr 8y ago

> I'll readily admit Chromium is far better than IE This is the part that's often forgotten. IE is how we got XHR. You could even argue IE is how we got `box-sizing: border-box;` (which is essentially IE's legacy box model). IE was once considered better than Netscape (the only real competitor at the time).

LocalH 8y ago
It was better, in the early days. IE3 and IE4 were a dream, at least as an enduser. It wasn't until closer to IE6 that it truly became shit
Lowkeyloki 8y ago
Not considering speed/efficiency, I don't recall scripting being the worst in IE. (Although, alerting users to scripting errors with alert modals was pretty unforgivable.) My biggest gripe was the poor CSS support. And though it gave us the border-box model, as you mentioned, it was legacy IE's normal box model, which didn't comply to standards. Which is the whole point. Because IE was the most popular browser by a landslide for many years, developers would code specifically to deal with IE's non-standard interpretations of web standards. It was a sad time. Either your site looked like crap in IE or in everything else. Depending on the year or era, that meant developers would make it look right in IE and shrug their shoulders for everyone else since they were just playing the odds. But no matter your outlook on which users you defer to, that's not a choice any developer should have to make.