3 ms·

It wouldn't have mattered if IE stopped progressing after IE6 given migration to other browsers, if there weren't so many "legacy" websites and apps stuck needi

It wouldn't have mattered if IE stopped progressing after IE6 given migration to other browsers, if there weren't so many "legacy" websites and apps stuck needing IE. Even in the worst days of IE stagnation Firefox and Chrome were only an install away. (And Chrome was busy using bad adware tactics to get as many installs as possible back in those days, but that's a different complaint in a different conversation.) What made IE truly damaging/dangerous was that before it stopped progressing it had lots of great "pull the web forward" features like XHR and CSS box-sizing that yesterday's developers wrote "bleeding edge" apps on that became those very same "legacy" sites and apps when the stagnation hit. While the web eventually standardized things like XHR and CSS box-sizing, they were done in ways that made migration of those "single browser apps" just slightly uncomfortable enough so companies especially procrastinated staying on the stagnant browser as long as possible to avoid paying down tech debt in their "legacy" apps. Today's "bleeding edge" apps are tomorrow's "legacy apps", and people aren't building "bleeding edge" apps for Safari [0], but they are building Chrome-only "bleeding edge" apps using all the little things that are like XHR in their own ways (WebUSB, Speech Recognition, what have you). The danger is that there are far too many of them. Again, I can't predict the future and I can't assume that Google execs are dumb enough to do the exact same thing that Microsoft did: check their (current!) marketshare, declare themselves the winner, and decide to finish Chrome as a project, moving the development team to more important tasks to the corporate bottom line. I want to believe that the pursuant stagnation would be less overall a dark period for the web because plenty of Chromium forks exist, but the install base is huge and convincing them all to switch to a fork would still be a massive marketing effort that wouldn't happen overnight. But stagnation is the consequence of the danger of people building single-browser apps, it's not the danger itself. The canaries (Safari, Firefox) are dying and blaming the canaries for being weak is avoiding asking hard questions about if the web is currently safe or not. > Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd. That is a different, unrelated problem than comparisons to IE. Even when pre-installed on Windows IE never stopped people from installing other browsers or setting them the default. It got real unfriendly about it in some versions of Windows, but it never (could have) blocked them entirely. That's still a problem to deal with, and maybe even a major problem, though these days iOS and Android are pretty neck-and-neck in the market and iOS does not have the domination it once had even in the US. But it's not at all the same problem as IE was. [0] Anymore; I will admit there was a brief period early in the rise of iOS with -webkit- prefixed everything where it was a small concern.

lern_too_spel 4y ago
I can use the web just fine on Firefox, just like I could use the web just fine on Phoenix during IE's ascendance. You are complaining about a problem that nobody is facing. The problem with Safari (that matches the problem with IE before it) is that there are a lot of apps that don't get built because Safari is so far behind the other browsers and Apple doesn't let users get around this. It doesn't matter that iOS isn't dominant to the extent that Windows/IE was. The fact that roughly half of users are stuck using a buggy and outdated browser is enough to prevent the web platform from being useful to people like the original commenter.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  > You are complaining about a problem that nobody is facing. Nobody is facing yet. That is my point. It's a huge danger that people aren't appreciating enough. If we want to use the history of IE as a warning lesson lest we are dumb enough to repeat it, it's a warning on letting a single browser get too much marketshare. It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable. It feels like the problem is "all these other browsers are buggy and outdated", but that isn't the danger, that's the symptom of the danger. People said the same thing about Netscape/Pheonix/Firefox when IE was "winning" that those browsers were too slow and "preventing the web platform from being useful". That's the dangerous cycle here. Maybe we'll be extremely lucky and the Chrome hegemony will never be the same problem that IE was. But blaming Safari for being "slow" in this scenario is putting the blame on the victim of the hegemony problem.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    > Nobody is facing yet. And nobody ever faced with IE. That wasn't the problem with IE. That is my point. > It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable. MSE isn't bleeding edge or unstable. Apple itself implemented it years ago on Safari for Mac, where it has no App Store revenue to protect. The feature this article is about isn't bleeding edge or unstable either. Apple is implementing it exactly the same way all the other browsers already have.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

I can use the web just fine on Firefox, just like I could use the web just fine on Phoenix during IE's ascendance. You are complaining about a problem that nobody is facing. The problem with Safari (that matches the problem with IE before it) is that there are a lot of apps that don't get built because Safari is so far behind the other browsers and Apple doesn't let users get around this. It doesn't matter that iOS isn't dominant to the extent that Windows/IE was. The fact that roughly half of users are stuck using a buggy and outdated browser is enough to prevent the web platform from being useful to people like the original commenter.

WorldMaker 4y ago
> You are complaining about a problem that nobody is facing. Nobody is facing yet. That is my point. It's a huge danger that people aren't appreciating enough. If we want to use the history of IE as a warning lesson lest we are dumb enough to repeat it, it's a warning on letting a single browser get too much marketshare. It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable. It feels like the problem is "all these other browsers are buggy and outdated", but that isn't the danger, that's the symptom of the danger. People said the same thing about Netscape/Pheonix/Firefox when IE was "winning" that those browsers were too slow and "preventing the web platform from being useful". That's the dangerous cycle here. Maybe we'll be extremely lucky and the Chrome hegemony will never be the same problem that IE was. But blaming Safari for being "slow" in this scenario is putting the blame on the victim of the hegemony problem.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  > Nobody is facing yet. And nobody ever faced with IE. That wasn't the problem with IE. That is my point. > It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable. MSE isn't bleeding edge or unstable. Apple itself implemented it years ago on Safari for Mac, where it has no App Store revenue to protect. The feature this article is about isn't bleeding edge or unstable either. Apple is implementing it exactly the same way all the other browsers already have.