11 ms·

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning e

by mrtksn 3y ago

Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE, IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. On IE's case, MS probably stagnated it to prevent competition against its desktop Apps business and on Google's case it's going to be in the name of data collection and ad business. Chrome is the new IE. But yeah, that's what you get when you don't know history.

tommiegannert 3y ago
IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs to Safari.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  Later, IE was also hated for being tied to the OS (which was related but different to the "not evolving"). Another thing Safari has. So yeah, I also fully agree. Safari is still the new IE.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    The reason IE was hated for being tied in the OS was because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all, just because the OS provides a JS engine out of the box doesn't make it Windows Me grade.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      I disagree. It made it, so people with an older OS could not get a current IE. So you had ancient IE version linger for years and years. And with Safari, I can’t test any specific issues because we only have one mac, and it’s old and can’t run a current Safari. The situation is slightly better than with IE, as multiple macOS versions apparently (or so I was told) can run a newer Safari, but still not all.
    - TheDong 3y ago
      > because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all I mean, I've had iOS crash while using safari more often than I had windows 98 crash while using IE. At least back in the IE days, when a user found a site they couldn't open in IE, they could go download firefox. When a user encounters a websites that doesn't work on iOS safari, they can't download a different browser. Even worse, when you report the bug to the site owner (say your friend), they'll then say "Oh, sorry, I don't own an iPhone or macbook, so I'd have to pay $800+ to reproduce your bug", while with IE, it ran on basically any computer, and I think windows back then still had a trial version you could use for free.
  - oblio 3y ago
    On a somewhat funny, somewhat related note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX It doesn't disprove your point, it's just a cute bit of trivia.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    If you downvote me, please tell me why my comment is wrong. Otherwise, no one learns anything.
  - smcleod 3y ago
    IE was hated for being unreliable, lax on security and lacking in modern features. Safari / WebKit is incredibly performant and reliable with a modern feature set. Personally I’m not a fan of the UI but I guess it gets the job done.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      I said "also hated", as in "in addition".
      - smcleod 3y ago
        Ah, my apologies, I must’ve misread.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  > I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when anything that's using some advanced API. IE was hated after the fact of cornering the whole marketshare and making the web developers build all the websites to work on IE only. Initially, IE was very innovative browser too and they were the inventor of technologies like Ajax, introduced in IE5. Back in the pre-hate days, the web developers loved IE and it's innovative ways that let them to cool stuff. Chrome being still innovative doesn't mean much. Once they make sure that websites are built to work in Chrome only, they can relax and stop spending money on it and increase profits and stock prices by rent seeking.
  - oblio 3y ago
    As crazy as that sounds, IE had a better development team until IE6 basically killed off its competition. It was more stable than equivalent browsers, it had more features, I think it was even developed faster than competitors. Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.
    - roenxi 3y ago
      OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. The "problem" is that the browser projects are organised as big monoliths with limited internal competition for the components. Although it isn't really a problem yet. Chrome works fine, and switching web browsers isn't hard to do. But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.
      - oblio 3y ago
- cowsandmilk 3y ago
  > Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”. The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions. > IE was absolutely hated for not evolving IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-angers-web-standards-advocates/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    It might be surprising, but that is not an exhaustive list of what Chrome has been doing "recently".
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Thanks for that link. Though I'm a bit confused by the date, wasn't IE6 already out by then?
- ralfn 3y ago
  >I'm curious what "its own vision" was Making Windows a requirement for the web. Things like ActiveX.
- tarsinge 3y ago
  Depends which of the two period: first it evolved a lot with custom features non available for competitors (that’s the phase Chrome is in). Then once everything was IE specific code and it achieved domination it stopped evolving. When people say Chrome is the new IE is to mean it’s on the same trajectory (IE early mid 00’s), not that it’s already at the IE6 in 2010 phase.
- phpnode 3y ago
  Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Ya, if I was told correctly by management at the time, Microsoft’s first large scale layoff (that would layoff people without perf reasons) was in the 2008. They actually moved a bunch of IE KLTO to China by the mid 2000s, and then took it back to Redmond in 2009/2010 when they realized chrome and Firefox were kicking their butts.
- Fatnino 3y ago
  When I learned html as a kid in 1998 IE was better than Netscape in my mind. Netscape had lame <blink> while IE had the very cool <marquee> instead.
  - tommiegannert 3y ago
    Touché, the blink vs marquee was a big thing.
- bartread 3y ago
  > I'm curious what "its own vision" was Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so. So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out. You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result. Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc. You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage). IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off. Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too. And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be. Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do. Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.
- onurcel 3y ago
  To be accurate, IE was not hated by "end-users". It was hated by web developers (understandably) reluctant to support non-standard apis and by informed people.
  - rvnx 3y ago
    If the API was used by 90%+ of the internet, then it was the standard.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    It was also hated by many end users.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  >IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS. So they had a vision for a vector image markup, and that was what they did. SMIL-like extensions to HTML, and the use of behaviors in css were also part of their "vision" https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html visions, like ideas, are a dime a dozen - in a browser market it matters if your visions are standards because if not they break the web. IE's visions were not standardized and not supported by other browsers, they tried to instead do an end run around standardization. Chrome is the new IE. Chrome removing JPEG XL seems a pretty good indicator of that. Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things.
  - codedokode 3y ago
    IE6 had a lot of bugs (not different vision of standards, but bugs). A kind of bugs that looked like developers were lazy to cover all possible cases. As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards. I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly. [1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time/#aa-the-double-margin-bug https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...
    - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      I can see that article was from 2008, IE6 was release in 2001. So again on its initial release, IE6 was the best browser. Did it have bugs? You bet! Were those bugs as irritating as the ones in Netscape - well the XSL-T that was generating html for a site once put a p inside of an li and Netscape would blue screen my Windows machine 75% of the time when that happened, unfortunately it turns out you cannot do a quick CSS hack for that.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Perhaps the issue here is age? At the start IE was cutting edge, then MS didn't do anything useful with it for 10 years. Filters were certainly part of its own vision, AIR. MS seemed to innovate most in breaking hacks that helped to work around their "quirks".
- helloooooooo 3y ago
  Do end users hate Chrome? Or is this just the perspective bias of the crowds that frequent HN? It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.
  - jen20 3y ago
    The thing they are doing right is being imposed upon people at every turn by every Google property, no?
    - helloooooooo 3y ago
      How? If I own a windows machine it comes with Edgium. If I own an apple machine it has Safari. If I use a desktop Linux distribution, it likely comes with Firefox. If I use a Chromebook, it comes with Chrome(which is highly integrated into the OS itself). Google isn’t imposing anything. Sure when you navigate to a Google site, it may nag you to download Chrome. Microsoft does the same on a Windows box. There is no imposition or compulsion involved.
      - jen20 3y ago
        Nagging is both imposition and compulsion.
  - nerdix 3y ago
    Its pretty clear that isn't the case since there are viable alternatives and people have to go out of their way to install Chrome to begin with. If most people hated it, they would just install Firefox instead (or use Edge or Safari)
- gumby 3y ago
  > Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it They do? That's quite a claim. I work with a number of people who were simply told that installing chrome is part of setting up your computer and don't really have any opinion -- "chrome" is the word for looking at a web page and "chrome is just how computers work". At least for the {desk,lap}top, I think that's the vast majority.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  > Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks). Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.
- layer8 3y ago
  > I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Yep, for various usability reasons, I used IE as my daily driver until Windows updates disabled it. Never liked Chrome. Using Firefox now.
- throw_m239339 3y ago
  > IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.
- aaa_aaa 3y ago
  No it was not hated for evolving. It was hated because it made banks and many web sites enforcing people to use Windows. Chrome is nowhere near it.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    "It was hated because it made banks force people to use Windows"? For all IE's weaknesses, it didn't "make" banks do any such thing. They chose that.
- pg_1234 3y ago
  > IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. Chrome is doing worse than not evolving ... ... it is evolving towards evil. Compared to this, stasis would be a blessing.
lol768 3y ago
Safari caused me by far the most issues, back when I was doing frontend in ~2017/2018, in terms of how it complied with web standards (I wasn't as fussed at the standards it didn't support - at least I knew!) and rendered the web application I was working on across desktop, iPad and iPhone. I spent more time chasing Safari bugs and rendering idiosyncrasies than I did dealing with IE11, frankly.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Satisfied Safari user here. Chrome had me chasing shiny, shiny but nowadays if something doesn't run right in Safari, life goes on, and Apple ecosystem integration more than compensates. Disclaimer: I am not a web dev.
- toastal 3y ago
  And bugfixes always took 6 months til the next OS update. Holding back Notifications and other PWA-related specs left a sour taste to me because it meant I couldn’t build a PWA …but you could buy Apple hardware a developer license and make a native app (even if it was mostly CRUD).
- burai 3y ago
  Most of the problems I faced in the projects I work are caused by developers working only and exclusively with Chrome and not bothering to check their work on Safari and Firefox. The issues that were found with Safari were easy to fix or work around. Nothing compares to the painful process during ~2005-2010 when it came to support IE6.
  - blackoil 3y ago
    Safari testing requires a mac/iP*
    - MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
      Safari’s UI is based on mac-platform components, but the WebKit team provides builds of the WebKit rendering engine with a GTK-based UI. => https://webkit.org/downloads https://webkit.org/downloads
frou_dh 3y ago
> Remember the "$BROWSER is the new IE" narrative? Yes, it's always been much like the "Everyone I Don't Like Is Hitler" meme.
bunga-bunga 3y ago
IE was different things to different people. To developers, IE was the browser for which you had to spend hours debugging issues. Sounds like Safari to me. Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was. (Sent from my Safari browser)
- joshstrange 3y ago
  > Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was. Until Edge (which is just Chrome essentially) the only way to run IE was on a windows computer. Not sure how that’s different.
  - bunga-bunga 3y ago
    The difference is that Microsoft did not sell computers and did not sue anyone trying to run their OS on non-Microsoft hardware. Safari can only be run on Apple machines manufactured by Apple.
    - joshstrange 3y ago
      Aside from selling hackintosh computers I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Apple going after someone for running macOS on third party hardware or running it virtualized. If you try to make a business out of it they will come after you but they are going after developers. Nowadays something like BrowserStack feels like a requirement anyways since I’ll never have all the devices I need to test.
      - bunga-bunga 3y ago
        You’re missing the point. Just because you can “pirate it” and not have the FBI at your doorstep it doesn’t mean Apple is faultless. Also Browserstack is still using Apple devices and you have to pay for them. These are all unnecessary justifications for the new IE
- robertoandred 3y ago
NicoJuicy 3y ago
Safari was always behind on Web specs that could replace apps in the app store. It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :) - Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives - Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)
- threeseed 3y ago
  People have been making this tired argument for literally over a decade. Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are. So no there is no conspiracy by Apple to prevent the rise of web apps.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I think it’s possible to develop a reasonably good web app or PWA. I’ve seen a small handful, but the vast majority I encounter don’t meet that bar. Truly great web apps are rare. There’s so many little things that need to be gotten right for a mobile app of any kind to feel good to use, and on the web it’s all entirely up to the developer since it’s “bring your own everything” with no shared known-good foundation and scaffolding to rely on (even React doesn’t really fit with the wildly different ways it can be used). There’s so many variables at play that the average incidence of papercuts is markedly higher. The other thing is that to make a great web app, the developer needs to care a lot about delivering quality and polish, which is somewhat rare. This can probably be attributed to the web as a platform often being chosen to keep costs down (multiplatform, large pool of devs) — while in theory the savings from not having to maintain codebases for separate platforms could instead be invested in quality of the web app, it’s usually not, instead being put towards more marketable things as the app is forever stuck at “technically works” in all its janky glory.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    And yet a lot of us avoid the Reddit app and use the mobile web version instead. Lots of apps are just thin web wrappers too, and I bet most users don't even notice.
Const-me 3y ago
> departure from standards There were no new HTML standards between 4.0.1 in 2000, and 5.0 in 2014. > enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share Modern web is only possible because Microsoft implemented non-standard XMLHttpRequest in IE5. However, they didn’t do that to enforce a vision. The goal was practical — save network bandwidth for their Outlook Web Access product.
- Macha 3y ago
  ES5, 2009, CSS 2.1, 2011. HTML is not the only standard for a web browser Also in that period, Microsoft was failing to comply with the standards for CSS 2, standardised in 1998, ES3, standardised in 1999, and PNG, standardised in 1996.
BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
google is the new microsoft. has been for a few years now.
lmm 3y ago
Standards were never the real problem; they were always a joke. I don't think Netscape/Mozilla ever once changed their behaviour to match a standard; rather the standards "committee" was in their pocket for some reason, and would rubber-stamp any proposal from their side no matter how stupid, from the box model onwards. Every "standard" from 4.0 onwards was a step backwards; eventually they approved enough pointless unimplementable nonsense that the WhatWG took over and we got some sanity. Web developers preferred Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox because it had better development tools and ran on Linux. Chrome is the heir of that. The web has always succeeded in spite of standards committees, not because of them. You're the one who doesn't know your history.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  There is some truth in this. IE had a box model a bit like TeX's. Divs stacked inline and spans sat side by side so you easily make very sophisticated layouts. Navigator's box model was dumb as a rock in comparison. Divs started a new vertical context like they do now. So Navigator's model was standardised as the lowest common denominator. It would have been pretty much impossible at the time to retrofit IE's model into Navigator, and it was years before inline blocks were supported in Firefox. It's not so surprising that Microsoft didn't downgrade their browser to meet the standard.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    It's also useful to note that much of what people loved about the IE box model got immortalized into the standards as box-sizing: border-box. That bit of "required" boilerplate in almost every "Reset CSS" and CSS framework is a forever ode to IE had an easier box model to design with, and now it's the "opt-in standard" that most wild CSS opts in to.
pawelmurias 3y ago
> IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. It ended up a turd browser with it's own unique quirks bundled everywhere by a company with a vested interest of hindering the web.
mattgperry 3y ago
Yes and no - IE was hated in part for deviating from standard/showing weird behaviour. But more than that it was dragging its feet on implementing new CSS and JS standards so they couldn't be used for years after introduction. It was nightmare.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
IE was terrible at first. It wasn’t until Netscape started proposing dynamic HTML and making a play to take over the desktop experience that Microsoft threw itself behind making a better browser, bundling it with the operating system, and giving it away for free (Netscape was free for end users but required commercial licensing). The only point of IE was to kill Netscape, and it did. Netscape got the last laugh by open sourcing the browser, which is todays Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla was the Netscape mascot FWIW. Mission accomplished Microsoft pivoted to destroying other innovative companies and let IE languish until it was replaced by the malware browser Edge as a competitor to the malware adware browser Chrome. Fortunately Firefox, Safari, Brave, opera continue to exist.
chpatrick 3y ago
IE6 was hated for being the only popular browser where standard features didn't work, or worked differently. It's the exact same situation with Safari now.
spoiler 3y ago
> Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE It wasn't because they had poor feature adoption. It was because they'd tend to adopt features in a way that's incompatible with other browsers (of the top of my head, handling of localStorage in private browsing). It was a bit of a "fuck you" to devs since you often had to do browser detection for Safari (much like you used to have to do for IE) and have special branches or polyfills for Safari. > What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web Apple is just as guilty of this. They crippled and bastardised a bunch of features just to push for a more native adoption (depends on how cynical you are, but some say it's for more control over device usage patterns, and some say it's for longer battery life) It's gotten better and more aligned with other browsers now, though. But alas, I know most are just chromium clones these days
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Apple probably have similar motives to MS when it comes to crippling the browser and enforcing its own rendering engine in iOS and that is to protects its app market. However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff. With the IE situation, you couldn't just download Firefox and live happy thereafter because every website was made to work in IE and any other browser would simply fail to display the webpages properly either due to the way HTML/CSS is handled or due to some proprietary technology. Apple hasn't done that, maybe only because its tiny marketshare compared to the alternatives but that's how it is. Unfortunately, due to the marketshare of Google Chrome, they can pull an IE and there are signs of it. The hate towards Safari comes from the Web devs who are angry that they can't send push notifications and have to pay 99$ to Apple to embed their webpage into a WebView to pass as an app. There's no much hate towards Safari in its userbase, it's by far the most convenient Web browser in Apple's ecosystem, by far the most battery efficient and the performance is top notch too. Completely different situation with the tragedy of IE.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    > However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use it's dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff. Flash would like a word with you.
cs702 3y ago
> Chrome is the new IE. That sounds exactly right to me, at this moment. I would add that Firefox -- which has been improving noticeably in recent years, -- is "the new Chrome."
joshstrange 3y ago
I’ve been saying this for years (on HN and elsewhere). In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Additionally, Safari at least has the fundamentals in place — IE couldn’t even render transparent PNGs properly without Windows-specific filter trickery until around version 9 or so which was released in 2011, around a decade after Gecko based browsers, WebKit-based browsers, and even Microsoft’s own Tasman-based IE for Mac did.
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    People are quick to forget the pain of things like table-based-layout. I’ll never forget in 2006-2008-ish I developed a website for my computer repair business (I was in High School) and was very proud of it. Then I opened it in IE (I had developed it in Firefox) and it all fell apart (I was using floats IIRC). I then rewrote the whole thing using tables because I knew my target audience would not be running Firefox. In Safari sometimes things aren’t aligned correctly but nothing to the degree of hacks I’ve done over the years for IE. Gradients, transparent pngs, rounded corners, the list goes on.
    - Klonoar 3y ago
      Years of obscure CSS targeting tricks to fix IE6/IE7/etc. Codebases littered with star html hacks that effectively rendered an alternate layout. Safari is fine in comparison.
      - joshstrange 3y ago
        I had almost purged the  hacks from my brain but this brought it all back.
deleted 3y ago
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anyonecancode 3y ago
I mainly remember 1) IE being quite idiosyncratic in how it followed html/css standards and 2) being able to use things like firebug to debug FF, but having an alert window pop up with a cryptic, unhelpful message when trying to debug IE. It seemed "make it work in IE6" was like 30% of time spent in my work back then. Also, it stuck around for a _long_ time, so that was especially annoying as long after other browsers, including IE, had moved on, a lot of effort still went into supporting IE6.
lapcat 3y ago
Safari sabotaged its own content blocking extensions long before Google did — uBlock Origin for Safari was killed years ago — and Safari also implemented web attestation before Chrome: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/ https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...
manojlds 3y ago
Chrome is the Desktop IE Safari is the mobile IE
jchw 3y ago
No, this is a LARP. People hated IE for many reasons but the main one is having to do a bunch of extra work to support it. When IE did depart from the standards most severely, it wasn't like most other browsers were super compliant, it's just that IE didn't update, so it stayed in its same non-compliant state for many years. IE6 lasted from 2001 to 2006 in terms of being the latest browser, which is eons. But worse is that due to the fact that browsers were not evergreen, supporting IE6 remained relevant for far longer. Well into 2010 many sites still had to support the dinosaur of a browser due to its still-relevant marketshare. In fact, I bet IE6 in that era had more marketshare than Firefox does now! Squabbles over standards like this are nothing particularly new either. The only reason Safari was? the new IE is because you have to test in it. caniuse says you can use Wasm, but the commonly-used initiateStreaming API came over a year later in Safari than it did other browsers. What Chrome is today is far worse than the new IE. IE did a lot of dumb garbage, and even some kind of sabotage, but they never had the opportunity to do the kinds of things Google is working on now.
AwaAwa 3y ago
It's also what you get, when you know history and allow it to repeat.
registeredcorn 3y ago
I'm not sure how pronounced it was for others, but one of my personal dislikes with IE was that there was no feasible way to uninstall IE, on top of the dreadful choices it made regarding web standards, documentation, and the overall "feel" of it - not to say that Netscape, etc. were much better at the time, but there was that very real sensation of being forced to have a piece of software I did not want installed on an Operating System that I used solely for compatibility reasons.
dspillett 3y ago
Chrome is the new IE 4 & 5, when MS were still doing the extend and extinguish thing, implementing crap their way, standards be damned. Safari is the new IE 6, when MS stagnated because they had won in large enough areas not to really care any more and designers were forced to hold back on using things for compatibility's sake. If we're more generous, maybe Safari is more like IE 9/10/11 when MS at least tried to be more up-to-date but were behind and non-compliant enough to be a significant pain. Though for us IE11 is still the current IE11 as one or two clients still have a few users on it, we can say “not supported” all we like, but we'll still get complaints if things flat out don't work (display issues and slowness we can tell people to deal with, dysfunction we can't).
SergeAx 3y ago
I believe Chrome was about web apps (e.g. Gmail, Maps) in the first place,and yes, it was an undermine of Windows domination on desktop. Data collection and ads outside search came later.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
IE lost because Microsoft thought they had won forever and stopped devoting resources to its development. By the time they reformed a team to improve it, it was too late. The reason we hate it is not the reason it became hated by most consumers.
devwastaken 3y ago
Safari doesn't even support adblockers. It's a DOA browser.
- troupo 3y ago
  Strange then that I use it with ad blockers both on MacOS and iOS.
- robertoandred 3y ago
  Where've you been the past 13 years?
izacus 3y ago
Safari already implements Manifest V3 (it never had anything else to block ads) and DRM. So what the heck are you talking about? Safari is leading the charge on all those hostile changes. (Not to mention all the other ways how they undermine the web, like refusing to properly support PWAs and forcing you to go through Apple reviewed process for apps.) This strange narative how Safari (the only browser you're ever allowed to use on iOS) is somehow better than Chrome is outright bizarre. It's worse in every single way... and you're not even allowed to use Firefox to fix it.
- hbn 3y ago
  > (it never had anything else to block ads) I've used Wipr for a long time on both my Mac and iPhone, this isn't true.
  - rpdillon 3y ago
    Wipr says it uses Safari's Content Blocking API, which has restrictions similar to those found in MV3. I think this is what GP was referring to, since it means Wipr/MV3 is limited in what they can block compared to, say, UBO on Firefox.
    - hbn 3y ago
      I think the big issue with MV3 is the limit of like 30k content blocking rules per extension, whereas Safari's is unlimited(?)
      - lapcat 3y ago
        > Safari's is unlimited(?) Safari content blocker rules are limited. Formerly 50k, increased to 150k: https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-for-safari-1-11.html https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-for-safari-1-11.html
        hbn 3y ago
        Right, but that article mentions the workaround. Wipr gets you to enable a few "extensions" (Wipr Extra, and Wipr Parts 1-3) when you set it up. Each one grants an additional 150k rules
drewcoo 3y ago
> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. Everyone hated IE because once they won the browser war Microsoft stopped improving their browser. Why bother? There was no market to gain.
simondotau 3y ago
> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) Google is of course much smarter than Microsoft. Google avoids this by declaring everything Chrome does to be a standard. And then far from being criticised from departing from the standard, their competitors get criticised for not implementing whatever thing Chrome came up with yesterday.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  That was what made IE dangerous: everything Microsoft did in IE was the standard for a bunch of years. They built things like XHR and the concept of "AJAX". The CSS model of IE was eventually enshrined as box-sizing: border-box, because designers loved it and it was easier to work with. For many years in IE4/5/6 every browser was criticized for not supporting IE standards. That's how IE6 got a huge marketshare and then kept that marketshare for far longer than it ever should have. That's why those of us that remember browser history worry that Chrome is the new IE. It's defining the standards. It has crazy momentum behind it. People are (victim) blaming Safari and Firefox for not "keeping up with standards", even though the standards they aren't keeping up with are often things Google decided to do without finishing the standards process first. That's what IE did. People remember the years after the interregnum of the web slowly cleaning up that mess. Of standards finally getting passed and IE being the one incompatible. They don't remember as well that IE was the problem child so much because it defined standards for years and that's what cemented its huge marketshare and inability to go away quietly when it came time to clean things up. Cleaning things up was so hard because it had defined so many standards. Worrying about "Chrome is the new IE" now is trying to prevent that mess from happening a second time.
pornel 3y ago
Recent Safari deserves credit for listening to developers and catching up with many standards.
aaa_aaa 3y ago
"Chrome is the new IE" is laughable. Apparently you know nothing about history. Chrome has its sins but it is no where near comparing the evil of MS shoveling their OS and Office to peoples throats.
- anthk 3y ago
  You mean, like Android and EEE? Chrome spying on everything the user has? Their search engine and phones tracking the user's life as our worst nightmare of the 90's? Private mail servers becoming near impossible to setup on our own because of GMAIL and DKIM witchcraftery with mail servers? With the main online media tracking the user preferences on music and video too, minus the porn? They cut down Gtalk/Jabber integration, too. Heck, Google is what we were afraid of MS in late 90's/early 2000's on galaxy levels.
barbazoo 3y ago
I don't expect my almost 70 year old mother to know the history of internet browsers. She just wants to browse the internet. I blame Google instead.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dizhn 3y ago
The standards yes. But everybody was targeting IE first so that wasn't a huge issue for the end user. What I remember made people move away from it was its willingless to just execute everything from the web (i.e ActiveX) and how insecure it had become due to this.
ksec 3y ago
>But yeah, that's what you get when you don't know history. The author of that phase, and those that commented on issue at the time admitted they wasn't even programming during IE era. And falsely claim IE era as IE 7..... Not only that. A lot of people actually quite like IE 5.5. I would even argue IE hate wasn't even because of enforcing its own standard ( Although that is certainly an issue ). It was because they conquered 95+% market share and stop innovating when there were insane amount of low hanging fruit and bugs. But yeah. Most vocal engineers of today joined the industry in post iPhone era. One reason why Silicon Valley are full of people continue to reinvent the flat tire.

by mrtksn 3y ago

tommiegannert 3y ago

IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs to Safari.

Semaphor 3y ago
Later, IE was also hated for being tied to the OS (which was related but different to the "not evolving"). Another thing Safari has. So yeah, I also fully agree. Safari is still the new IE.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  The reason IE was hated for being tied in the OS was because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all, just because the OS provides a JS engine out of the box doesn't make it Windows Me grade.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I disagree. It made it, so people with an older OS could not get a current IE. So you had ancient IE version linger for years and years. And with Safari, I can’t test any specific issues because we only have one mac, and it’s old and can’t run a current Safari. The situation is slightly better than with IE, as multiple macOS versions apparently (or so I was told) can run a newer Safari, but still not all.
  - TheDong 3y ago
    > because the OS was crashing due to the IE bugs. That's not the case with macOS or iOS at all I mean, I've had iOS crash while using safari more often than I had windows 98 crash while using IE. At least back in the IE days, when a user found a site they couldn't open in IE, they could go download firefox. When a user encounters a websites that doesn't work on iOS safari, they can't download a different browser. Even worse, when you report the bug to the site owner (say your friend), they'll then say "Oh, sorry, I don't own an iPhone or macbook, so I'd have to pay $800+ to reproduce your bug", while with IE, it ran on basically any computer, and I think windows back then still had a trial version you could use for free.
- oblio 3y ago
  On a somewhat funny, somewhat related note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX It doesn't disprove your point, it's just a cute bit of trivia.
- Semaphor 3y ago
  If you downvote me, please tell me why my comment is wrong. Otherwise, no one learns anything.
- smcleod 3y ago
  IE was hated for being unreliable, lax on security and lacking in modern features. Safari / WebKit is incredibly performant and reliable with a modern feature set. Personally I’m not a fan of the UI but I guess it gets the job done.
  - Semaphor 3y ago
    I said "also hated", as in "in addition".
    - smcleod 3y ago
      Ah, my apologies, I must’ve misread.
mrtksn 3y ago
> I'm curious what "its own vision" was The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when anything that's using some advanced API. IE was hated after the fact of cornering the whole marketshare and making the web developers build all the websites to work on IE only. Initially, IE was very innovative browser too and they were the inventor of technologies like Ajax, introduced in IE5. Back in the pre-hate days, the web developers loved IE and it's innovative ways that let them to cool stuff. Chrome being still innovative doesn't mean much. Once they make sure that websites are built to work in Chrome only, they can relax and stop spending money on it and increase profits and stock prices by rent seeking.
- oblio 3y ago
  As crazy as that sounds, IE had a better development team until IE6 basically killed off its competition. It was more stable than equivalent browsers, it had more features, I think it was even developed faster than competitors. Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    OS complexity isn't much of a moat, linux works fine. The "problem" is that the browser projects are organised as big monoliths with limited internal competition for the components. Although it isn't really a problem yet. Chrome works fine, and switching web browsers isn't hard to do. But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.
    - oblio 3y ago
cowsandmilk 3y ago
> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”. The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions. > IE was absolutely hated for not evolving IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-angers-web-standards-advocates/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  It might be surprising, but that is not an exhaustive list of what Chrome has been doing "recently".
- cubefox 3y ago
  Thanks for that link. Though I'm a bit confused by the date, wasn't IE6 already out by then?
ralfn 3y ago
>I'm curious what "its own vision" was Making Windows a requirement for the web. Things like ActiveX.
tarsinge 3y ago
Depends which of the two period: first it evolved a lot with custom features non available for competitors (that’s the phase Chrome is in). Then once everything was IE specific code and it achieved domination it stopped evolving. When people say Chrome is the new IE is to mean it’s on the same trajectory (IE early mid 00’s), not that it’s already at the IE6 in 2010 phase.
phpnode 3y ago
Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Ya, if I was told correctly by management at the time, Microsoft’s first large scale layoff (that would layoff people without perf reasons) was in the 2008. They actually moved a bunch of IE KLTO to China by the mid 2000s, and then took it back to Redmond in 2009/2010 when they realized chrome and Firefox were kicking their butts.
Fatnino 3y ago
When I learned html as a kid in 1998 IE was better than Netscape in my mind. Netscape had lame <blink> while IE had the very cool <marquee> instead.
- tommiegannert 3y ago
  Touché, the blink vs marquee was a big thing.
bartread 3y ago
> I'm curious what "its own vision" was Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so. So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out. You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result. Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc. You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage). IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off. Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too. And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be. Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do. Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.
onurcel 3y ago
To be accurate, IE was not hated by "end-users". It was hated by web developers (understandably) reluctant to support non-standard apis and by informed people.
- rvnx 3y ago
  If the API was used by 90%+ of the internet, then it was the standard.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It was also hated by many end users.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
>IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS. So they had a vision for a vector image markup, and that was what they did. SMIL-like extensions to HTML, and the use of behaviors in css were also part of their "vision" https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html visions, like ideas, are a dime a dozen - in a browser market it matters if your visions are standards because if not they break the web. IE's visions were not standardized and not supported by other browsers, they tried to instead do an end run around standardization. Chrome is the new IE. Chrome removing JPEG XL seems a pretty good indicator of that. Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things.
- codedokode 3y ago
  IE6 had a lot of bugs (not different vision of standards, but bugs). A kind of bugs that looked like developers were lazy to cover all possible cases. As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards. I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly. [1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time/#aa-the-double-margin-bug https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    I can see that article was from 2008, IE6 was release in 2001. So again on its initial release, IE6 was the best browser. Did it have bugs? You bet! Were those bugs as irritating as the ones in Netscape - well the XSL-T that was generating html for a site once put a p inside of an li and Netscape would blue screen my Windows machine 75% of the time when that happened, unfortunately it turns out you cannot do a quick CSS hack for that.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Perhaps the issue here is age? At the start IE was cutting edge, then MS didn't do anything useful with it for 10 years. Filters were certainly part of its own vision, AIR. MS seemed to innovate most in breaking hacks that helped to work around their "quirks".
helloooooooo 3y ago
Do end users hate Chrome? Or is this just the perspective bias of the crowds that frequent HN? It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.
- jen20 3y ago
  The thing they are doing right is being imposed upon people at every turn by every Google property, no?
  - helloooooooo 3y ago
    How? If I own a windows machine it comes with Edgium. If I own an apple machine it has Safari. If I use a desktop Linux distribution, it likely comes with Firefox. If I use a Chromebook, it comes with Chrome(which is highly integrated into the OS itself). Google isn’t imposing anything. Sure when you navigate to a Google site, it may nag you to download Chrome. Microsoft does the same on a Windows box. There is no imposition or compulsion involved.
    - jen20 3y ago
      Nagging is both imposition and compulsion.
- nerdix 3y ago
  Its pretty clear that isn't the case since there are viable alternatives and people have to go out of their way to install Chrome to begin with. If most people hated it, they would just install Firefox instead (or use Edge or Safari)
gumby 3y ago
> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it They do? That's quite a claim. I work with a number of people who were simply told that installing chrome is part of setting up your computer and don't really have any opinion -- "chrome" is the word for looking at a web page and "chrome is just how computers work". At least for the {desk,lap}top, I think that's the vast majority.
saiya-jin 3y ago
> Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks). Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.
layer8 3y ago
> I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective. Yep, for various usability reasons, I used IE as my daily driver until Windows updates disabled it. Never liked Chrome. Using Firefox now.
throw_m239339 3y ago
> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. I'm curious what "its own vision" was, other than "do as little as possible, while Mozilla and Opera keeps pushing forward." IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.
aaa_aaa 3y ago
No it was not hated for evolving. It was hated because it made banks and many web sites enforcing people to use Windows. Chrome is nowhere near it.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  "It was hated because it made banks force people to use Windows"? For all IE's weaknesses, it didn't "make" banks do any such thing. They chose that.
pg_1234 3y ago
> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving. Chrome is doing worse than not evolving ... ... it is evolving towards evil. Compared to this, stasis would be a blessing.

lol768 3y ago

Safari caused me by far the most issues, back when I was doing frontend in ~2017/2018, in terms of how it complied with web standards (I wasn't as fussed at the standards it didn't support - at least I knew!) and rendered the web application I was working on across desktop, iPad and iPhone. I spent more time chasing Safari bugs and rendering idiosyncrasies than I did dealing with IE11, frankly.

euroderf 3y ago
Satisfied Safari user here. Chrome had me chasing shiny, shiny but nowadays if something doesn't run right in Safari, life goes on, and Apple ecosystem integration more than compensates. Disclaimer: I am not a web dev.
toastal 3y ago
And bugfixes always took 6 months til the next OS update. Holding back Notifications and other PWA-related specs left a sour taste to me because it meant I couldn’t build a PWA …but you could buy Apple hardware a developer license and make a native app (even if it was mostly CRUD).
burai 3y ago
Most of the problems I faced in the projects I work are caused by developers working only and exclusively with Chrome and not bothering to check their work on Safari and Firefox. The issues that were found with Safari were easy to fix or work around. Nothing compares to the painful process during ~2005-2010 when it came to support IE6.
- blackoil 3y ago
  Safari testing requires a mac/iP*
  - MatthiasPortzel 3y ago
    Safari’s UI is based on mac-platform components, but the WebKit team provides builds of the WebKit rendering engine with a GTK-based UI. => https://webkit.org/downloads https://webkit.org/downloads

frou_dh 3y ago

> Remember the "$BROWSER is the new IE" narrative? Yes, it's always been much like the "Everyone I Don't Like Is Hitler" meme.

bunga-bunga 3y ago

IE was different things to different people. To developers, IE was the browser for which you had to spend hours debugging issues. Sounds like Safari to me. Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was. (Sent from my Safari browser)

joshstrange 3y ago
> Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was. Until Edge (which is just Chrome essentially) the only way to run IE was on a windows computer. Not sure how that’s different.
- bunga-bunga 3y ago
  The difference is that Microsoft did not sell computers and did not sue anyone trying to run their OS on non-Microsoft hardware. Safari can only be run on Apple machines manufactured by Apple.
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    Aside from selling hackintosh computers I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Apple going after someone for running macOS on third party hardware or running it virtualized. If you try to make a business out of it they will come after you but they are going after developers. Nowadays something like BrowserStack feels like a requirement anyways since I’ll never have all the devices I need to test.
    - bunga-bunga 3y ago
      You’re missing the point. Just because you can “pirate it” and not have the FBI at your doorstep it doesn’t mean Apple is faultless. Also Browserstack is still using Apple devices and you have to pay for them. These are all unnecessary justifications for the new IE
robertoandred 3y ago

NicoJuicy 3y ago

Safari was always behind on Web specs that could replace apps in the app store. It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :) - Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives - Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)

threeseed 3y ago
People have been making this tired argument for literally over a decade. Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are. So no there is no conspiracy by Apple to prevent the rise of web apps.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I think it’s possible to develop a reasonably good web app or PWA. I’ve seen a small handful, but the vast majority I encounter don’t meet that bar. Truly great web apps are rare. There’s so many little things that need to be gotten right for a mobile app of any kind to feel good to use, and on the web it’s all entirely up to the developer since it’s “bring your own everything” with no shared known-good foundation and scaffolding to rely on (even React doesn’t really fit with the wildly different ways it can be used). There’s so many variables at play that the average incidence of papercuts is markedly higher. The other thing is that to make a great web app, the developer needs to care a lot about delivering quality and polish, which is somewhat rare. This can probably be attributed to the web as a platform often being chosen to keep costs down (multiplatform, large pool of devs) — while in theory the savings from not having to maintain codebases for separate platforms could instead be invested in quality of the web app, it’s usually not, instead being put towards more marketable things as the app is forever stuck at “technically works” in all its janky glory.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  And yet a lot of us avoid the Reddit app and use the mobile web version instead. Lots of apps are just thin web wrappers too, and I bet most users don't even notice.

Const-me 3y ago

> departure from standards There were no new HTML standards between 4.0.1 in 2000, and 5.0 in 2014. > enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share Modern web is only possible because Microsoft implemented non-standard XMLHttpRequest in IE5. However, they didn’t do that to enforce a vision. The goal was practical — save network bandwidth for their Outlook Web Access product.

Macha 3y ago
ES5, 2009, CSS 2.1, 2011. HTML is not the only standard for a web browser Also in that period, Microsoft was failing to comply with the standards for CSS 2, standardised in 1998, ES3, standardised in 1999, and PNG, standardised in 1996.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

google is the new microsoft. has been for a few years now.

lmm 3y ago

Standards were never the real problem; they were always a joke. I don't think Netscape/Mozilla ever once changed their behaviour to match a standard; rather the standards "committee" was in their pocket for some reason, and would rubber-stamp any proposal from their side no matter how stupid, from the box model onwards. Every "standard" from 4.0 onwards was a step backwards; eventually they approved enough pointless unimplementable nonsense that the WhatWG took over and we got some sanity. Web developers preferred Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox because it had better development tools and ran on Linux. Chrome is the heir of that. The web has always succeeded in spite of standards committees, not because of them. You're the one who doesn't know your history.

masfuerte 3y ago
There is some truth in this. IE had a box model a bit like TeX's. Divs stacked inline and spans sat side by side so you easily make very sophisticated layouts. Navigator's box model was dumb as a rock in comparison. Divs started a new vertical context like they do now. So Navigator's model was standardised as the lowest common denominator. It would have been pretty much impossible at the time to retrofit IE's model into Navigator, and it was years before inline blocks were supported in Firefox. It's not so surprising that Microsoft didn't downgrade their browser to meet the standard.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  It's also useful to note that much of what people loved about the IE box model got immortalized into the standards as box-sizing: border-box. That bit of "required" boilerplate in almost every "Reset CSS" and CSS framework is a forever ode to IE had an easier box model to design with, and now it's the "opt-in standard" that most wild CSS opts in to.

pawelmurias 3y ago

> IE wasn't an inferior browser at the beginning either. It ended up a turd browser with it's own unique quirks bundled everywhere by a company with a vested interest of hindering the web.

mattgperry 3y ago

Yes and no - IE was hated in part for deviating from standard/showing weird behaviour. But more than that it was dragging its feet on implementing new CSS and JS standards so they couldn't be used for years after introduction. It was nightmare.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

IE was terrible at first. It wasn’t until Netscape started proposing dynamic HTML and making a play to take over the desktop experience that Microsoft threw itself behind making a better browser, bundling it with the operating system, and giving it away for free (Netscape was free for end users but required commercial licensing). The only point of IE was to kill Netscape, and it did. Netscape got the last laugh by open sourcing the browser, which is todays Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla was the Netscape mascot FWIW. Mission accomplished Microsoft pivoted to destroying other innovative companies and let IE languish until it was replaced by the malware browser Edge as a competitor to the malware adware browser Chrome. Fortunately Firefox, Safari, Brave, opera continue to exist.

chpatrick 3y ago

IE6 was hated for being the only popular browser where standard features didn't work, or worked differently. It's the exact same situation with Safari now.

spoiler 3y ago

> Remember the "Safari is the new IE" narrative? Just because Safari doesn't support some API doesn't make it IE It wasn't because they had poor feature adoption. It was because they'd tend to adopt features in a way that's incompatible with other browsers (of the top of my head, handling of localStorage in private browsing). It was a bit of a "fuck you" to devs since you often had to do browser detection for Safari (much like you used to have to do for IE) and have special branches or polyfills for Safari. > What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web Apple is just as guilty of this. They crippled and bastardised a bunch of features just to push for a more native adoption (depends on how cynical you are, but some say it's for more control over device usage patterns, and some say it's for longer battery life) It's gotten better and more aligned with other browsers now, though. But alas, I know most are just chromium clones these days

mrtksn 3y ago
Apple probably have similar motives to MS when it comes to crippling the browser and enforcing its own rendering engine in iOS and that is to protects its app market. However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff. With the IE situation, you couldn't just download Firefox and live happy thereafter because every website was made to work in IE and any other browser would simply fail to display the webpages properly either due to the way HTML/CSS is handled or due to some proprietary technology. Apple hasn't done that, maybe only because its tiny marketshare compared to the alternatives but that's how it is. Unfortunately, due to the marketshare of Google Chrome, they can pull an IE and there are signs of it. The hate towards Safari comes from the Web devs who are angry that they can't send push notifications and have to pay 99$ to Apple to embed their webpage into a WebView to pass as an app. There's no much hate towards Safari in its userbase, it's by far the most convenient Web browser in Apple's ecosystem, by far the most battery efficient and the performance is top notch too. Completely different situation with the tragedy of IE.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  > However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use it's dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff. Flash would like a word with you.

cs702 3y ago

> Chrome is the new IE. That sounds exactly right to me, at this moment. I would add that Firefox -- which has been improving noticeably in recent years, -- is "the new Chrome."

joshstrange 3y ago

I’ve been saying this for years (on HN and elsewhere). In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.

jwells89 3y ago
Additionally, Safari at least has the fundamentals in place — IE couldn’t even render transparent PNGs properly without Windows-specific filter trickery until around version 9 or so which was released in 2011, around a decade after Gecko based browsers, WebKit-based browsers, and even Microsoft’s own Tasman-based IE for Mac did.
- joshstrange 3y ago
  People are quick to forget the pain of things like table-based-layout. I’ll never forget in 2006-2008-ish I developed a website for my computer repair business (I was in High School) and was very proud of it. Then I opened it in IE (I had developed it in Firefox) and it all fell apart (I was using floats IIRC). I then rewrote the whole thing using tables because I knew my target audience would not be running Firefox. In Safari sometimes things aren’t aligned correctly but nothing to the degree of hacks I’ve done over the years for IE. Gradients, transparent pngs, rounded corners, the list goes on.
  - Klonoar 3y ago
    Years of obscure CSS targeting tricks to fix IE6/IE7/etc. Codebases littered with star html hacks that effectively rendered an alternate layout. Safari is fine in comparison.
    - joshstrange 3y ago
      I had almost purged the  hacks from my brain but this brought it all back.

deleted 3y ago

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anyonecancode 3y ago

I mainly remember 1) IE being quite idiosyncratic in how it followed html/css standards and 2) being able to use things like firebug to debug FF, but having an alert window pop up with a cryptic, unhelpful message when trying to debug IE. It seemed "make it work in IE6" was like 30% of time spent in my work back then. Also, it stuck around for a _long_ time, so that was especially annoying as long after other browsers, including IE, had moved on, a lot of effort still went into supporting IE6.

lapcat 3y ago

Safari sabotaged its own content blocking extensions long before Google did — uBlock Origin for Safari was killed years ago — and Safari also implemented web attestation before Chrome: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/ https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att...

manojlds 3y ago

Chrome is the Desktop IE Safari is the mobile IE

jchw 3y ago

No, this is a LARP. People hated IE for many reasons but the main one is having to do a bunch of extra work to support it. When IE did depart from the standards most severely, it wasn't like most other browsers were super compliant, it's just that IE didn't update, so it stayed in its same non-compliant state for many years. IE6 lasted from 2001 to 2006 in terms of being the latest browser, which is eons. But worse is that due to the fact that browsers were not evergreen, supporting IE6 remained relevant for far longer. Well into 2010 many sites still had to support the dinosaur of a browser due to its still-relevant marketshare. In fact, I bet IE6 in that era had more marketshare than Firefox does now! Squabbles over standards like this are nothing particularly new either. The only reason Safari was? the new IE is because you have to test in it. caniuse says you can use Wasm, but the commonly-used initiateStreaming API came over a year later in Safari than it did other browsers. What Chrome is today is far worse than the new IE. IE did a lot of dumb garbage, and even some kind of sabotage, but they never had the opportunity to do the kinds of things Google is working on now.

AwaAwa 3y ago

It's also what you get, when you know history and allow it to repeat.

registeredcorn 3y ago

I'm not sure how pronounced it was for others, but one of my personal dislikes with IE was that there was no feasible way to uninstall IE, on top of the dreadful choices it made regarding web standards, documentation, and the overall "feel" of it - not to say that Netscape, etc. were much better at the time, but there was that very real sensation of being forced to have a piece of software I did not want installed on an Operating System that I used solely for compatibility reasons.

dspillett 3y ago

Chrome is the new IE 4 & 5, when MS were still doing the extend and extinguish thing, implementing crap their way, standards be damned. Safari is the new IE 6, when MS stagnated because they had won in large enough areas not to really care any more and designers were forced to hold back on using things for compatibility's sake. If we're more generous, maybe Safari is more like IE 9/10/11 when MS at least tried to be more up-to-date but were behind and non-compliant enough to be a significant pain. Though for us IE11 is still the current IE11 as one or two clients still have a few users on it, we can say “not supported” all we like, but we'll still get complaints if things flat out don't work (display issues and slowness we can tell people to deal with, dysfunction we can't).

SergeAx 3y ago

I believe Chrome was about web apps (e.g. Gmail, Maps) in the first place,and yes, it was an undermine of Windows domination on desktop. Data collection and ads outside search came later.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

IE lost because Microsoft thought they had won forever and stopped devoting resources to its development. By the time they reformed a team to improve it, it was too late. The reason we hate it is not the reason it became hated by most consumers.

devwastaken 3y ago

Safari doesn't even support adblockers. It's a DOA browser.

troupo 3y ago
Strange then that I use it with ad blockers both on MacOS and iOS.
robertoandred 3y ago
Where've you been the past 13 years?

izacus 3y ago

Safari already implements Manifest V3 (it never had anything else to block ads) and DRM. So what the heck are you talking about? Safari is leading the charge on all those hostile changes. (Not to mention all the other ways how they undermine the web, like refusing to properly support PWAs and forcing you to go through Apple reviewed process for apps.) This strange narative how Safari (the only browser you're ever allowed to use on iOS) is somehow better than Chrome is outright bizarre. It's worse in every single way... and you're not even allowed to use Firefox to fix it.

hbn 3y ago
> (it never had anything else to block ads) I've used Wipr for a long time on both my Mac and iPhone, this isn't true.
- rpdillon 3y ago
  Wipr says it uses Safari's Content Blocking API, which has restrictions similar to those found in MV3. I think this is what GP was referring to, since it means Wipr/MV3 is limited in what they can block compared to, say, UBO on Firefox.
  - hbn 3y ago
    I think the big issue with MV3 is the limit of like 30k content blocking rules per extension, whereas Safari's is unlimited(?)
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > Safari's is unlimited(?) Safari content blocker rules are limited. Formerly 50k, increased to 150k: https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-for-safari-1-11.html https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-for-safari-1-11.html
      - hbn 3y ago
        Right, but that article mentions the workaround. Wipr gets you to enable a few "extensions" (Wipr Extra, and Wipr Parts 1-3) when you set it up. Each one grants an additional 150k rules

drewcoo 3y ago

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share. Everyone hated IE because once they won the browser war Microsoft stopped improving their browser. Why bother? There was no market to gain.

simondotau 3y ago

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) Google is of course much smarter than Microsoft. Google avoids this by declaring everything Chrome does to be a standard. And then far from being criticised from departing from the standard, their competitors get criticised for not implementing whatever thing Chrome came up with yesterday.

WorldMaker 3y ago
That was what made IE dangerous: everything Microsoft did in IE was the standard for a bunch of years. They built things like XHR and the concept of "AJAX". The CSS model of IE was eventually enshrined as box-sizing: border-box, because designers loved it and it was easier to work with. For many years in IE4/5/6 every browser was criticized for not supporting IE standards. That's how IE6 got a huge marketshare and then kept that marketshare for far longer than it ever should have. That's why those of us that remember browser history worry that Chrome is the new IE. It's defining the standards. It has crazy momentum behind it. People are (victim) blaming Safari and Firefox for not "keeping up with standards", even though the standards they aren't keeping up with are often things Google decided to do without finishing the standards process first. That's what IE did. People remember the years after the interregnum of the web slowly cleaning up that mess. Of standards finally getting passed and IE being the one incompatible. They don't remember as well that IE was the problem child so much because it defined standards for years and that's what cemented its huge marketshare and inability to go away quietly when it came time to clean things up. Cleaning things up was so hard because it had defined so many standards. Worrying about "Chrome is the new IE" now is trying to prevent that mess from happening a second time.

pornel 3y ago

Recent Safari deserves credit for listening to developers and catching up with many standards.

aaa_aaa 3y ago

"Chrome is the new IE" is laughable. Apparently you know nothing about history. Chrome has its sins but it is no where near comparing the evil of MS shoveling their OS and Office to peoples throats.

anthk 3y ago
You mean, like Android and EEE? Chrome spying on everything the user has? Their search engine and phones tracking the user's life as our worst nightmare of the 90's? Private mail servers becoming near impossible to setup on our own because of GMAIL and DKIM witchcraftery with mail servers? With the main online media tracking the user preferences on music and video too, minus the porn? They cut down Gtalk/Jabber integration, too. Heck, Google is what we were afraid of MS in late 90's/early 2000's on galaxy levels.

barbazoo 3y ago

I don't expect my almost 70 year old mother to know the history of internet browsers. She just wants to browse the internet. I blame Google instead.

deleted 3y ago

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dizhn 3y ago

The standards yes. But everybody was targeting IE first so that wasn't a huge issue for the end user. What I remember made people move away from it was its willingless to just execute everything from the web (i.e ActiveX) and how insecure it had become due to this.

ksec 3y ago

>But yeah, that's what you get when you don't know history. The author of that phase, and those that commented on issue at the time admitted they wasn't even programming during IE era. And falsely claim IE era as IE 7..... Not only that. A lot of people actually quite like IE 5.5. I would even argue IE hate wasn't even because of enforcing its own standard ( Although that is certainly an issue ). It was because they conquered 95+% market share and stop innovating when there were insane amount of low hanging fruit and bugs. But yeah. Most vocal engineers of today joined the industry in post iPhone era. One reason why Silicon Valley are full of people continue to reinvent the flat tire.