11 ms·

Chrome is not the new IE

asddubs 6y ago
this half-article just seems like pointless arguing over definitions. people aren't saying chrome is the new IE because the two situations are exactly alike in every way. but google, as a private entity, now effectively has a monopoly on deciding what the web should function like.
- The_rationalist 6y ago
  Yeah because Microsoft is a small company that has not a say in it?
  - leshenka 6y ago
    Oh do they? In what way?
    - The_rationalist 6y ago
      For example they rejected the future changes that were potentially limiting uBlock Origin. But most of the time, chromium Google devs are just talented engineers and Microsoft has not to conflict much with their excellence
      - frank2 6y ago
        Would you please say how you know that Microsoft has (in your words) "rejected the future changes that were potentially limiting uBlock Origin"? E.g., did a Microsoft executive say something to a journalist, who wrote it down somewhere where you subsequently read it? E.g., do you know people who work at Microsoft?
naniwaduni 6y ago
"It's different looking from the inside" is little consolation to those of us on the outside.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I frequently find conversations with Googlers with regards to privacy and trust always end this way. The assumption is if you were just a Googler, if you knew what working at Google was like, you'd also believe it is a good thing. But since you don't have that inside Google knowledge, just trust them.
kryptiskt 6y ago
It's worse, because this time there is no hope on the horizon.
- cloudwizard 6y ago
  When IE6 was king, there was no hope on horizon. IE6 came out in 2001, Chrome did not come out until 2008.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Mozilla was there.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      I'm guessing them mean in terms of anything likely to actually unseat IE. Netscape->Mozilla->Firefox had been around years and were still only minor players ~20% market share. Chrome on the other hand saw nearly instant hockey-stick growth. I remember I switched almost instantly after a quick try and everything was so much faster.
  - n1vz3r 6y ago
    How about Netscape communicator (I used it since 2003), then Firefox (first release was in 2004)?
    - int_19h 6y ago
      There was Opera, as well. But with all of these, you constantly ran into IE-only websites. Which got away with it because most people were running IE. And that's why people are saying that Chrome is the new IE - because we're seeing that history repeating, with websites written only for and tested only on Chrome and Safari (and I doubt Safari would be anywhere if it weren't effectively forced onto iOS users).
EugeneOZ 6y ago
Author doesn't understand what "the new IE" actually means.
- KarimDaghari 6y ago
  What does it mean? (Honest question)
  - EugeneOZ 6y ago
    alias of the internet for users, main target for devs and designers. Chrome is the new IE.
    - rossjudson 6y ago
      Uh...no. Perhaps you weren't there. Microsoft wanted IE to be a wedge to drive Windows into enterprises. An open, standards-based web threatened that quite deeply (particularly one where the experiences that could be created could rival desktop apps). Microsoft adopted a two-pronged approach. One was the inclusion of IE into the operating system to ensure the ground was seeded, and IE would be ubiquitous (keep in mind this was prior to Apple products being a realistic alternative in enterprise settings, so it was PC/Windows everywhere). The second part was investing significant engineering efforts into ensuring that Windows- and Office-specific capabilities could emerge through IE (and only IE). For example, if you wanted vector graphics you could use Office to produce VML and that could be viewed through IE (only). Pointedly, IE did not support SVG, which was the other major vector graphics standard at the time. This neatly (and painfully) fragmented the market for anyone who wanted to produce vector graphics as part of a solution. You had to find a way to support VML and SVG if you wanted that to happen (and many early graphical toolkits for the web did precisely that). All development for IE was conducted as closed source. Microsoft had no particular interest in making the browser compatible with the web standards, because as synergy between Windows and IE created a development target with benefits for Microsoft. Nobody else could create an equivalent to IE that would replicate the Microsoft-specific capabilities. The lack of standards-support created stickiness that kept IE around for a long time, because enterprises couldn't (or didn't feel like paying for) the changes necessary to bring apps into standards compliance. A wholesale shift towards Adobe Flash was made a big crack in IE's armor. Flash ran everywhere, and sophisticated solutions could be built with it. Real web standards also made a lot of progress, and IE's creaking old engine was easily outperformed and "out-standarded" by Chrome. The subsequent rise of Apple and fall of Flash cemented Chrome (and Safari) as solid performers that could be used to deliver enterprise solutions and worked on multiple platforms. Is Chrome the new IE? Well, is Chrome being used to drive Google-specific functionality that can only be used with other Google technologies, and can't be implemented elsewhere? Does Chrome actively avoid standards? Is Chrome actively attempting to fragment the standards? Is Chrome developed as closed source? The thing is, Microsoft's strategy stood a pretty good chance of working. I'm always amazed at how IE stuck around when there were better alternatives, and how long it took before market pressure forced Microsoft towards web standards. A lot of money was spent on Enterprise Windows, and a lot of solutions used Microsoft-specific parts of IE. Enterprise dollars cast a long shadow, over time.
csours 6y ago
I feel like people don't remember how terrible IE 6 was for so long. You can criticize Google for any number of things, but they certainly want browsers to be as good and as capable as possible.
- Phenix88be 6y ago
  The issue is not a technical one. It's politics...
- asddubs 6y ago
  I don't really think people are criticizing google for not wanting browsers to be capable when they say that chrome is the new IE
  - csours 6y ago
    I agree, and that's why I think it's not the new IE. Like I said, it is very fair to criticize google and fear the monopoly of Chrome, but it won't be like the monopoly of IE.
  - xnx 6y ago
    I don't know what other people think, but IE to me is synonymous with a browser that was good, but then stopped improving in any meaningful way for years. The first version of Chrome showed that there was still immense worthwhile improvements that could be made in browsers. If anything, the rate of improvements to Chrome is accelerating, even after they established marketshare dominance.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      When Chrome came out I had been using Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox for about 10 years. Then Chrome seemed to blow it out of the water in terms of speed improvements. I switched virtually over night.
      - xnx 6y ago
n1vz3r 6y ago
The article is just an opinion and some claims, supported by zero evidence. Yes, Google is interested that Web continues to live. But article omits that Google only wants the Web that exists on Google's terms. That's why they practically rebuilt the web themselves, on all levels, from protocol to the client (spdy, webp, amp, dart, chromeos & android, chromium).
- tssva 6y ago
  Your comment is just an opinion and some claims supported by zero evidence.
  - zakki 6y ago
    Aren’t all protocols gp mentioned the evidence, are they?
    - Chyzwar 6y ago
      spdy become HTTP2, quic become HTTP3 it is expensive in time and money to develop and test new ideas in protocols. I think it is a bit unfair to to bundle android, chromium and AMP into same bag. AMP is clearly driven by money but there is a lot of open source that benefit everyone. Google is big company. I think trying to paint whole google as evil is not effective.
      - rhacker 6y ago
        It's like this beast that does these benevolent things, but at some point it catches up to them and they shut something down after getting people kinda hooked. For example Picasa - massively popular - free and pretty amazing desktop photo management tool. It slowly morphed such that all of the users of it were just folded into a cloud offering: Drive. Chrome and all of it's open source awesomeness, again, mostly used to fold people into the bigger profitable picture. So even though there are developers that work at Google creating protocols that help everyone, including non-Chrome browsers - that benevolence has a product manager paying that developer's time. At some stage it's not all free beer.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
Seems reasonable enough to me. If URLs were no longer a thing, for what reason would I Google anything? How would google create results if they couldn't crawl publicly accessible websites? The value of the search engine and a public internet seem hand-in-hand.
- djxfade 6y ago
  Well if Google is already hosting all the content in their walled garden (see AMP), this would still be able to crawl the content, and even be able to be the exclusive platform that could crawl that content (in theory)
  - Bnshsysjab 6y ago
    I was a bit young at the time but isn’t this what AOL tried to achieve?
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      Somewhat: there was definitely a walled-garden with an entire AOL ecosystem, but that wall also had a door you could walk through out into the wild west web of the times.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    True, but fortunately the vast majority of content isn't fronted by AMP. Most of my queries don't return AMP pages.
  - xnx 6y ago
    This is probably straying a little off-topic, but AMP seems nothing like a walled garden when compared to Facebook, Instagram, or Apple app store.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      AMP is nothing like a walled garden, period. Anyone can host it.
Lammy 6y ago
> IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next" I was under the impression that HTAs were what they viewed as "next", letting developers host and dynamically generate applications that would run over the network on Windows (or otherwise IE-equipped, hence IE for Solaris, et al) clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application It even has that whole super-granular "Zones" security system to e.g. trust an intranet-hosted HTA more than a publicly-hosted one. Am I off-base here on my historic Microsoft speculation? :)
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I kind of like seeing articles like this, where you get to see the mental gymnastics (sometimes a simple somersault, sometimes a double twisting triple backflip) that employees use to justify to themselves "why I am not as evil as those people in that other company." Sure, I don't believe Chrome has the same problems that IE did either, but I definitely do believe Chrome uses its dominant position primarily in service to extending Google's desires for the web. E.g. signed HTTP exchanges are more AMP shit that nobody asked for.
- gizmodo59 6y ago
  Sorry but I like amp. I don’t want sites like the guardian to drain my phone battery and load in 10 seconds. I understand if it’s bad for publishers but as a consumer I love it. To suggest that an end user would go about disabling JavaScript and other reasons just shows how HN is in a bubble and don’t really understand that 99% of the users don’t care.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    There are many ways to go about speeding up the websites for the end users that are less technically involved for everyone and require a new subset of markup and standard.
    - macspoofing 6y ago
      >There are many ways to go about speeding up the websites for the end users that are less technically involved for everyone and require a new subset of markup and standard. So why isn't it done?
      - searchableguy 6y ago
        Google could simply cache the web pages and strip them naked. Reader mode on browsers do a good job of it on most sites and they can publish guidelines on how to structure your site to make it easier for reader mode to work which wouldn't be that problematic (it would also encourage accessibility).
francasso 6y ago
I believe he is in good faith. My concern is that his opinions and what corporate policy is going to push for in a monopoly situation are two different things. You only have so much power as a technical person. Policies that are good for the community align with a company bottom line only when there is competition. Otherwise things degenerate, it might take time but I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. Especially when the barrier to entry is so high.
sukilot 6y ago
Someone's going to get a friendly email from in house counsel tomorrow morning....
ineedasername 6y ago
It's not the new IE in so far as the problems with it are not the same as the problems IE had. IE was a stagnant platform with proprietary technology that still haunts my workplace: Cognos < v.11 only has complete functionality with IE. For a couple of years we could only use our primary ERP system with a specific version of JVM in a specific version of IE. IE failed (at least in part) because it failed the consumer experience. Chrome generally gives users a good experience: Page load times, better in its own very popular apps (though apparently sand-bagged against competitors) built in high-quality search, etc. The reasons it fails are, in my opinion, primarily on the privacy front.
The_rationalist 6y ago
Chromium is the exact opposite of internet explorer: Internet Explorer slowed down progress by getting low human resources, chromium on the other hand has more human resources than any browser has ever had (especially since Microsoft joined them) and enrich the web through new features at an unprecedented pace. Internet explorer was stagnation while chromium is making the web a better platform in real-time The new IE obviously is webkit which miraculously can still run most websites,but for how long? After the mozilla lay offs, it's probable that they will slowly but surely get massive webcompat issues too
- pritambaral 6y ago
  The issue is not a technical one. It's political. Even in the case of IE, the issue wasn't a technical one. The issue was that MS held a monopoly on the web. They might not have abused it the same way Google is trying to today, but the specific means of abuse isn't the primary problem. Let me use your words to illustrate my point better. You said, "... chromium is making the web a better platform in real-time", but it is not "the web" that chromium is improving, but Google's private version of it.
- userbinator 6y ago
  You call it "stagnation", I call it "stability" --- something that seems to be ignored or even actively discouraged by a lot of these "modern" trends.
  - esperent 6y ago
    I also call it stagnation. Stability suggests that you are in a good place and don't need to move on. IE was anything but a good place, in particular for the people that had to build things for it. Not all modern trends in web dev are good, but there have been many, many quality of life improvements for developers and users alike since IE finally stopped being so ubiquitously supported.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      It was definitely a much better place back then for everyone who did not have to rely on IE, since the heavy abuse of JS was not common and sites were far simpler and more content-focused as a result.
m0zg 6y ago
Twitter bio: "Web Standards at Google in my spare time". It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
candiddevmike 6y ago
Safari is the new IE. Apple's ecosystem is holding back the web severely by shipping a crippled web browser. Safari severely lags behind other browsers, and due to how iOS and the like require other browsers (like Chrome) to use it's archaic rendering engine, it hurts competition as much as the 30% store tax. No PWAs, no notifications, no native experience. I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.
- kevincox 6y ago
  Also you can't test on it without paying them thousands of dollars for hardware. I remember maintaining a bunch of sites and university, and while IE11 was missing a couple of APIs (like Promise) at least I could download a VM straight from Microsoft and figure out what was going wrong. I still have no way to test on Safari which is becoming more and more annoying as they "fall" behind.
  - candiddevmike 6y ago
    I learned that on Linux, GNOME Web (Epiphany) is basically Safari. It will exhibit most of the quirks and rendering issues, and it has a decent dev console. It definitely helps avoid paying the Apple tax.
    - The_rationalist 6y ago
      Yeah but webkit on Linux is basically unmaintained / untested and therefore there can be many confusing webkit Linux only bugs
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        The Igalia team maintains WebKit for GTK+ (among many other platforms). They are certainly smaller and more resource-starved than Apple, but they do a fairly decent job of keeping it running.
    - bitL 6y ago
gscott 6y ago
Chrome is without a question the new IE. Worse then IE now that Chrome tracks your Google login directly in the browser and takes away functionality if you don't login. IE forced all other browsers to follow its standards and guess what... Chrome does the same thing.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  Except IE was ripe for disruption due to a fairly poor customer experience. Various web apps of the time wouldn't work in different versions. It was slow, and frequently locked up completely needing a force-quit or, worse, hard reboot. Chrome isn't in that same sort of position.
  - CarbyAu 6y ago
    While true, I feel it is simply a more competent prison.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
> IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next". Chrome has plenty of ideas of what's "next" for the web - and they're not just about Google. (cont) This is literally the problem though. If you consider all the Chrome derivatives and WebKit as one single browser. Then Firefox is the main competitor and Chromes market share is at the rate of IEs. Just because you worked on IE and Chrome doesnt mean you are not biased. The issue we all have is that exactly that Google assumes control of what the web will look like and other browsers are left scrambling to implement things that were not standardized beforehand. If you want to argue Chrome is not the new IE then Chrome needs to stop pushing out features not yet fully approved by their respective standards committees. Chrome is the new IE in several ways including websites only working on Chrome as they once only worked on IE. Lastly... A good number of things Google has added to the web could be argued that it is indeed about Googles own interests. WebRTC was useful for Google Hangouts for example. AMP only exists to give Google total control. Their adblocking changes only exist for the same reasons. Removing URLs from the URL bar also are not part of an open web standard. This is beyond anything I remember IE doing. Chrome is literally worse than IE for the open web.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > If you consider all the Chrome derivatives and WebKit as one single browser. WebKit has a very different direction from Chromium and it is usually not very useful to model them as being related anymore in most cases.
henriquez 6y ago
Of course a Google engineer would say this, because only a Google engineer has the perspective to truly appreciate Google’s position as the world’s benevolent steward of technology leadership - not just to maintain web standards but drive them forward in ways that Google knows will benefit everyone. Sure it would be great if Google wasn’t a de-facto monopoly or that they have massive conflicts of interests as the Internet’s biggest advertising network. But what people need to understand is that Google knows what’s best for all of us when it comes to what the Internet is and should be. So when Google rams half-baked APIs into their browser well before they even have gone through third party certification, often releasing features with glaring security holes, they’re doing it because it’s best for all of us, not just Google. All the nay-sayers need to just relax and know their place.
- gchamonlive 6y ago
  I am a little confused. Is that supposed to be a sarcastic comment? Honest question, because I am a bad judge of sarcasm
  - esperent 6y ago
    With >99% certainty, yes. But you never know.
  - rimjongun 6y ago
    Yeah it is
  - wrycoder 6y ago
    An example of heavy sarcasm. It would be worth your while to study it carefully to learn the style points.
    - Lammy 6y ago
      And the tone of voice someone might use when speaking such heavy sarcasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URnJzUPChSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URnJzUPChSg
Hitton 6y ago
It would be easier to not believe accusations like [0], if google didn't squander it's reputation of not doing evil long time ago. [0]: https://fossbytes.com/google-accused-of-sabotaging-microsofts-edge-browser-by-ex-engineer/ https://fossbytes.com/google-accused-of-sabotaging-microsoft...
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Quite a bit of sloppy reasoning there. If I add a DIV to my page and it stops your video acceleration, that's because your browser engine sucks.
  - asddubs 6y ago
    all browser engines suck in specific enough circumstances, though
matlin 6y ago
I will say unlike IE, Chrome (more specifically Chromium) has allowed for a new generation of browsers to compete. Rendering / JavaScript engine is now a commodity. If you want try out something that feels new and different you can try out what I'm working on! It's designed to make you more productive and feel more like an OS than a browser...
- matlin 6y ago
  Forgot the link to get access: https://www.aspen.cloud https://www.aspen.cloud
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Chrome is the opposite of IE. IE was dragging the rest of the web behind with its glacial update pace and lack of automatic updates. Chrome moves at light speed meaning no one else can actually keep up with all the new features getting added. Chrome has resulted in browsers being more complex than an OS.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Agreed 100%, and IMHO it was a good thing that IE "was dragging the rest of the web behind", because it at least gave some stability to the platform and gave the small competitor browsers a chance, while keeping sites relatively simple. In contrast, Google's "pushing the web forward" propaganda and the explosion of complexity and churn that has basically become a cancerous growth is much worse.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    Most of the time it doesn't actually matter that your browser is missing support for webusb or webwhatever but every now and then you hit a site that uses it and it creates a user experience of "Just use chrome and it always works" A good demo is Mozilla spent about 7 years and 43,000 commits on Servo which is JUST a rendering engine and not any of the JS apis and it still doesn't actually work well enough to render most sites.
gitgud 6y ago
Many comments are saying it's not a technical issue, I think it is. Chrome is mostly developed as an open-source project (chromium), meaning features and bugs are transparently discussed and fixed. Compare that to IE which was closed source, meaning nothing was fixed...
- wolco 6y ago
  Ever get your ideas on the roadmap? Ever add new features or change how chromium or how google chrome works. I didn't think so. Open source doesn't mean you have any infuence or say in the future of the project. It only means you can take a copy make changes and roll your own version. The roadmap changes the internet unhealthy ways.
  - gitgud 6y ago
    > "Open source doesn't mean you have any influence or say in the future of the project. It only means you can take a copy make changes and roll your own version." Exactly, just because you have a change you want, doesn't mean you can force in on everyone. The maintainers of the project decide weather they want it or not. Unfortunately the best open-source projects have some-kind of [1] top-down control. For example; Linux is developed the same way. You can fork and submit changes, but there's no guarantee that Linus Torvald's will accept those changes.... What would be a better alternative? Developing in behind closed doors? Some kind of democratic system of implementing features... these projects usually suck as there's nobody in charge and it tries to please too many people. Anyway, it's definitely better than the IE situation, which was much less transparent and resistant to changes... with absolutely ZERO input from the community... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
scoot_718 6y ago
> Chrome has plenty of ideas of what's "next" for the web - I mean, I feel like that's so much worse.
mdoms 6y ago
As long as AMP exists then Google can not be trusted stewards of the web.
earthboundkid 6y ago
Node is the new IE. No support for fetch. Has its own non-standard APIs. Doesn’t implement basics like atob.
underwater 6y ago
I think that Chrome is different for the web than IE was, but I'm still wary of Google having such a heavy influence over the web as a platform. Google have consistently shown they're great at data, struggle to build platforms, and approach product development by throwing stuff at a wall. They have a heavy cultural bias towards developing and shipping new initiatives over supporting existing products. None of these attributes are good things for supporting an open platform. Google does a good job at firewalling their data gathering tendencies from Chrome and web standards, but over the last ten years they've consistently pushed new standards and experiments that no one has asked for: Dart, GWT, Angular, Web Components, AMP, Service Workers, notifications, payments, DRM support, web bundles, etc. The actual innovations that have helped the platform grow have largely happened elsewhere. Some of the stuff they do will be great, but there is going to be a long term cost to the platform from this relentless push to use the web as Google's personal playground for innovation.
renewiltord 6y ago
Not scared of an open-source engine ruining the Internet. Not gonna happen and I'm fine with Google doing whatever they're doing. My experience with the Webkit gang is that they're obsessed with the consumer and privacy and all that stuff. So much that they won't entertain any adjustments to permit adtech. That's enough for me to be convinced that browser engine development is sufficiently separate from Google's main business. The real problem is when things like EME make it into the standard and you need to use Widevine and friends to see things. Also, I hate having to stand with people who rail against everything because then no one takes you seriously when there is a thing that needs railing against. Given that and given that my life is short, I'm not going to lose any sleep over this.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  > open-source engine An open-source engine that is under majority control by one company. > Not gonna happen It is already happening! > So much that they won't entertain any adjustments to permit adtech. The WebKit team has created special features to essentially restore things lost with ITP, and really has no other purpose to exist: https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-for-the-web/ https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
  - int_19h 6y ago
    WebKit is Apple, not Google, no?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      For the most part, yes. Were you confused about something?
      - int_19h 6y ago
        The OP was talking about WebKit in the context of "an open-source engine ruining the Internet", and how "browser engine development is sufficiently separate from Google's main business".
xg15 6y ago
> ... Are they all good ideas? No, probably not, and that's why we have processes (that get revised - hi, that's part of my job now) to make sure we're including lots of external input too. The Web stagnating as a platform for just docs would be bad too. (cont) Oh, you guys have internal processes! You're close to able to unilaterally set the direction the web should be taking, but that's ok, because you have processes!
ourcat 6y ago
Back in the day IE always had an 'advantage' purely by the name: 'Internet Explorer'. When people 'got a computer' to 'get on the internet', seeing that icon on the desktop got them where the thought they needed to be. Very, very few people, even years after after Chrome and Firefox came out, even knew they had a choice over the (browser) matter of getting 'on the web'. (There are some classic videos out there of voxpops of people being asked about 'the web' and 'the internet' etc.) (To begin with, for me, it was Spry Mosaic then Netscape from about '93.)
- Lammy 6y ago
  Internet Explorer 3 was even more blatant — its desktop icon label was "The Internet"! https://i.imgur.com/uq1AW2I.png https://i.imgur.com/uq1AW2I.png

this half-article just seems like pointless arguing over definitions. people aren't saying chrome is the new IE because the two situations are exactly alike in every way. but google, as a private entity, now effectively has a monopoly on deciding what the web should function like.

The_rationalist 6y ago
Yeah because Microsoft is a small company that has not a say in it?
- leshenka 6y ago
  Oh do they? In what way?
  - The_rationalist 6y ago
    For example they rejected the future changes that were potentially limiting uBlock Origin. But most of the time, chromium Google devs are just talented engineers and Microsoft has not to conflict much with their excellence
    - frank2 6y ago
      Would you please say how you know that Microsoft has (in your words) "rejected the future changes that were potentially limiting uBlock Origin"? E.g., did a Microsoft executive say something to a journalist, who wrote it down somewhere where you subsequently read it? E.g., do you know people who work at Microsoft?

naniwaduni 6y ago

"It's different looking from the inside" is little consolation to those of us on the outside.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I frequently find conversations with Googlers with regards to privacy and trust always end this way. The assumption is if you were just a Googler, if you knew what working at Google was like, you'd also believe it is a good thing. But since you don't have that inside Google knowledge, just trust them.

kryptiskt 6y ago

It's worse, because this time there is no hope on the horizon.

cloudwizard 6y ago
When IE6 was king, there was no hope on horizon. IE6 came out in 2001, Chrome did not come out until 2008.
- mc32 6y ago
  Mozilla was there.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    I'm guessing them mean in terms of anything likely to actually unseat IE. Netscape->Mozilla->Firefox had been around years and were still only minor players ~20% market share. Chrome on the other hand saw nearly instant hockey-stick growth. I remember I switched almost instantly after a quick try and everything was so much faster.
- n1vz3r 6y ago
  How about Netscape communicator (I used it since 2003), then Firefox (first release was in 2004)?
  - int_19h 6y ago
    There was Opera, as well. But with all of these, you constantly ran into IE-only websites. Which got away with it because most people were running IE. And that's why people are saying that Chrome is the new IE - because we're seeing that history repeating, with websites written only for and tested only on Chrome and Safari (and I doubt Safari would be anywhere if it weren't effectively forced onto iOS users).

EugeneOZ 6y ago

Author doesn't understand what "the new IE" actually means.

KarimDaghari 6y ago
What does it mean? (Honest question)
- EugeneOZ 6y ago
  alias of the internet for users, main target for devs and designers. Chrome is the new IE.
  - rossjudson 6y ago
    Uh...no. Perhaps you weren't there. Microsoft wanted IE to be a wedge to drive Windows into enterprises. An open, standards-based web threatened that quite deeply (particularly one where the experiences that could be created could rival desktop apps). Microsoft adopted a two-pronged approach. One was the inclusion of IE into the operating system to ensure the ground was seeded, and IE would be ubiquitous (keep in mind this was prior to Apple products being a realistic alternative in enterprise settings, so it was PC/Windows everywhere). The second part was investing significant engineering efforts into ensuring that Windows- and Office-specific capabilities could emerge through IE (and only IE). For example, if you wanted vector graphics you could use Office to produce VML and that could be viewed through IE (only). Pointedly, IE did not support SVG, which was the other major vector graphics standard at the time. This neatly (and painfully) fragmented the market for anyone who wanted to produce vector graphics as part of a solution. You had to find a way to support VML and SVG if you wanted that to happen (and many early graphical toolkits for the web did precisely that). All development for IE was conducted as closed source. Microsoft had no particular interest in making the browser compatible with the web standards, because as synergy between Windows and IE created a development target with benefits for Microsoft. Nobody else could create an equivalent to IE that would replicate the Microsoft-specific capabilities. The lack of standards-support created stickiness that kept IE around for a long time, because enterprises couldn't (or didn't feel like paying for) the changes necessary to bring apps into standards compliance. A wholesale shift towards Adobe Flash was made a big crack in IE's armor. Flash ran everywhere, and sophisticated solutions could be built with it. Real web standards also made a lot of progress, and IE's creaking old engine was easily outperformed and "out-standarded" by Chrome. The subsequent rise of Apple and fall of Flash cemented Chrome (and Safari) as solid performers that could be used to deliver enterprise solutions and worked on multiple platforms. Is Chrome the new IE? Well, is Chrome being used to drive Google-specific functionality that can only be used with other Google technologies, and can't be implemented elsewhere? Does Chrome actively avoid standards? Is Chrome actively attempting to fragment the standards? Is Chrome developed as closed source? The thing is, Microsoft's strategy stood a pretty good chance of working. I'm always amazed at how IE stuck around when there were better alternatives, and how long it took before market pressure forced Microsoft towards web standards. A lot of money was spent on Enterprise Windows, and a lot of solutions used Microsoft-specific parts of IE. Enterprise dollars cast a long shadow, over time.

csours 6y ago

I feel like people don't remember how terrible IE 6 was for so long. You can criticize Google for any number of things, but they certainly want browsers to be as good and as capable as possible.

Phenix88be 6y ago
The issue is not a technical one. It's politics...
asddubs 6y ago
I don't really think people are criticizing google for not wanting browsers to be capable when they say that chrome is the new IE
- csours 6y ago
  I agree, and that's why I think it's not the new IE. Like I said, it is very fair to criticize google and fear the monopoly of Chrome, but it won't be like the monopoly of IE.
- xnx 6y ago
  I don't know what other people think, but IE to me is synonymous with a browser that was good, but then stopped improving in any meaningful way for years. The first version of Chrome showed that there was still immense worthwhile improvements that could be made in browsers. If anything, the rate of improvements to Chrome is accelerating, even after they established marketshare dominance.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    When Chrome came out I had been using Netscape -> Mozilla -> Firefox for about 10 years. Then Chrome seemed to blow it out of the water in terms of speed improvements. I switched virtually over night.
    - xnx 6y ago

n1vz3r 6y ago

The article is just an opinion and some claims, supported by zero evidence. Yes, Google is interested that Web continues to live. But article omits that Google only wants the Web that exists on Google's terms. That's why they practically rebuilt the web themselves, on all levels, from protocol to the client (spdy, webp, amp, dart, chromeos & android, chromium).

tssva 6y ago
Your comment is just an opinion and some claims supported by zero evidence.
- zakki 6y ago
  Aren’t all protocols gp mentioned the evidence, are they?
  - Chyzwar 6y ago
    spdy become HTTP2, quic become HTTP3 it is expensive in time and money to develop and test new ideas in protocols. I think it is a bit unfair to to bundle android, chromium and AMP into same bag. AMP is clearly driven by money but there is a lot of open source that benefit everyone. Google is big company. I think trying to paint whole google as evil is not effective.
    - rhacker 6y ago
      It's like this beast that does these benevolent things, but at some point it catches up to them and they shut something down after getting people kinda hooked. For example Picasa - massively popular - free and pretty amazing desktop photo management tool. It slowly morphed such that all of the users of it were just folded into a cloud offering: Drive. Chrome and all of it's open source awesomeness, again, mostly used to fold people into the bigger profitable picture. So even though there are developers that work at Google creating protocols that help everyone, including non-Chrome browsers - that benevolence has a product manager paying that developer's time. At some stage it's not all free beer.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

Seems reasonable enough to me. If URLs were no longer a thing, for what reason would I Google anything? How would google create results if they couldn't crawl publicly accessible websites? The value of the search engine and a public internet seem hand-in-hand.

djxfade 6y ago
Well if Google is already hosting all the content in their walled garden (see AMP), this would still be able to crawl the content, and even be able to be the exclusive platform that could crawl that content (in theory)
- Bnshsysjab 6y ago
  I was a bit young at the time but isn’t this what AOL tried to achieve?
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    Somewhat: there was definitely a walled-garden with an entire AOL ecosystem, but that wall also had a door you could walk through out into the wild west web of the times.
- JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  True, but fortunately the vast majority of content isn't fronted by AMP. Most of my queries don't return AMP pages.
- xnx 6y ago
  This is probably straying a little off-topic, but AMP seems nothing like a walled garden when compared to Facebook, Instagram, or Apple app store.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    AMP is nothing like a walled garden, period. Anyone can host it.

Lammy 6y ago

> IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next" I was under the impression that HTAs were what they viewed as "next", letting developers host and dynamically generate applications that would run over the network on Windows (or otherwise IE-equipped, hence IE for Solaris, et al) clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application It even has that whole super-granular "Zones" security system to e.g. trust an intranet-hosted HTA more than a publicly-hosted one. Am I off-base here on my historic Microsoft speculation? :)

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

I kind of like seeing articles like this, where you get to see the mental gymnastics (sometimes a simple somersault, sometimes a double twisting triple backflip) that employees use to justify to themselves "why I am not as evil as those people in that other company." Sure, I don't believe Chrome has the same problems that IE did either, but I definitely do believe Chrome uses its dominant position primarily in service to extending Google's desires for the web. E.g. signed HTTP exchanges are more AMP shit that nobody asked for.

gizmodo59 6y ago
Sorry but I like amp. I don’t want sites like the guardian to drain my phone battery and load in 10 seconds. I understand if it’s bad for publishers but as a consumer I love it. To suggest that an end user would go about disabling JavaScript and other reasons just shows how HN is in a bubble and don’t really understand that 99% of the users don’t care.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  There are many ways to go about speeding up the websites for the end users that are less technically involved for everyone and require a new subset of markup and standard.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >There are many ways to go about speeding up the websites for the end users that are less technically involved for everyone and require a new subset of markup and standard. So why isn't it done?
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      Google could simply cache the web pages and strip them naked. Reader mode on browsers do a good job of it on most sites and they can publish guidelines on how to structure your site to make it easier for reader mode to work which wouldn't be that problematic (it would also encourage accessibility).

francasso 6y ago

I believe he is in good faith. My concern is that his opinions and what corporate policy is going to push for in a monopoly situation are two different things. You only have so much power as a technical person. Policies that are good for the community align with a company bottom line only when there is competition. Otherwise things degenerate, it might take time but I don't see any reason why they shouldn't. Especially when the barrier to entry is so high.

sukilot 6y ago

Someone's going to get a friendly email from in house counsel tomorrow morning....

ineedasername 6y ago

It's not the new IE in so far as the problems with it are not the same as the problems IE had. IE was a stagnant platform with proprietary technology that still haunts my workplace: Cognos < v.11 only has complete functionality with IE. For a couple of years we could only use our primary ERP system with a specific version of JVM in a specific version of IE. IE failed (at least in part) because it failed the consumer experience. Chrome generally gives users a good experience: Page load times, better in its own very popular apps (though apparently sand-bagged against competitors) built in high-quality search, etc. The reasons it fails are, in my opinion, primarily on the privacy front.

The_rationalist 6y ago

Chromium is the exact opposite of internet explorer: Internet Explorer slowed down progress by getting low human resources, chromium on the other hand has more human resources than any browser has ever had (especially since Microsoft joined them) and enrich the web through new features at an unprecedented pace. Internet explorer was stagnation while chromium is making the web a better platform in real-time The new IE obviously is webkit which miraculously can still run most websites,but for how long? After the mozilla lay offs, it's probable that they will slowly but surely get massive webcompat issues too

pritambaral 6y ago
The issue is not a technical one. It's political. Even in the case of IE, the issue wasn't a technical one. The issue was that MS held a monopoly on the web. They might not have abused it the same way Google is trying to today, but the specific means of abuse isn't the primary problem. Let me use your words to illustrate my point better. You said, "... chromium is making the web a better platform in real-time", but it is not "the web" that chromium is improving, but Google's private version of it.
userbinator 6y ago
You call it "stagnation", I call it "stability" --- something that seems to be ignored or even actively discouraged by a lot of these "modern" trends.
- esperent 6y ago
  I also call it stagnation. Stability suggests that you are in a good place and don't need to move on. IE was anything but a good place, in particular for the people that had to build things for it. Not all modern trends in web dev are good, but there have been many, many quality of life improvements for developers and users alike since IE finally stopped being so ubiquitously supported.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    It was definitely a much better place back then for everyone who did not have to rely on IE, since the heavy abuse of JS was not common and sites were far simpler and more content-focused as a result.

m0zg 6y ago

Twitter bio: "Web Standards at Google in my spare time". It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

candiddevmike 6y ago

Safari is the new IE. Apple's ecosystem is holding back the web severely by shipping a crippled web browser. Safari severely lags behind other browsers, and due to how iOS and the like require other browsers (like Chrome) to use it's archaic rendering engine, it hurts competition as much as the 30% store tax. No PWAs, no notifications, no native experience. I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.

kevincox 6y ago
Also you can't test on it without paying them thousands of dollars for hardware. I remember maintaining a bunch of sites and university, and while IE11 was missing a couple of APIs (like Promise) at least I could download a VM straight from Microsoft and figure out what was going wrong. I still have no way to test on Safari which is becoming more and more annoying as they "fall" behind.
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  I learned that on Linux, GNOME Web (Epiphany) is basically Safari. It will exhibit most of the quirks and rendering issues, and it has a decent dev console. It definitely helps avoid paying the Apple tax.
  - The_rationalist 6y ago
    Yeah but webkit on Linux is basically unmaintained / untested and therefore there can be many confusing webkit Linux only bugs
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      The Igalia team maintains WebKit for GTK+ (among many other platforms). They are certainly smaller and more resource-starved than Apple, but they do a fairly decent job of keeping it running.
  - bitL 6y ago

gscott 6y ago

Chrome is without a question the new IE. Worse then IE now that Chrome tracks your Google login directly in the browser and takes away functionality if you don't login. IE forced all other browsers to follow its standards and guess what... Chrome does the same thing.

ineedasername 6y ago
Except IE was ripe for disruption due to a fairly poor customer experience. Various web apps of the time wouldn't work in different versions. It was slow, and frequently locked up completely needing a force-quit or, worse, hard reboot. Chrome isn't in that same sort of position.
- CarbyAu 6y ago
  While true, I feel it is simply a more competent prison.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

> IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next". Chrome has plenty of ideas of what's "next" for the web - and they're not just about Google. (cont) This is literally the problem though. If you consider all the Chrome derivatives and WebKit as one single browser. Then Firefox is the main competitor and Chromes market share is at the rate of IEs. Just because you worked on IE and Chrome doesnt mean you are not biased. The issue we all have is that exactly that Google assumes control of what the web will look like and other browsers are left scrambling to implement things that were not standardized beforehand. If you want to argue Chrome is not the new IE then Chrome needs to stop pushing out features not yet fully approved by their respective standards committees. Chrome is the new IE in several ways including websites only working on Chrome as they once only worked on IE. Lastly... A good number of things Google has added to the web could be argued that it is indeed about Googles own interests. WebRTC was useful for Google Hangouts for example. AMP only exists to give Google total control. Their adblocking changes only exist for the same reasons. Removing URLs from the URL bar also are not part of an open web standard. This is beyond anything I remember IE doing. Chrome is literally worse than IE for the open web.

saagarjha 6y ago
> If you consider all the Chrome derivatives and WebKit as one single browser. WebKit has a very different direction from Chromium and it is usually not very useful to model them as being related anymore in most cases.

henriquez 6y ago

Of course a Google engineer would say this, because only a Google engineer has the perspective to truly appreciate Google’s position as the world’s benevolent steward of technology leadership - not just to maintain web standards but drive them forward in ways that Google knows will benefit everyone. Sure it would be great if Google wasn’t a de-facto monopoly or that they have massive conflicts of interests as the Internet’s biggest advertising network. But what people need to understand is that Google knows what’s best for all of us when it comes to what the Internet is and should be. So when Google rams half-baked APIs into their browser well before they even have gone through third party certification, often releasing features with glaring security holes, they’re doing it because it’s best for all of us, not just Google. All the nay-sayers need to just relax and know their place.

gchamonlive 6y ago
I am a little confused. Is that supposed to be a sarcastic comment? Honest question, because I am a bad judge of sarcasm
- esperent 6y ago
  With >99% certainty, yes. But you never know.
- rimjongun 6y ago
  Yeah it is
- wrycoder 6y ago
  An example of heavy sarcasm. It would be worth your while to study it carefully to learn the style points.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    And the tone of voice someone might use when speaking such heavy sarcasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URnJzUPChSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URnJzUPChSg

Hitton 6y ago

It would be easier to not believe accusations like [0], if google didn't squander it's reputation of not doing evil long time ago. [0]: https://fossbytes.com/google-accused-of-sabotaging-microsofts-edge-browser-by-ex-engineer/ https://fossbytes.com/google-accused-of-sabotaging-microsoft...

jeffbee 6y ago
Quite a bit of sloppy reasoning there. If I add a DIV to my page and it stops your video acceleration, that's because your browser engine sucks.
- asddubs 6y ago
  all browser engines suck in specific enough circumstances, though

matlin 6y ago

I will say unlike IE, Chrome (more specifically Chromium) has allowed for a new generation of browsers to compete. Rendering / JavaScript engine is now a commodity. If you want try out something that feels new and different you can try out what I'm working on! It's designed to make you more productive and feel more like an OS than a browser...

matlin 6y ago
Forgot the link to get access: https://www.aspen.cloud https://www.aspen.cloud

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

Chrome is the opposite of IE. IE was dragging the rest of the web behind with its glacial update pace and lack of automatic updates. Chrome moves at light speed meaning no one else can actually keep up with all the new features getting added. Chrome has resulted in browsers being more complex than an OS.

userbinator 6y ago
Agreed 100%, and IMHO it was a good thing that IE "was dragging the rest of the web behind", because it at least gave some stability to the platform and gave the small competitor browsers a chance, while keeping sites relatively simple. In contrast, Google's "pushing the web forward" propaganda and the explosion of complexity and churn that has basically become a cancerous growth is much worse.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  Most of the time it doesn't actually matter that your browser is missing support for webusb or webwhatever but every now and then you hit a site that uses it and it creates a user experience of "Just use chrome and it always works" A good demo is Mozilla spent about 7 years and 43,000 commits on Servo which is JUST a rendering engine and not any of the JS apis and it still doesn't actually work well enough to render most sites.

gitgud 6y ago

Many comments are saying it's not a technical issue, I think it is. Chrome is mostly developed as an open-source project (chromium), meaning features and bugs are transparently discussed and fixed. Compare that to IE which was closed source, meaning nothing was fixed...

wolco 6y ago
Ever get your ideas on the roadmap? Ever add new features or change how chromium or how google chrome works. I didn't think so. Open source doesn't mean you have any infuence or say in the future of the project. It only means you can take a copy make changes and roll your own version. The roadmap changes the internet unhealthy ways.
- gitgud 6y ago
  > "Open source doesn't mean you have any influence or say in the future of the project. It only means you can take a copy make changes and roll your own version." Exactly, just because you have a change you want, doesn't mean you can force in on everyone. The maintainers of the project decide weather they want it or not. Unfortunately the best open-source projects have some-kind of [1] top-down control. For example; Linux is developed the same way. You can fork and submit changes, but there's no guarantee that Linus Torvald's will accept those changes.... What would be a better alternative? Developing in behind closed doors? Some kind of democratic system of implementing features... these projects usually suck as there's nobody in charge and it tries to please too many people. Anyway, it's definitely better than the IE situation, which was much less transparent and resistant to changes... with absolutely ZERO input from the community... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life

scoot_718 6y ago

> Chrome has plenty of ideas of what's "next" for the web - I mean, I feel like that's so much worse.

mdoms 6y ago

As long as AMP exists then Google can not be trusted stewards of the web.

earthboundkid 6y ago

Node is the new IE. No support for fetch. Has its own non-standard APIs. Doesn’t implement basics like atob.

underwater 6y ago

I think that Chrome is different for the web than IE was, but I'm still wary of Google having such a heavy influence over the web as a platform. Google have consistently shown they're great at data, struggle to build platforms, and approach product development by throwing stuff at a wall. They have a heavy cultural bias towards developing and shipping new initiatives over supporting existing products. None of these attributes are good things for supporting an open platform. Google does a good job at firewalling their data gathering tendencies from Chrome and web standards, but over the last ten years they've consistently pushed new standards and experiments that no one has asked for: Dart, GWT, Angular, Web Components, AMP, Service Workers, notifications, payments, DRM support, web bundles, etc. The actual innovations that have helped the platform grow have largely happened elsewhere. Some of the stuff they do will be great, but there is going to be a long term cost to the platform from this relentless push to use the web as Google's personal playground for innovation.

renewiltord 6y ago

Not scared of an open-source engine ruining the Internet. Not gonna happen and I'm fine with Google doing whatever they're doing. My experience with the Webkit gang is that they're obsessed with the consumer and privacy and all that stuff. So much that they won't entertain any adjustments to permit adtech. That's enough for me to be convinced that browser engine development is sufficiently separate from Google's main business. The real problem is when things like EME make it into the standard and you need to use Widevine and friends to see things. Also, I hate having to stand with people who rail against everything because then no one takes you seriously when there is a thing that needs railing against. Given that and given that my life is short, I'm not going to lose any sleep over this.

saagarjha 6y ago
> open-source engine An open-source engine that is under majority control by one company. > Not gonna happen It is already happening! > So much that they won't entertain any adjustments to permit adtech. The WebKit team has created special features to essentially restore things lost with ITP, and really has no other purpose to exist: https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution-for-the-web/ https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-att...
- int_19h 6y ago
  WebKit is Apple, not Google, no?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    For the most part, yes. Were you confused about something?
    - int_19h 6y ago
      The OP was talking about WebKit in the context of "an open-source engine ruining the Internet", and how "browser engine development is sufficiently separate from Google's main business".

xg15 6y ago

> ... Are they all good ideas? No, probably not, and that's why we have processes (that get revised - hi, that's part of my job now) to make sure we're including lots of external input too. The Web stagnating as a platform for just docs would be bad too. (cont) Oh, you guys have internal processes! You're close to able to unilaterally set the direction the web should be taking, but that's ok, because you have processes!

ourcat 6y ago

Back in the day IE always had an 'advantage' purely by the name: 'Internet Explorer'. When people 'got a computer' to 'get on the internet', seeing that icon on the desktop got them where the thought they needed to be. Very, very few people, even years after after Chrome and Firefox came out, even knew they had a choice over the (browser) matter of getting 'on the web'. (There are some classic videos out there of voxpops of people being asked about 'the web' and 'the internet' etc.) (To begin with, for me, it was Spry Mosaic then Netscape from about '93.)

Lammy 6y ago
Internet Explorer 3 was even more blatant — its desktop icon label was "The Internet"! https://i.imgur.com/uq1AW2I.png https://i.imgur.com/uq1AW2I.png