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The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the <toast> element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their vi

The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the <toast> element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. But their view of the situation is completely correct; just because this one feature might be useful (heck, when Microsoft dumped XMLHttpRequest on us that was incredible too), doesn't change the fact that we're now living in a web where Google does whatever it wants, adds whatever it wants to Chrome, and the web is at its mercy. If they wanted to add <blink> it'd get added and supported, and other browsers would have to follow lest they become incompatible. There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people in my office use other browsers (these were internal tools). It saddens me that people worship Chrome and yet Firefox has a lot more potential in some areas. Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js and other awesome efforts. Microsoft gave us AJAX when Mozilla reverse engineered it back when standards were not properly standardized which is why AJAX is so XML focused in the name despite being able to fetch other things.
- OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
  I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.
  - tech2 7y ago
    Interestingly I try Chrome once every which and go right back to Firefox for exactly the same reason. I find the Chrome UI intolerable. Tiny tabs, inflexible GUI, less interesting extensions, etc. I also tend to use _many_ tabs (grouped by topic I'm working on) so maybe I'm a bit of an unusual case.
    - Insanity 7y ago
      It is probably a quite subjective thing. I use Firefox as main browser but test things in Chrome. Neither UI really bothers me, but I prefer Firefox for ideological reasons. The dev tools in chrome are better though imo.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        I feel like Firefox's Dev Tools are better in so many small ways at the fundamentals it's really sad every time someone says they prefer Chrome Dev Tools. (Plus, Firefox's Dev Tools inherited from Firebug and at least from that sort of continuity perspective arguably are the most mature Dev Tools codebase.) A lot of the reason so many people seem to like Chrome Dev Tools better seems to be exactly the sort of "Works best in IE6" mentality that so many devs only spend time testing in Chrome and customizing Chrome Dev Tools how they like and making sure Chrome Dev Tools work right that it just becomes inertia that that is what they like better. Little tweaks to sourcemap generation options, for instance, can be all it takes to get Firefox Dev Tools working just as well as Chrome for code debugging, but so many devs work in Chrome only that the defaults in so many places are accidentally so Chrome-centric. Similar goes for all the Chrome-only Dev Tools extensions. At this point even the Dev Tools Extension Models are close enough between Chrome and Firefox that it mostly just needs more people using Firefox for development to catch up on extensions.
        Insanity 7y ago
        Could well be. I do very little web development, and I used chrome back in the days when that was my fulltime job. It might be more of a case of familiarity rather than them actually being better. :)
- m0nty 7y ago
  > Chrome is the new IE Some software houses who supply the company I work for, are refusing to work with anything but Chrome. So it really does seem like the bad old days all over again.
  - notus 7y ago
    It is nothing remotely like the bad old days. I'm assuming you never had to support IE6.
    - xeromal 7y ago
      IE6 was good until it wasn't anymore.
      - munk-a 7y ago
        No, IE6 was far less terrible than IE4, but still amazingly awful. If was from the era of browsers where you had to essentially code up different copies of a page per-browser if you wanted any sort of graphical anything.
        iforgotpassword 7y ago
        No you didn't. You had to code exactly one copy: for IE6. Nobody cared about anything else. Just like nowadays more and more pages only get coded for chrome and might or might not work on Firefox.
        munk-a 7y ago
        Except that IE6 didn't die when IE7 came out - it stuck around. I was working at a company that still had to support IE6 when IE8 was coming out - and firefox was quite popular by that point - we ended up dropping support for it shortly after chrome got popular. IE6 outlived it's expected lifetime by leaps and bounds due to lots of customers stuck on machines locked into running old version of windows due to financial or corporate policy reasons.
- dccoolgai 7y ago
  I don't really agree with the "Chrome is the new IE" sentiment. They participate in the Web Standards process the same as anyone else. That their voice has different gravity in the process due to the fact that they are often the ones pushing the standards forward isn't something they should be compared to IE for. Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different...
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    It is different but not necessarily better. Where IE got really bad is when they stopped developing it. Development really slowed after 5.5 and once 6 was the undisputed champion they just left it to rot. Whatever else can be claimed about Chrome, they're not idle. TBH I think if you want a slogan then "Google is the new AOL" is better. When you look at what their doing across technologies it looks more like reinventing AOL's walled browser for the modern age.
    - friedegg 7y ago
      Obviously every Google product is different, but how many Google products have reached maturity only for Google to basically stop, and then eventually discontinue it after eliminating the competition in the interim?
      - ChrisSD 7y ago
        Chrome and AMP do seem to be part of Google's long term strategy. I don't see them dropping either anytime soon. Well ok they may drop AMP if they finally get it all integrated into the various web specs. but that's a distinction without a difference.
        mcguire 7y ago
        Chrome still has some competition. So does AMP, if you count, you know, HTTP.
      - dnautics 7y ago
- robocat 7y ago
  > Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js And that shows why Chrome is not IE... Chrome jumped in and supported WebAssembly even though they already had a mature equivalent (pNaCl) which they have now deprecated. I just don't understand why there is so much hate for Chrome out there. Sure, we don't always get our way. To me the Chrome team seems to listen to developers and users, and to put the effort in to follow standards, and to keep improving Chrome in ways that I care about as a developer. IE6 did none of that.
  - lostjohnny 7y ago
    > IE6 did none of that IE6 had just different users than Chrome has. But MS did listen to them, even too much actually. MS had their customers intranet developers to make happy, Chrome has its giant father, Google, the AD company. Chrome is much worse in perspective for users freedom.
userbinator 7y ago
There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad At least back then sites were not as reliant on JS, so I think that's one of the ways it was better; sure, sites often looked different in non-IE vs. IE, but you could still consume the mostly-static content (and what wasn't static was almost always ads...) Now there are far too many "appifications" of sites that shouldn't be anything but static pages, JS is required to render their content, and that JS is often very browser-specific.
kdazzle 7y ago
> The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the <toast> element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. I don't know - I kind of figured that was part of the joke - I thought it was pretty clever.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tannhaeuser 7y ago
There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-state budget.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago
  Firefox has rewritten its entire rendering engine, and its entire CSS engine. Writing a browser is incredibly hard, but not infeasible.
  - hajile 7y ago
    While writing rendering engine isn't easy to do, it's extremely easy compared to the HTML part. Even Mozilla isn't in a hurry to rewrite all that code.
    - gsnedders 7y ago
      Depends what you mean by the "HTML part". The HTML parser, which is the only HTML-specific part, was replaced in Firefox 4, with one implementing the algorithm defined in the WHATWG HTML spec. The DOM code there's definitely less motivation to rewrite, in large part because there's a lot less benefit to be gotten from rewriting large parts of it (versus layout or style where there's much more entanglement across the codebase).
    - tannhaeuser 7y ago
      HTML parsing is not that hard compared to CSS/layout/fonts (or even figuring out layout), a competitive JavaScript engine, and the myriad of APIs and site compatibility problems OP talked about. My HTML parser uses SGML which is more generic as it takes the HTML grammar (a DTD) as parameter and computes state machine tables etc. dynamically based on it, thus a bit harder, but still very much doable.
Edmond 7y ago
"There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it." I agree that the monopoly power situation is similar but there really is a big difference between IE hell and today's situation. There is a big difference between one browser having a cool feature that may not be available in other browsers, versus the leading browser strangling everyone in a stasis of mediocrity, which was the case when IE/Microsoft owned the web.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  This is how you get to that situation. It's the "extend" in "embrace, extend, extinguish".
xtf 7y ago
Simply put: Don't write for chrome, write w3c conform. Or better: Use standards which match most browsers at caniuse.com
- richthegeek 7y ago
  That only works if everyone does it. At the moment some people develop only for Chrome because it has the most market share. So they deploy their site using the <toast> thing and suddenly people using Firefox are wondering why things are broken. At this point Firefox can either implement the new feature(s) or lose users. And once FF etc. have implemented it suddenly it's on caniuse.com as "works in all modern browsers".
  - vcavallo 7y ago
    > that only works if everyone does it which is probably why OP is suggesting it
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Even better : Develop for Firefox / Gecko in mind, and ignore Chrome / Chromium / Blink / V8 / Node.js
nerd7473 7y ago
If I don't like something, I'm going to talk about it. The plusses, and the minuses. You can't have everything in life and that is the way I veiw everything (although that has little to do with these odd new html tags).
013a 7y ago
There's a difference between now and the 90s/00s. And its worse now. At least Microsoft's overarching goal was just to get developers to use their platform, by making their platform as useful as possible (even if many of the changes were ultimately misguided). With Google, there's some of this, but there's also some very clear "we're an ads company and we want the ad experience on Chrome to favor us as much as possible, without regard for the user."
- bubblicious 7y ago
  I would say that anyone who has spent an extensive amount of time writing code that needed to work with IE6 or below would disagree with your statement.
SquareWheel 7y ago
>There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web This is a shallow comment. IE was closed-source, cornered the market and then abandoned all development. They stalled the web for years. Today all browser vendors are active in the standardization process, open or nearly open source, and collaborate heavily to implement the same features. Any feature that "only works in X browser" is a result of one browser implementing a feature first, rather than the result of a browser monopoly. For instance prefers-color-scheme was introduced by Safari, than Firefox, and next to-be Chrome. So yes, for a period of one to two months a site might have "worked best in Safari" as a result of this feature adoption. But drawing a parallel to a web dominated by IE6 is completely ignoring all context of the situation. It shows a complete misunderstanding of how the web has evolved.
dhimes 7y ago
You must have missed the post where we all took a blood oath to stick to standards when we develop.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

I have been repeating the Chrome is the new IE meme for the last few years. I even had a boss that only cared about our code working on Chrome and would lose it when I was demoing / developing from FireFox. I only ever demoed in Chrome just to feed that illusion that I was adhering to Chrome but I honestly dont see anything special or better and I still made sure it behaved and worked the same in both. I know people in my office use other browsers (these were internal tools). It saddens me that people worship Chrome and yet Firefox has a lot more potential in some areas. Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js and other awesome efforts. Microsoft gave us AJAX when Mozilla reverse engineered it back when standards were not properly standardized which is why AJAX is so XML focused in the name despite being able to fetch other things.

OnlyOneCannolo 7y ago
I try switching from Chrome to Firefox at least once a year, but the UI design keeps me firmly entrenched as a Chrome user.
- tech2 7y ago
  Interestingly I try Chrome once every which and go right back to Firefox for exactly the same reason. I find the Chrome UI intolerable. Tiny tabs, inflexible GUI, less interesting extensions, etc. I also tend to use _many_ tabs (grouped by topic I'm working on) so maybe I'm a bit of an unusual case.
  - Insanity 7y ago
    It is probably a quite subjective thing. I use Firefox as main browser but test things in Chrome. Neither UI really bothers me, but I prefer Firefox for ideological reasons. The dev tools in chrome are better though imo.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      I feel like Firefox's Dev Tools are better in so many small ways at the fundamentals it's really sad every time someone says they prefer Chrome Dev Tools. (Plus, Firefox's Dev Tools inherited from Firebug and at least from that sort of continuity perspective arguably are the most mature Dev Tools codebase.) A lot of the reason so many people seem to like Chrome Dev Tools better seems to be exactly the sort of "Works best in IE6" mentality that so many devs only spend time testing in Chrome and customizing Chrome Dev Tools how they like and making sure Chrome Dev Tools work right that it just becomes inertia that that is what they like better. Little tweaks to sourcemap generation options, for instance, can be all it takes to get Firefox Dev Tools working just as well as Chrome for code debugging, but so many devs work in Chrome only that the defaults in so many places are accidentally so Chrome-centric. Similar goes for all the Chrome-only Dev Tools extensions. At this point even the Dev Tools Extension Models are close enough between Chrome and Firefox that it mostly just needs more people using Firefox for development to catch up on extensions.
      - Insanity 7y ago
        Could well be. I do very little web development, and I used chrome back in the days when that was my fulltime job. It might be more of a case of familiarity rather than them actually being better. :)
m0nty 7y ago
> Chrome is the new IE Some software houses who supply the company I work for, are refusing to work with anything but Chrome. So it really does seem like the bad old days all over again.
- notus 7y ago
  It is nothing remotely like the bad old days. I'm assuming you never had to support IE6.
  - xeromal 7y ago
    IE6 was good until it wasn't anymore.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      No, IE6 was far less terrible than IE4, but still amazingly awful. If was from the era of browsers where you had to essentially code up different copies of a page per-browser if you wanted any sort of graphical anything.
      - iforgotpassword 7y ago
        No you didn't. You had to code exactly one copy: for IE6. Nobody cared about anything else. Just like nowadays more and more pages only get coded for chrome and might or might not work on Firefox.
        munk-a 7y ago
        Except that IE6 didn't die when IE7 came out - it stuck around. I was working at a company that still had to support IE6 when IE8 was coming out - and firefox was quite popular by that point - we ended up dropping support for it shortly after chrome got popular. IE6 outlived it's expected lifetime by leaps and bounds due to lots of customers stuck on machines locked into running old version of windows due to financial or corporate policy reasons.
dccoolgai 7y ago
I don't really agree with the "Chrome is the new IE" sentiment. They participate in the Web Standards process the same as anyone else. That their voice has different gravity in the process due to the fact that they are often the ones pushing the standards forward isn't something they should be compared to IE for. Devs old enough to recall the halcyon days of IE know it was quite different...
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  It is different but not necessarily better. Where IE got really bad is when they stopped developing it. Development really slowed after 5.5 and once 6 was the undisputed champion they just left it to rot. Whatever else can be claimed about Chrome, they're not idle. TBH I think if you want a slogan then "Google is the new AOL" is better. When you look at what their doing across technologies it looks more like reinventing AOL's walled browser for the modern age.
  - friedegg 7y ago
    Obviously every Google product is different, but how many Google products have reached maturity only for Google to basically stop, and then eventually discontinue it after eliminating the competition in the interim?
    - ChrisSD 7y ago
      Chrome and AMP do seem to be part of Google's long term strategy. I don't see them dropping either anytime soon. Well ok they may drop AMP if they finally get it all integrated into the various web specs. but that's a distinction without a difference.
      - mcguire 7y ago
        Chrome still has some competition. So does AMP, if you count, you know, HTTP.
    - dnautics 7y ago
robocat 7y ago
> Hell it was Mozilla and not Google that gave us WebAssembly through asm.js And that shows why Chrome is not IE... Chrome jumped in and supported WebAssembly even though they already had a mature equivalent (pNaCl) which they have now deprecated. I just don't understand why there is so much hate for Chrome out there. Sure, we don't always get our way. To me the Chrome team seems to listen to developers and users, and to put the effort in to follow standards, and to keep improving Chrome in ways that I care about as a developer. IE6 did none of that.
- lostjohnny 7y ago
  > IE6 did none of that IE6 had just different users than Chrome has. But MS did listen to them, even too much actually. MS had their customers intranet developers to make happy, Chrome has its giant father, Google, the AD company. Chrome is much worse in perspective for users freedom.

userbinator 7y ago

There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad At least back then sites were not as reliant on JS, so I think that's one of the ways it was better; sure, sites often looked different in non-IE vs. IE, but you could still consume the mostly-static content (and what wasn't static was almost always ads...) Now there are far too many "appifications" of sites that shouldn't be anything but static pages, JS is required to render their content, and that JS is often very browser-specific.

kdazzle 7y ago

> The person writing this has to repeat frequently that they're OK with the <toast> element; it's quite funny how hard they try not to upset people. I don't know - I kind of figured that was part of the joke - I thought it was pretty clever.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tannhaeuser 7y ago

There is a difference though: when Firefox was launched, it was still possible to develop a browser from scratch (like Opera was doing back then), and hence lively competition. Nowadays, with WHATWG HTML's feature creep (the HTML "living standard" spec alone weighing in at 1250 pages and 13.3 MB as a PDF, plus tens of CSS specs all over the place, and JavaScript a moving target), that's infeasible for even a nation-state budget.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
Firefox has rewritten its entire rendering engine, and its entire CSS engine. Writing a browser is incredibly hard, but not infeasible.
- hajile 7y ago
  While writing rendering engine isn't easy to do, it's extremely easy compared to the HTML part. Even Mozilla isn't in a hurry to rewrite all that code.
  - gsnedders 7y ago
    Depends what you mean by the "HTML part". The HTML parser, which is the only HTML-specific part, was replaced in Firefox 4, with one implementing the algorithm defined in the WHATWG HTML spec. The DOM code there's definitely less motivation to rewrite, in large part because there's a lot less benefit to be gotten from rewriting large parts of it (versus layout or style where there's much more entanglement across the codebase).
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    HTML parsing is not that hard compared to CSS/layout/fonts (or even figuring out layout), a competitive JavaScript engine, and the myriad of APIs and site compatibility problems OP talked about. My HTML parser uses SGML which is more generic as it takes the HTML grammar (a DTD) as parameter and computes state machine tables etc. dynamically based on it, thus a bit harder, but still very much doable.

Edmond 7y ago

"There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web, and that's sad. There's a difference in developer goodwill, and of course things aren't as buggy as they were back then so it overall doesn't feel like you're "stuck" with Chrome like it did with IE, but... you are. You're just OK with it." I agree that the monopoly power situation is similar but there really is a big difference between IE hell and today's situation. There is a big difference between one browser having a cool feature that may not be available in other browsers, versus the leading browser strangling everyone in a stasis of mediocrity, which was the case when IE/Microsoft owned the web.

jakelazaroff 7y ago
This is how you get to that situation. It's the "extend" in "embrace, extend, extinguish".

xtf 7y ago

Simply put: Don't write for chrome, write w3c conform. Or better: Use standards which match most browsers at caniuse.com

richthegeek 7y ago
That only works if everyone does it. At the moment some people develop only for Chrome because it has the most market share. So they deploy their site using the <toast> thing and suddenly people using Firefox are wondering why things are broken. At this point Firefox can either implement the new feature(s) or lose users. And once FF etc. have implemented it suddenly it's on caniuse.com as "works in all modern browsers".
- vcavallo 7y ago
  > that only works if everyone does it which is probably why OP is suggesting it
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
BlueTemplar 7y ago
Even better : Develop for Firefox / Gecko in mind, and ignore Chrome / Chromium / Blink / V8 / Node.js

nerd7473 7y ago

If I don't like something, I'm going to talk about it. The plusses, and the minuses. You can't have everything in life and that is the way I veiw everything (although that has little to do with these odd new html tags).

013a 7y ago

There's a difference between now and the 90s/00s. And its worse now. At least Microsoft's overarching goal was just to get developers to use their platform, by making their platform as useful as possible (even if many of the changes were ultimately misguided). With Google, there's some of this, but there's also some very clear "we're an ads company and we want the ad experience on Chrome to favor us as much as possible, without regard for the user."

bubblicious 7y ago
I would say that anyone who has spent an extensive amount of time writing code that needed to work with IE6 or below would disagree with your statement.

SquareWheel 7y ago

>There's not really much of a difference between the web today and the "Best viewed in IE" web This is a shallow comment. IE was closed-source, cornered the market and then abandoned all development. They stalled the web for years. Today all browser vendors are active in the standardization process, open or nearly open source, and collaborate heavily to implement the same features. Any feature that "only works in X browser" is a result of one browser implementing a feature first, rather than the result of a browser monopoly. For instance prefers-color-scheme was introduced by Safari, than Firefox, and next to-be Chrome. So yes, for a period of one to two months a site might have "worked best in Safari" as a result of this feature adoption. But drawing a parallel to a web dominated by IE6 is completely ignoring all context of the situation. It shows a complete misunderstanding of how the web has evolved.

dhimes 7y ago

You must have missed the post where we all took a blood oath to stick to standards when we develop.