18 ms·

Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

284 points by bentocorp 2y ago

amadeuspagel 2y ago
Are web standards the new proprietary extensions?
est 2y ago
The only problem with Chrome: It's controlled by an advertising company.
- threeseed 2y ago
  And you see evidence of this influence throughout Chrome. For example, Apple simply blocked third party cookies which are almost exclusively used for tracking. Chrome waited years until they could add their Advertising Sandbox feature first.
  - nolist_policy 2y ago
    Google's competitors in the advertisement space are all lined up to sue Google into oblivion the moment they disable third-party cookies.
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      Why?
      - int_19h 2y ago
        Because Google itself can still track people if they sign into Chrome itself (which it actively encourages by using it as single-sign on for its own services), and thus AdSense can still serve targeted ads, but other ad networks cannot.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    You can see it much more clearly in the lack of an extension API on Android. Chrome on Android is an absolute nightmare for one reason alone: No adblock.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gerash 2y ago
    you can disable 3rd party cookies if you want: chrome://settings/cookies
DonnyV 2y ago
Unlike IE, Chrome is still moving forward with new features and depreciating old features.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
  New features to ensure ads are pervasive and can’t be blocked? How empowering! Advertisers say thanks. Wait, Google is the biggest. How self-serving.
- wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  Depreciating old "features" like supporting legacy OS versions which is infuriating. Firefox is an inadequate substitute because too many sites only work in Chrome. I blame lazy developers for this mess all around, which had caused a perfect storm of shit on the nouveau web.
  - sleepybrett 2y ago
    I've run into exactly zero sites, that don't want to update some firmware on some piece of hardware over usb, that don't work on firefox.
    - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
      Congratulations. Maybe in the future in lieu of additional testing, the development team should just check in with you, and if you declare it sunshine and rainbows, ship it.
      - sleepybrett 2y ago
        Maybe in the future you can stop spreading fud about how everything only works in the most consumer hostile browser on the market.
  - 2y ago
lapcat 2y ago
(2023)
curtis3389 2y ago
Mobile Safari is the new IE. Random idiosyncrasies that are poorly documented dictated by the whims of a single corporation. Apple has broken stuff multiple times in the past few years.
- wannacboatmovie 2y ago
  Then it would be quite different from IE. Microsoft was so averse to breaking backwards compatibility, that IE stopped innovating and stagnated.
  - curtis3389 2y ago
    I was thinking more of every web app needing one or more "if isIE() {} else {}" blocks somewhere in its codebase. Now we have the wondrous pleasure of doing the same for Apple.
    - perardi 2y ago
      There are so many little bits of…weird in Safari. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/WebKit_Extensions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/WebKit_Exte... Just this morning, I had to go down the WebKit pseudo-element rabbit hole to fix a layout bug in a very standard date-of-birth field.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    I don't think that is true. They stopped developing it full stop. Keeping back compat was not the issue.
    - leptons 2y ago
      Microsoft stopped developing IE when the government sued them for simply including IE with Windows, the same thing Apple does with Safari. But Apple is far more abusive and forbids any other browser engine on iOS, all browsers on iOS are forced to use Safari under the hood.
asddubs 2y ago
Just to (mostly) preempt this because the exact same discussion is had every time this sentiment comes up: Isn't safari the new IE? Answer: They both are like IE, for different reasons: Chrome: Pushes proprietary extensions onto the web, which due to their absolute dominance others are somewhat forced to adopt, people develop for it and don't test in any other browser, just like IE Safari: is coupled to operating system version, lags behind on implementing new features, thus single handedly slowing down when everyone can use new features. Has weird quirks that other browsers don't, just like IE (though not nearly as bad as IE) So which is like IE? It just depends on what you mean when you say "like IE", the label applies to both because IE was bad for more than one reason
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  What are these proprietary extensions?
  - asddubs 2y ago
    if you want a really old example, pnacl. If you want a slightly recent one, FLoC. Not saying those are the best examples, they are just what comes to my head first. I don't really keep up super closely.
    - amadeuspagel 2y ago
      Neither of these are proprietary.
      - asadotzler 2y ago
        Both are.
    - SquareWheel 2y ago
      pnacl was an example of Google throwing away their homebrewed solution in favour of a common standard (Web Assembly). That seems like a strong argument that they don't push proprietary extensions.
refulgentis 2y ago
Safari. I assumed this was overblown until I had the rich experience of developing a Flutter app that needed to work on every platform. Somehow, even Androids chaos is notably better to work with.
- torlok 2y ago
  A Google product didn't work right on iOS? Shocking.
  - nerdix 2y ago
    Google typically goes out of its way to make its products work on iOS while the same can't be said in reverse.
    - pirates 2y ago
      Intentionally restricting apps from using core features of the OS with a paywall is making its products work?
      - nerdix 2y ago
        I'm not sure which product(s) you're referring to. Apple has like 6 apps in the Play Store and one of them is for helping Android users migrate to iOS. On the other hand, Google has dozens of apps in the App Store. And Flutter Web not working on iOS doesn't even help Google. If anything it just hurts Flutter's adoption on the web which is already low. So I don't think there is some grand conspiracy within Google to take out Safari by withholding Flutter support.
        refulgentis 2y ago
        They sort of gave up halfway through lazily invoking the NPC bog-standard Google-on-iOS complaint: you need to pay for YouTube Premium to watch videos picture in picture over other apps. (source: iOS dev turned Googler turned ex-Googler, so I soak in everyone's grudge matches :) )
MBCook 2y ago
Yes. If it works on Chrome, no one cares or even tests for other things. If there is a JS feature in Chrome they want to use, so it’s impossible to use other browsers (instead of looking wrong) people do it. Performs fine in Chrome? Ship it. Yes, Chrome is the new IE in that it’s the only browsers companies care about, just like IE was for a very long time. Everything has to be Chrome compatible to succeed. That’s the benchmark, not what the spec says.
- wseqyrku 2y ago
  > If it works on Chrome, no one cares or even tests for other things. We've been through an extensive standardization pass for this to not happen. Anything not matching the specification whether in Chrome or any other browser should be considered a bug. This is not at all the same as IE, where it just went its own way.
  - beej71 2y ago
    > should be considered a bug Should be, but isn't. At least not in a practical sense.
  - ClassyJacket 2y ago
    Yes it should be, but it isn't, that's the problem
  - bunderbunder 2y ago
    The unstated major premise of this assertion is that the standard is a spec that every browser must comply with exactly. It's not; there's not a single browser that has ever implemented 100% of whatever was the latest standard at the time, and major browsers typically also include many of their own additions that go beyond the standard. This latter bit isn't in conflict with the standard; it's an essential part of the standardization process. The typical route for something making it into the standard is for a browser to release their own browser-specific extension and use that as a basis for advocating that it be added to the standard. XMLHttpRequest, for example, started as an IE-only feature and didn't make it into all the other major browsers for several years. It got a published W3C spec a little bit after that, which meant that browsers needed another couple years to also get synced up on their behavior. In this respect, Chrome has definitely now taken IE's old position: new Web standards have a tendency to start as Chrome-specific extensions, and then the other browsers have to implement their own versions and get them ratified into the W3C specs in an effort to try and keep up. Which in turn suggests that a compatibility-minded Web developer might want to choose a similar strategy from what was done in the past: test on the most popular browser last.
marxisttemp 2y ago
Safari is great and very performant. Not every rushed “standard” Google forces everyone to catch up to is a good thing.
intellix 2y ago
Safari, the browser that claims to support standards but always comes with caveats, like saying they support transform/transitions and then everything with box shadows flickering
- lxgr 2y ago
  It's also very slow to support new standards, in my experience. Web push notifications literally took years to make it from macOS to iOS, for example. (Yes, these are commonly abused for spam and other user-hostile things; no, I don't think that's a valid reason to withhold them from the only acceptable browser on their OS entirely.)
  - jacobp100 2y ago
    Depends what you’re looking at. They’re very fast at CSS and JS language features They adopt new web APIs much more cautiously - or they drag their feet - depending on your perspective
- sccxy 2y ago
  and Safari finds ways to break existing features with every minor update. My codebase is full of Safari version-specific bug fixes.
  - jacobp100 2y ago
    Do you not have fixes for other browsers too?
    - sccxy 2y ago
      No Other browsers are updated more frequently and do not need OS updates. Safari users are left behind with a broken browser. I have more iOS 16.1 users (specific version) than all Chrome users with 6+ months old versions.
sevensor 2y ago
Where I work, edge is the new IE, and there has never been an interregnum. I think people forget that institutions have their own logic.
- tjkohli 2y ago
  But you realize Edge is just Chrome with a different interface right?
  - defrost 2y ago
    There's more to it than that alone, if you run psExplorer you'll find there's Edge the browser and Edge the subterranean process that's hooked into desktop search and general user activity while constantly engaged in telemetry. Sure, these are "just Chrome" components and libraries .. but they're engaged in more than simple web page rendering. NB: I'm not engaging in Edge is Evil conspiracy here and there are "reasons" for what's going on there that some may or may not accept. Just pointing out the additional below the surface integration.
skybrian 2y ago
When was the last time you wanted to build a website and web browsers got in the way? Those days are long gone. Compared to a decade ago, everything is amazing.
- gavindean90 2y ago
  Tbh service workers are different across browsers and the specific implementations should be taken into account. That or I am bad at it.
furyofantares 2y ago
The number of websites that only work on chrome really sucks. It's a small percentage, but it's enough that you run into them and I hate that very much. But unless I'm actively campaigning everyone I know to switch in an effort to save them from it, I'm going to reserve the term "the new ie" for another day. Not to mention the developer story. Just getting a website to look right in every browser was difficult, with IE very often being by far the hardest. IE was a nightmare for a long time.
taf2 2y ago
Not even close. IE 6 didn’t get any updates or new web features for years. It was closed source. It was dead and everyone used it. float:right; zoom:1; was a common necessity… to compare them is an insult to the immense progress and effort spent over the last 24 years… (yes chrome started in 2007, but the teams from Firefox get credit too, many of them went on to build chrome ). The open source movement won, IE is dead - MS shipped edge. We can argue about how Google is evil all day but it’s night and day compared to what the web was like in 2000
- alganet 2y ago
  Then why does it feel like standards lost? We don't have float:right;zoom1: but our "necessities" nowadays are even crazier. Babel, vdom, frameworks provided by browser-vendors. Those are several orders of magnitude more complex than previous "workaround" approaches to the web, all unstandardized. How about Electron? Do we see any Firefox-based desktop apps around or is that market completely dominated by the Chrome runtime? Are app developers happy having only Chromium as the viable solution? (my guess: they're not, but they have no choice). Where we're going is even nastier than clearfixes and table layouts.
  - m4rtink 2y ago
    Isn't this a Firefox/Mozilla fault as well ? Afaik there is really no API or support for embedding Gecko & anyone who tries to do that, is on their own, having to periodically rebase large patch sets for embedding.
    - alganet 2y ago
      Possibly. I guess XUL was that API, but XUL is no more. It helps if your company uses the embedded stuff in other products. Like Microsoft used the Trident engine from IE6 all over Windows components. In that way, allocating resources for developing an embeddable engine is justifiable. Can Mozilla do that? I don'know. Google can (and does it! why wouldn't they?).
      - 2y ago
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
Chromium is, not Chrome And that's not a bad thing - open source - portable - crossplatform - efficient - always up to date
- benchloftbrunch 2y ago
  It's a bad thing because Google's monopoly gives them enormous power to influence browser standards, while also having conflicts of interest re: their advertising business. See for example their recent war against ad blocker extensions.
drewcoo 2y ago
I just bought a new computer and was curious, so I thought I'd try Windows first, and . . . No. Chrome is not the new IE. I am constantly pushed to use Edge for everything, to "make it better" for myself. It's actually sorta creepy . . .
- theshrike79 2y ago
  You do know that Edge is Chromium repackaged, like all other browsers except Safari and Firefox?
  - saghm 2y ago
    So then why does Microsoft try to push it so hard on users who are trying to use Chrome? It's hard to believe they're just trying to save everyone the minimal time and effort that's being spent installing a different browser by randomly deciding to force a full-screen ad on an OS update. At absolute best, it's benign but worth not using simply to avoid rewarding whatever misguided incentives lead to them to "market" it like this. https://www.techradar.com/news/sorry-microsoft-not-even-a-full-page-ad-will-make-people-want-to-use-edge https://www.techradar.com/news/sorry-microsoft-not-even-a-fu...
    - giantrobot 2y ago
      The Edge browser engine is just Chromium. But the Edge browser has loads of telemetry active. Microsoft wants you to use Edge because the telemetry makes them money, rendering websites doesn't really make them money.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      When you use Chrome and sign in, Google is tracking you. When you use Edge and sign in, Microsoft gets to track you. Both companies are selling ads.
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      Edge integrates to Windows, Chrome doesn't. You can set parental controls on Edge using Microsoft's tools, not so for Chrome and Firefox.
ksec 2y ago
I remember this blog. Magic Lasso Adblock is Apple ecosystem only. Its view on pretty much everything is basically Daring Fireball. >tends to be misunderstood to mean that Chrome is like Internet Explorer was in 2009 >Despite being the market share leader, there is significant evidence that Chrome is trailing in speed, efficiency and standards interoperability. >Perhaps the browser with the most disruptive potential is from Microsoft with Edge...... It has also avoided alternative-browser compatibility issues by being based upon Chromium. Every time this subject came up and I will find people who have never used all three browser at the same time. Or wasn't there during the IE era. The phase "is Safari the new IE" was actually coined by someone who wasn't even there or doing Web Dev during IE era. It was IE6, not IE7, and definitely not 2008. And the phase somehow catches on to become is Chrome the new IE. IE was absolutely dominant with 95%+ of browser market share during its peak. Neither Chrome / Blink nor Safari / Webkit ever achieved that. And the most important part was that the HTML / CSS and IE implementation had so many low hanging fruit but NO IMPROVEMENT were made for years. IE 7 / MSHTML released 5 years after IE 6 offered little to no improvement other than a few small fix. Both Chrome / Blink and Safari / Webkit have continuous development over the years. We may not like some of the direction they are going. But every year there are improvement being made with HTML / CSS / JS features. Second part being Chrome is a resource hog or slow. Chrome has made tremendous effort into making it memory efficient since 2021 when complain started to pile in. By 2022 and definitely 2023 multi tab on Chrome is far better than what it was. Safari on the other hand isn't doing well on MultiTabs for over a decade but gets zero attention on the issue. Meanwhile Firefox being the fastest browser in terms of least janks and best for hundreds of tabs gets No recognition either. And lastly Interop. Since 2019 and I believe the first Interop was in 2021. We still dont have a 100% coverage on any Interop year for all three major browsers. I wish Interop could at least agree and publish baseline support that aims to have all browser support by 2025. Instead we are forever stuck in 95% with quirks everywhere.
- xlii 2y ago
  Actually, quick search leads to [0] (not very reliable, but still better than nothing) shows that Chrome and derivatives take 72%. As other commenters mention, Safari is mostly locked to the Apple ecosystem, so IMO Chrome on non-Apple systems is around 90%. Firefox is metered to 3% which is lower than reality (due to adblocking). My personal experience is, however, very similar to IE golden age. In order to interact with state office web apps I need to switch to Chromium. Neither Firefox nor Safari are supported. Vivaldi is a mixed bag (not sure why though). For me this answer questions is Chrome the new IE. [0]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
(2023) And, No.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
znpy 2y ago
> Is chrome the new IE? Oh it's way worse than that: Chrome is the new IE, and Google is the new (old) Microsoft.
sowut 2y ago
every time i get a new work machine i attempt to use a browser that is not chrome. last time was firefox, this time was safari. eventually i start using chrome on certain sites because of ublock origin. then, as was the case with aws, certain websites are flakey enough times that i just give in and use chrome full time. side note: hey aws, why is your rds performance insights dashboard broken on safari? 33% of the time it will "freeze" and i have to reload the page. very un-dude like.
- darknavi 2y ago
  > eventually i start using chrome on certain sites because of ublock origin. uBO works fine on Firefox for what it's worth. Maybe even better because of the lack of Manifest v3 restrictions.
  - sowut 2y ago
    i'll have to give firefox another look, it has been years.
    - peutetre 2y ago
      uBlock Origin works best on Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
_fat_santa 2y ago
One issue I keep see cropping up with various corporate websites is they will only allow Chrome and will block any other browser. I would say in 9/10 cases, this isn't because the site uses features not supported in other browsers but rather, developers restrict it to Chrome because that's all their QA's test on.
- 1stcity3rdcoast 2y ago
  Which is ironic because scores of enterprise companies developed internal systems/reporting/intranets using .NET in the early 2000s, restricting their users to Internet Explorer!
  - ta1243 2y ago
    And still have to maintain windows 7 or earlier machines running IE 7 to run internal applications
- wslh 2y ago
  It's clear that Net Neutrality and web standards are close to a myth. Security-wise, I trust Google over Mozilla though.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    That's a different layer of the stack. I could get behind "web neutrality" as an initiative, though!
- lxgr 2y ago
  Absolutely. I'm still not sure what annoys me more: Sites that break on non-Chrome, or sites that won't even let me try behind a cookie agent blocker.
- dangsux 2y ago
  [dead]
smm11 2y ago
Chrome is controlled by Google. The US government will be controlled by the owner of X, Tesla, and SpaceX.
fellowniusmonk 2y ago
No not even close by every single possible measure. I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change. I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed. The most important one from an anti-trust perspective, every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome, that includes my mobile devices which used the manufactures browser by default. If I want to use chromium I can, Safari has been VERY late in implementing certain industry spec standards (SSE's, web sockets, IndexedDB API, animations, relative color syntax, container queries, a bunch of <video> stuff, flexbox, the list goes on and on.)
- lxgr 2y ago
  > using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed. 99% of the time I use Chrome it's because some site does not support Firefox (and that often includes Google sites/apps). (The 1% are for APIs that Firefox, consciously or out of resource constraints, does not support.) In what sense am I "freely installing" Chrome in this situation? Just today I had a family member reach out to me, unable to use government e-signing on their phone after I'd switched their default browser to Firefox (they were getting tons of ads in mobile Chrome, which does not support plugins and accordingly also no ad blockers). Turns out they support only IE/Edge, Safari, and of course Chrome... > every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome My Pixel came with Chrome preinstalled, as far as I remember. (I don't recall if there was a browser selection screen.) Sure, that's a Google phone, but then again Windows is a Microsoft operating system. > the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS Oh, I'd also not advise anyone to switch to Safari. Apple absolutely would pull exactly the same or worse as Google if they could, I have no illusions about that. I can't wait for the day they're finally forced to actually allow alternative browser engines on iOS and switch to Firefox everywhere.
  - 2y ago
crowcroft 2y ago
Yes, Chrome is the de facto standard, and often the only browser thoroughly tested against. Even now though it isn't as dominant as IE at its peak though. No, Chrome isn't significantly behind on adopting new standards compared with other major browsers (I'm looking at you Safari). IE6 to IE7 was about five years!
- ericwood 2y ago
  I see so many ideological arguments around "X is the new IE" that neglect one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. Working around all of its quirks and non-standard behavior had an extremely long half-life; the venn diagram of things that worked correctly across all major browsers at the time was very complex and messy. Even with the release of IE7 it took many years for people to adopt it, and IE7 was hardly a saint either. There's a part of my brain I'll never get back devoted to all of these workarounds. So many hours lost to weird corporate networks that had quirks mode enabled, different box models (before the advent of the `box-sizing` CSS attribute), random omissions of standards (no `:hover` on elements besides `a`), etc.
  - JimDabell 2y ago
    > one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. This is the thing that I think developers today don’t seem to be able to get their head around. There was a fourteen year time period between Internet Explorer 6 being released and when it dropped out of usage worldwide. Even if you only had to support the USA, it was still eleven years. People could go their entire careers without ever knowing what it was like not having to support it. It paralysed front-end development for more than a decade.
    - ericwood 2y ago
      Deprecating it if your site had much traffic was like pulling teeth! I worked at a company that had IT professionals as its main demographic in 2011 and it was a constant struggle. Lots of corporations were locked into IE6 because they had developed internal applications that relied on ActiveX controls or other non-standard APIs. IE7 was still pretty terrible, and it took even longer to drop support. CSS was pretty bad but at least well-documented; debugging JS was a whole other hell. There was no such thing as dev tooling, and you got a small alert in the status bar when the page had errors, which opened a pop up that gave you the line number and very little other information. Supposedly you could connect it to VisualStudio and get a full debugging experience, but I never had the luxury. Lots of guessing and checking. Firebug was a huge deal when it launched.
neonsunset 2y ago
It is, except this time around it's worse.
kernal 2y ago
Yes, Chrome is the new IE in only one category when IE was popular: market share. Everything else? Not so much.
mediumsmart 2y ago
I always find it comforting to know that a site would work in chrome.
t1234s 2y ago
Safari has been the new IE
spaceguillotine 2y ago
I think it might be worse. Google has lied about Chrome and privacy so much that you can just assume it phones everything back to Alphabet even if you set it not to.
amelius 2y ago
Is Apple the new Microsoft?
mixxit 2y ago
can i run chrome on my mobile and sync to chrome on my pc and put an adblocker on both?
PeterStuer 2y ago
As a Firefox mainliner for 'legacy' reasons to be fair, I often have to revert to Chrome to get sites to work. I guess there are a lott of dev shops out there that just test on Chrome/Edge (and maybe Safari)
- hombre_fatal 2y ago
  Besides, Firefox has its own problems. The craziest is its permissive same origin policy compared to Chrome/Safari, like how `window.top.location.href = 'https://example.com https://example.com';` works from inside a cross origin iframe to redirect the parent.
wkyleg 2y ago
Yes, in terms of market share. But the key difference is that it's leagues better than other browser engines on quality. From the perspective of competition this isn't great, but the network effects are hard to ignore. Firefox and Safari (webkit) just tend not to work as well. It's very different in terms of quality though. Internet Explorer was a terrible browser and often lagging in implementing standards. The better comparison would be Safari now, which often completely breaks many sites on mobile for me. It also doesn't eliminate a lot of newer CSS animations properly. This is really very unfortunate because it's good to have competition in browser implementations. Everything is Chrome under the hood now except for Safari and Firefox.
- akira2501 2y ago
  Internet Explorer was an attempt to monopolize and control the early internet. They intentionally left standards unimplemented or just implemented their own insane version of them in order to trap people into the platform. It's no wonder the product saw them taken to court over antitrust violations.
pipeline_peak 2y ago
No because Chrome is actually a good browser. We’ll never see a reasonable competitor unless someone like Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos gets involved. But that’s not feasible because their companies aren’t internet ad agencies.
steelframe 2y ago
When I parked a rental car in downtown SLC last week I had to find a way to pay to park. There was a kiosk with a functional screen, but the touchscreen part of it was broken, so I couldn't interact with it. I plopped my stuff down and sat on a concrete bench in the cold and dark to try to figure things out on my phone. The QR code sent me to a website to install an app. Google Play store said the app was designed for an older version of Android and couldn't be installed on my device. I eventually found a "pay online" link hidden down the page a bit, then spent several minutes filling in my credit card number and what not. Then when I got to the part where I was to select the expiration month and year, the drop-down menus simply didn't work. I had no way to continue in my default browser, Firefox. It had been 7 or 8 minutes, the cold was starting to numb my fingers, and I was no closer to actually paying for my parking space. I debated just canceling my appointment and driving away rather than risk a parking ticket, but I decided to give it just one more try in the Vanadium browser. Lo and behold, the drop-down menus worked, and after over 10 minutes of messing with a broken kiosk, a broken app, and a broken website, I was able to proceed to the point where I punched in my parking space number. Which, of course, wasn't marked. At that point I looked up and down the side of the street and noticed a post with numbers for two spots behind me. I noted which number was bigger to infer whether my space would be one higher than the higher or one lower than the lower and punched that in. After my appointment I came out to find the car parked behind me had a parking ticket, while my car didn't. So I guess I managed to punch the right sequence of buttons on my phone to avoid a parking fine. However the fact remains that I couldn't legally park my car in Salt Lake City unless I was in possession of a functioning smartphone and was running a Chrome-based browser on it. Not sure if this is more a story of Chrome being the only browser that's tested and/or compatible with critical services I need to use to function in a major U.S. city or if it's a story about municipalities like Salt Lake City making things as difficult as possible for people so as to collect more revenue from fines.
- 1over137 2y ago
  The machines don’t take cash?
  - Loughla 2y ago
Devasta 2y ago
As an example of how perfidious some of the discussions on web standards are, on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines In teeny tiny font near the bottom: "Given the market-share dominance of Blink-based browsers,[4] if Google chooses to not support a standard, like JPEG XL,[30][31] it will not become relevant on the Web.[30][31] Such standards are not listed in these tables." So if Chrome implements something that Safari doesn't, then its a deficiency in Safari. If Safari supports something Chrome doesn't, its not relevant so will not appear in any comparison tables. Chrome is 100% the new IE, as it is the being treated as the sole arbiter of what is a web standard or not.
- WD-42 2y ago
  Time to break up chrome.
- troupo 2y ago
  You can see it here, too. And in all discussions around PWAs. And on sites like whatcanwebdotoday. Anything Chrome ships is considered crucial, critical, and standard. And other browsers are shit because they don't immediately implement everything Chrome implements
lerp-io 2y ago
okay then i wanna see your chrome IE alternative to v8
ngcc_hk 2y ago
Only use chrome when safari on mac, edge in win11 and whatever browser on Ubuntu failed.
webprofusion 2y ago
Yes. By virtue of most other popular browsers being based on it (chromium), with the exceptions of Safari and Firefox. The controller of the project is still Google. Safari trails chrome because Google didn't like Apple being in charge of the Webkit repo, which led to the Blink fork (the Chromium engine). Firefox is still a great browser, but it has fallen back to square one on popularity. From an anti-trust perspective Google should offer to fund their competitors directly instead of splitting the browser out, the eventual result should be revisions to web standards specs to ensure they are correct and detailed enough to be accurately implemented, which in turn makes new browsers easier to implement. Eventually if specs are close to 100% correct it should be reasonable to generate new browser engines from them. Currently that's not possible due to chasms of ambiguity and contradiction, and because browsers like chrome occasionally implement their own design of stuff just because they want to.
redbell 2y ago
> Perhaps the browser with the most disruptive potential is from Microsoft with Edge... With Edge, Microsoft has a chance to claim the position of the disruptive alternate browser. I believe moving from Chrome to Edge does not change a lot in terms of privacy, proprietary ecosystems, data mining practices, or other reasons that made you switch. In the end, it’s a transition from one tech giant to another of comparable scale with the same practices. Safar? I don't think Apple has the intention to dominate this sector, so it won't push Safari beyond its current geography. All that it cares about is its * walled garden. Firefox? Although I use it as my default browser, it is still far from mass adoption. The fact that they beg users to switch to Firefox* say it all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270
markgoho 2y ago
if any browser is the new IE, it's Firefox -- poor compatibility, very few people use it, but enough that makes people think we need to support it https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/ We're now at 0.8% Firefox usage on Gov't websites, that means Firefox support is no longer required at a gov't level (2% usage is the threshold) Firefox should be shut down in 2025 if all trends continue
whatthedangz 2y ago
[dead]
p0w3n3d 2y ago
Yes it is. I use Firefox wherever I can to not allow one company to take over the internet with their toxic patterns (manifest v3, disallowing screenshotting on pages, breaking their services on other browsers etc.)

284 points by bentocorp 2y ago

amadeuspagel 2y ago

Are web standards the new proprietary extensions?

est 2y ago

The only problem with Chrome: It's controlled by an advertising company.

threeseed 2y ago
And you see evidence of this influence throughout Chrome. For example, Apple simply blocked third party cookies which are almost exclusively used for tracking. Chrome waited years until they could add their Advertising Sandbox feature first.
- nolist_policy 2y ago
  Google's competitors in the advertisement space are all lined up to sue Google into oblivion the moment they disable third-party cookies.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    Why?
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Because Google itself can still track people if they sign into Chrome itself (which it actively encourages by using it as single-sign on for its own services), and thus AdSense can still serve targeted ads, but other ad networks cannot.
- lxgr 2y ago
  You can see it much more clearly in the lack of an extension API on Android. Chrome on Android is an absolute nightmare for one reason alone: No adblock.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gerash 2y ago
  you can disable 3rd party cookies if you want: chrome://settings/cookies

DonnyV 2y ago

Unlike IE, Chrome is still moving forward with new features and depreciating old features.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rcMgD2BwE72F 2y ago
New features to ensure ads are pervasive and can’t be blocked? How empowering! Advertisers say thanks. Wait, Google is the biggest. How self-serving.
wannacboatmovie 2y ago
Depreciating old "features" like supporting legacy OS versions which is infuriating. Firefox is an inadequate substitute because too many sites only work in Chrome. I blame lazy developers for this mess all around, which had caused a perfect storm of shit on the nouveau web.
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  I've run into exactly zero sites, that don't want to update some firmware on some piece of hardware over usb, that don't work on firefox.
  - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
    Congratulations. Maybe in the future in lieu of additional testing, the development team should just check in with you, and if you declare it sunshine and rainbows, ship it.
    - sleepybrett 2y ago
      Maybe in the future you can stop spreading fud about how everything only works in the most consumer hostile browser on the market.
- 2y ago

lapcat 2y ago

(2023)

curtis3389 2y ago

Mobile Safari is the new IE. Random idiosyncrasies that are poorly documented dictated by the whims of a single corporation. Apple has broken stuff multiple times in the past few years.

wannacboatmovie 2y ago
Then it would be quite different from IE. Microsoft was so averse to breaking backwards compatibility, that IE stopped innovating and stagnated.
- curtis3389 2y ago
  I was thinking more of every web app needing one or more "if isIE() {} else {}" blocks somewhere in its codebase. Now we have the wondrous pleasure of doing the same for Apple.
  - perardi 2y ago
    There are so many little bits of…weird in Safari. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/WebKit_Extensions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/WebKit_Exte... Just this morning, I had to go down the WebKit pseudo-element rabbit hole to fix a layout bug in a very standard date-of-birth field.
- bawolff 2y ago
  I don't think that is true. They stopped developing it full stop. Keeping back compat was not the issue.
  - leptons 2y ago
    Microsoft stopped developing IE when the government sued them for simply including IE with Windows, the same thing Apple does with Safari. But Apple is far more abusive and forbids any other browser engine on iOS, all browsers on iOS are forced to use Safari under the hood.

asddubs 2y ago

Just to (mostly) preempt this because the exact same discussion is had every time this sentiment comes up: Isn't safari the new IE? Answer: They both are like IE, for different reasons: Chrome: Pushes proprietary extensions onto the web, which due to their absolute dominance others are somewhat forced to adopt, people develop for it and don't test in any other browser, just like IE Safari: is coupled to operating system version, lags behind on implementing new features, thus single handedly slowing down when everyone can use new features. Has weird quirks that other browsers don't, just like IE (though not nearly as bad as IE) So which is like IE? It just depends on what you mean when you say "like IE", the label applies to both because IE was bad for more than one reason

amadeuspagel 2y ago
What are these proprietary extensions?
- asddubs 2y ago
  if you want a really old example, pnacl. If you want a slightly recent one, FLoC. Not saying those are the best examples, they are just what comes to my head first. I don't really keep up super closely.
  - amadeuspagel 2y ago
    Neither of these are proprietary.
    - asadotzler 2y ago
      Both are.
  - SquareWheel 2y ago
    pnacl was an example of Google throwing away their homebrewed solution in favour of a common standard (Web Assembly). That seems like a strong argument that they don't push proprietary extensions.

refulgentis 2y ago

Safari. I assumed this was overblown until I had the rich experience of developing a Flutter app that needed to work on every platform. Somehow, even Androids chaos is notably better to work with.

torlok 2y ago
A Google product didn't work right on iOS? Shocking.
- nerdix 2y ago
  Google typically goes out of its way to make its products work on iOS while the same can't be said in reverse.
  - pirates 2y ago
    Intentionally restricting apps from using core features of the OS with a paywall is making its products work?
    - nerdix 2y ago
      I'm not sure which product(s) you're referring to. Apple has like 6 apps in the Play Store and one of them is for helping Android users migrate to iOS. On the other hand, Google has dozens of apps in the App Store. And Flutter Web not working on iOS doesn't even help Google. If anything it just hurts Flutter's adoption on the web which is already low. So I don't think there is some grand conspiracy within Google to take out Safari by withholding Flutter support.
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        They sort of gave up halfway through lazily invoking the NPC bog-standard Google-on-iOS complaint: you need to pay for YouTube Premium to watch videos picture in picture over other apps. (source: iOS dev turned Googler turned ex-Googler, so I soak in everyone's grudge matches :) )

MBCook 2y ago

Yes. If it works on Chrome, no one cares or even tests for other things. If there is a JS feature in Chrome they want to use, so it’s impossible to use other browsers (instead of looking wrong) people do it. Performs fine in Chrome? Ship it. Yes, Chrome is the new IE in that it’s the only browsers companies care about, just like IE was for a very long time. Everything has to be Chrome compatible to succeed. That’s the benchmark, not what the spec says.

wseqyrku 2y ago
> If it works on Chrome, no one cares or even tests for other things. We've been through an extensive standardization pass for this to not happen. Anything not matching the specification whether in Chrome or any other browser should be considered a bug. This is not at all the same as IE, where it just went its own way.
- beej71 2y ago
  > should be considered a bug Should be, but isn't. At least not in a practical sense.
- ClassyJacket 2y ago
  Yes it should be, but it isn't, that's the problem
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  The unstated major premise of this assertion is that the standard is a spec that every browser must comply with exactly. It's not; there's not a single browser that has ever implemented 100% of whatever was the latest standard at the time, and major browsers typically also include many of their own additions that go beyond the standard. This latter bit isn't in conflict with the standard; it's an essential part of the standardization process. The typical route for something making it into the standard is for a browser to release their own browser-specific extension and use that as a basis for advocating that it be added to the standard. XMLHttpRequest, for example, started as an IE-only feature and didn't make it into all the other major browsers for several years. It got a published W3C spec a little bit after that, which meant that browsers needed another couple years to also get synced up on their behavior. In this respect, Chrome has definitely now taken IE's old position: new Web standards have a tendency to start as Chrome-specific extensions, and then the other browsers have to implement their own versions and get them ratified into the W3C specs in an effort to try and keep up. Which in turn suggests that a compatibility-minded Web developer might want to choose a similar strategy from what was done in the past: test on the most popular browser last.

marxisttemp 2y ago

Safari is great and very performant. Not every rushed “standard” Google forces everyone to catch up to is a good thing.

intellix 2y ago

Safari, the browser that claims to support standards but always comes with caveats, like saying they support transform/transitions and then everything with box shadows flickering

lxgr 2y ago
It's also very slow to support new standards, in my experience. Web push notifications literally took years to make it from macOS to iOS, for example. (Yes, these are commonly abused for spam and other user-hostile things; no, I don't think that's a valid reason to withhold them from the only acceptable browser on their OS entirely.)
- jacobp100 2y ago
  Depends what you’re looking at. They’re very fast at CSS and JS language features They adopt new web APIs much more cautiously - or they drag their feet - depending on your perspective
sccxy 2y ago
and Safari finds ways to break existing features with every minor update. My codebase is full of Safari version-specific bug fixes.
- jacobp100 2y ago
  Do you not have fixes for other browsers too?
  - sccxy 2y ago
    No Other browsers are updated more frequently and do not need OS updates. Safari users are left behind with a broken browser. I have more iOS 16.1 users (specific version) than all Chrome users with 6+ months old versions.

sevensor 2y ago

Where I work, edge is the new IE, and there has never been an interregnum. I think people forget that institutions have their own logic.

tjkohli 2y ago
But you realize Edge is just Chrome with a different interface right?
- defrost 2y ago
  There's more to it than that alone, if you run psExplorer you'll find there's Edge the browser and Edge the subterranean process that's hooked into desktop search and general user activity while constantly engaged in telemetry. Sure, these are "just Chrome" components and libraries .. but they're engaged in more than simple web page rendering. NB: I'm not engaging in Edge is Evil conspiracy here and there are "reasons" for what's going on there that some may or may not accept. Just pointing out the additional below the surface integration.

skybrian 2y ago

When was the last time you wanted to build a website and web browsers got in the way? Those days are long gone. Compared to a decade ago, everything is amazing.

gavindean90 2y ago
Tbh service workers are different across browsers and the specific implementations should be taken into account. That or I am bad at it.

furyofantares 2y ago

The number of websites that only work on chrome really sucks. It's a small percentage, but it's enough that you run into them and I hate that very much. But unless I'm actively campaigning everyone I know to switch in an effort to save them from it, I'm going to reserve the term "the new ie" for another day. Not to mention the developer story. Just getting a website to look right in every browser was difficult, with IE very often being by far the hardest. IE was a nightmare for a long time.

taf2 2y ago

Not even close. IE 6 didn’t get any updates or new web features for years. It was closed source. It was dead and everyone used it. float:right; zoom:1; was a common necessity… to compare them is an insult to the immense progress and effort spent over the last 24 years… (yes chrome started in 2007, but the teams from Firefox get credit too, many of them went on to build chrome ). The open source movement won, IE is dead - MS shipped edge. We can argue about how Google is evil all day but it’s night and day compared to what the web was like in 2000

alganet 2y ago
Then why does it feel like standards lost? We don't have float:right;zoom1: but our "necessities" nowadays are even crazier. Babel, vdom, frameworks provided by browser-vendors. Those are several orders of magnitude more complex than previous "workaround" approaches to the web, all unstandardized. How about Electron? Do we see any Firefox-based desktop apps around or is that market completely dominated by the Chrome runtime? Are app developers happy having only Chromium as the viable solution? (my guess: they're not, but they have no choice). Where we're going is even nastier than clearfixes and table layouts.
- m4rtink 2y ago
  Isn't this a Firefox/Mozilla fault as well ? Afaik there is really no API or support for embedding Gecko & anyone who tries to do that, is on their own, having to periodically rebase large patch sets for embedding.
  - alganet 2y ago
    Possibly. I guess XUL was that API, but XUL is no more. It helps if your company uses the embedded stuff in other products. Like Microsoft used the Trident engine from IE6 all over Windows components. In that way, allocating resources for developing an embeddable engine is justifiable. Can Mozilla do that? I don'know. Google can (and does it! why wouldn't they?).
    - 2y ago

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

Chromium is, not Chrome And that's not a bad thing - open source - portable - crossplatform - efficient - always up to date

benchloftbrunch 2y ago
It's a bad thing because Google's monopoly gives them enormous power to influence browser standards, while also having conflicts of interest re: their advertising business. See for example their recent war against ad blocker extensions.

drewcoo 2y ago

I just bought a new computer and was curious, so I thought I'd try Windows first, and . . . No. Chrome is not the new IE. I am constantly pushed to use Edge for everything, to "make it better" for myself. It's actually sorta creepy . . .

theshrike79 2y ago
You do know that Edge is Chromium repackaged, like all other browsers except Safari and Firefox?
- saghm 2y ago
  So then why does Microsoft try to push it so hard on users who are trying to use Chrome? It's hard to believe they're just trying to save everyone the minimal time and effort that's being spent installing a different browser by randomly deciding to force a full-screen ad on an OS update. At absolute best, it's benign but worth not using simply to avoid rewarding whatever misguided incentives lead to them to "market" it like this. https://www.techradar.com/news/sorry-microsoft-not-even-a-full-page-ad-will-make-people-want-to-use-edge https://www.techradar.com/news/sorry-microsoft-not-even-a-fu...
  - giantrobot 2y ago
    The Edge browser engine is just Chromium. But the Edge browser has loads of telemetry active. Microsoft wants you to use Edge because the telemetry makes them money, rendering websites doesn't really make them money.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    When you use Chrome and sign in, Google is tracking you. When you use Edge and sign in, Microsoft gets to track you. Both companies are selling ads.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    Edge integrates to Windows, Chrome doesn't. You can set parental controls on Edge using Microsoft's tools, not so for Chrome and Firefox.

ksec 2y ago

I remember this blog. Magic Lasso Adblock is Apple ecosystem only. Its view on pretty much everything is basically Daring Fireball. >tends to be misunderstood to mean that Chrome is like Internet Explorer was in 2009 >Despite being the market share leader, there is significant evidence that Chrome is trailing in speed, efficiency and standards interoperability. >Perhaps the browser with the most disruptive potential is from Microsoft with Edge...... It has also avoided alternative-browser compatibility issues by being based upon Chromium. Every time this subject came up and I will find people who have never used all three browser at the same time. Or wasn't there during the IE era. The phase "is Safari the new IE" was actually coined by someone who wasn't even there or doing Web Dev during IE era. It was IE6, not IE7, and definitely not 2008. And the phase somehow catches on to become is Chrome the new IE. IE was absolutely dominant with 95%+ of browser market share during its peak. Neither Chrome / Blink nor Safari / Webkit ever achieved that. And the most important part was that the HTML / CSS and IE implementation had so many low hanging fruit but NO IMPROVEMENT were made for years. IE 7 / MSHTML released 5 years after IE 6 offered little to no improvement other than a few small fix. Both Chrome / Blink and Safari / Webkit have continuous development over the years. We may not like some of the direction they are going. But every year there are improvement being made with HTML / CSS / JS features. Second part being Chrome is a resource hog or slow. Chrome has made tremendous effort into making it memory efficient since 2021 when complain started to pile in. By 2022 and definitely 2023 multi tab on Chrome is far better than what it was. Safari on the other hand isn't doing well on MultiTabs for over a decade but gets zero attention on the issue. Meanwhile Firefox being the fastest browser in terms of least janks and best for hundreds of tabs gets No recognition either. And lastly Interop. Since 2019 and I believe the first Interop was in 2021. We still dont have a 100% coverage on any Interop year for all three major browsers. I wish Interop could at least agree and publish baseline support that aims to have all browser support by 2025. Instead we are forever stuck in 95% with quirks everywhere.

xlii 2y ago
Actually, quick search leads to [0] (not very reliable, but still better than nothing) shows that Chrome and derivatives take 72%. As other commenters mention, Safari is mostly locked to the Apple ecosystem, so IMO Chrome on non-Apple systems is around 90%. Firefox is metered to 3% which is lower than reality (due to adblocking). My personal experience is, however, very similar to IE golden age. In order to interact with state office web apps I need to switch to Chromium. Neither Firefox nor Safari are supported. Vivaldi is a mixed bag (not sure why though). For me this answer questions is Chrome the new IE. [0]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

(2023) And, No.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

znpy 2y ago

> Is chrome the new IE? Oh it's way worse than that: Chrome is the new IE, and Google is the new (old) Microsoft.

sowut 2y ago

every time i get a new work machine i attempt to use a browser that is not chrome. last time was firefox, this time was safari. eventually i start using chrome on certain sites because of ublock origin. then, as was the case with aws, certain websites are flakey enough times that i just give in and use chrome full time. side note: hey aws, why is your rds performance insights dashboard broken on safari? 33% of the time it will "freeze" and i have to reload the page. very un-dude like.

darknavi 2y ago
> eventually i start using chrome on certain sites because of ublock origin. uBO works fine on Firefox for what it's worth. Maybe even better because of the lack of Manifest v3 restrictions.
- sowut 2y ago
  i'll have to give firefox another look, it has been years.
  - peutetre 2y ago
    uBlock Origin works best on Firefox: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-best-on-Firefox https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

_fat_santa 2y ago

One issue I keep see cropping up with various corporate websites is they will only allow Chrome and will block any other browser. I would say in 9/10 cases, this isn't because the site uses features not supported in other browsers but rather, developers restrict it to Chrome because that's all their QA's test on.

1stcity3rdcoast 2y ago
Which is ironic because scores of enterprise companies developed internal systems/reporting/intranets using .NET in the early 2000s, restricting their users to Internet Explorer!
- ta1243 2y ago
  And still have to maintain windows 7 or earlier machines running IE 7 to run internal applications
wslh 2y ago
It's clear that Net Neutrality and web standards are close to a myth. Security-wise, I trust Google over Mozilla though.
- lxgr 2y ago
  That's a different layer of the stack. I could get behind "web neutrality" as an initiative, though!
lxgr 2y ago
Absolutely. I'm still not sure what annoys me more: Sites that break on non-Chrome, or sites that won't even let me try behind a cookie agent blocker.
dangsux 2y ago
[dead]

smm11 2y ago

Chrome is controlled by Google. The US government will be controlled by the owner of X, Tesla, and SpaceX.

fellowniusmonk 2y ago

No not even close by every single possible measure. I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change. I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed. The most important one from an anti-trust perspective, every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome, that includes my mobile devices which used the manufactures browser by default. If I want to use chromium I can, Safari has been VERY late in implementing certain industry spec standards (SSE's, web sockets, IndexedDB API, animations, relative color syntax, container queries, a bunch of <video> stuff, flexbox, the list goes on and on.)

lxgr 2y ago
> using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed. 99% of the time I use Chrome it's because some site does not support Firefox (and that often includes Google sites/apps). (The 1% are for APIs that Firefox, consciously or out of resource constraints, does not support.) In what sense am I "freely installing" Chrome in this situation? Just today I had a family member reach out to me, unable to use government e-signing on their phone after I'd switched their default browser to Firefox (they were getting tons of ads in mobile Chrome, which does not support plugins and accordingly also no ad blockers). Turns out they support only IE/Edge, Safari, and of course Chrome... > every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome My Pixel came with Chrome preinstalled, as far as I remember. (I don't recall if there was a browser selection screen.) Sure, that's a Google phone, but then again Windows is a Microsoft operating system. > the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS Oh, I'd also not advise anyone to switch to Safari. Apple absolutely would pull exactly the same or worse as Google if they could, I have no illusions about that. I can't wait for the day they're finally forced to actually allow alternative browser engines on iOS and switch to Firefox everywhere.
- 2y ago

crowcroft 2y ago

Yes, Chrome is the de facto standard, and often the only browser thoroughly tested against. Even now though it isn't as dominant as IE at its peak though. No, Chrome isn't significantly behind on adopting new standards compared with other major browsers (I'm looking at you Safari). IE6 to IE7 was about five years!

ericwood 2y ago
I see so many ideological arguments around "X is the new IE" that neglect one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. Working around all of its quirks and non-standard behavior had an extremely long half-life; the venn diagram of things that worked correctly across all major browsers at the time was very complex and messy. Even with the release of IE7 it took many years for people to adopt it, and IE7 was hardly a saint either. There's a part of my brain I'll never get back devoted to all of these workarounds. So many hours lost to weird corporate networks that had quirks mode enabled, different box models (before the advent of the `box-sizing` CSS attribute), random omissions of standards (no `:hover` on elements besides `a`), etc.
- JimDabell 2y ago
  > one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. This is the thing that I think developers today don’t seem to be able to get their head around. There was a fourteen year time period between Internet Explorer 6 being released and when it dropped out of usage worldwide. Even if you only had to support the USA, it was still eleven years. People could go their entire careers without ever knowing what it was like not having to support it. It paralysed front-end development for more than a decade.
  - ericwood 2y ago
    Deprecating it if your site had much traffic was like pulling teeth! I worked at a company that had IT professionals as its main demographic in 2011 and it was a constant struggle. Lots of corporations were locked into IE6 because they had developed internal applications that relied on ActiveX controls or other non-standard APIs. IE7 was still pretty terrible, and it took even longer to drop support. CSS was pretty bad but at least well-documented; debugging JS was a whole other hell. There was no such thing as dev tooling, and you got a small alert in the status bar when the page had errors, which opened a pop up that gave you the line number and very little other information. Supposedly you could connect it to VisualStudio and get a full debugging experience, but I never had the luxury. Lots of guessing and checking. Firebug was a huge deal when it launched.

neonsunset 2y ago

It is, except this time around it's worse.

kernal 2y ago

Yes, Chrome is the new IE in only one category when IE was popular: market share. Everything else? Not so much.

mediumsmart 2y ago

I always find it comforting to know that a site would work in chrome.

t1234s 2y ago

Safari has been the new IE

spaceguillotine 2y ago

I think it might be worse. Google has lied about Chrome and privacy so much that you can just assume it phones everything back to Alphabet even if you set it not to.

amelius 2y ago

Is Apple the new Microsoft?

mixxit 2y ago

can i run chrome on my mobile and sync to chrome on my pc and put an adblocker on both?

PeterStuer 2y ago

As a Firefox mainliner for 'legacy' reasons to be fair, I often have to revert to Chrome to get sites to work. I guess there are a lott of dev shops out there that just test on Chrome/Edge (and maybe Safari)

hombre_fatal 2y ago
Besides, Firefox has its own problems. The craziest is its permissive same origin policy compared to Chrome/Safari, like how `window.top.location.href = 'https://example.com https://example.com';` works from inside a cross origin iframe to redirect the parent.

wkyleg 2y ago

Yes, in terms of market share. But the key difference is that it's leagues better than other browser engines on quality. From the perspective of competition this isn't great, but the network effects are hard to ignore. Firefox and Safari (webkit) just tend not to work as well. It's very different in terms of quality though. Internet Explorer was a terrible browser and often lagging in implementing standards. The better comparison would be Safari now, which often completely breaks many sites on mobile for me. It also doesn't eliminate a lot of newer CSS animations properly. This is really very unfortunate because it's good to have competition in browser implementations. Everything is Chrome under the hood now except for Safari and Firefox.

akira2501 2y ago
Internet Explorer was an attempt to monopolize and control the early internet. They intentionally left standards unimplemented or just implemented their own insane version of them in order to trap people into the platform. It's no wonder the product saw them taken to court over antitrust violations.

pipeline_peak 2y ago

No because Chrome is actually a good browser. We’ll never see a reasonable competitor unless someone like Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos gets involved. But that’s not feasible because their companies aren’t internet ad agencies.

steelframe 2y ago

When I parked a rental car in downtown SLC last week I had to find a way to pay to park. There was a kiosk with a functional screen, but the touchscreen part of it was broken, so I couldn't interact with it. I plopped my stuff down and sat on a concrete bench in the cold and dark to try to figure things out on my phone. The QR code sent me to a website to install an app. Google Play store said the app was designed for an older version of Android and couldn't be installed on my device. I eventually found a "pay online" link hidden down the page a bit, then spent several minutes filling in my credit card number and what not. Then when I got to the part where I was to select the expiration month and year, the drop-down menus simply didn't work. I had no way to continue in my default browser, Firefox. It had been 7 or 8 minutes, the cold was starting to numb my fingers, and I was no closer to actually paying for my parking space. I debated just canceling my appointment and driving away rather than risk a parking ticket, but I decided to give it just one more try in the Vanadium browser. Lo and behold, the drop-down menus worked, and after over 10 minutes of messing with a broken kiosk, a broken app, and a broken website, I was able to proceed to the point where I punched in my parking space number. Which, of course, wasn't marked. At that point I looked up and down the side of the street and noticed a post with numbers for two spots behind me. I noted which number was bigger to infer whether my space would be one higher than the higher or one lower than the lower and punched that in. After my appointment I came out to find the car parked behind me had a parking ticket, while my car didn't. So I guess I managed to punch the right sequence of buttons on my phone to avoid a parking fine. However the fact remains that I couldn't legally park my car in Salt Lake City unless I was in possession of a functioning smartphone and was running a Chrome-based browser on it. Not sure if this is more a story of Chrome being the only browser that's tested and/or compatible with critical services I need to use to function in a major U.S. city or if it's a story about municipalities like Salt Lake City making things as difficult as possible for people so as to collect more revenue from fines.

1over137 2y ago
The machines don’t take cash?
- Loughla 2y ago

Devasta 2y ago

As an example of how perfidious some of the discussions on web standards are, on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines In teeny tiny font near the bottom: "Given the market-share dominance of Blink-based browsers,[4] if Google chooses to not support a standard, like JPEG XL,[30][31] it will not become relevant on the Web.[30][31] Such standards are not listed in these tables." So if Chrome implements something that Safari doesn't, then its a deficiency in Safari. If Safari supports something Chrome doesn't, its not relevant so will not appear in any comparison tables. Chrome is 100% the new IE, as it is the being treated as the sole arbiter of what is a web standard or not.

WD-42 2y ago
Time to break up chrome.
troupo 2y ago
You can see it here, too. And in all discussions around PWAs. And on sites like whatcanwebdotoday. Anything Chrome ships is considered crucial, critical, and standard. And other browsers are shit because they don't immediately implement everything Chrome implements

lerp-io 2y ago

okay then i wanna see your chrome IE alternative to v8

ngcc_hk 2y ago

Only use chrome when safari on mac, edge in win11 and whatever browser on Ubuntu failed.

webprofusion 2y ago

Yes. By virtue of most other popular browsers being based on it (chromium), with the exceptions of Safari and Firefox. The controller of the project is still Google. Safari trails chrome because Google didn't like Apple being in charge of the Webkit repo, which led to the Blink fork (the Chromium engine). Firefox is still a great browser, but it has fallen back to square one on popularity. From an anti-trust perspective Google should offer to fund their competitors directly instead of splitting the browser out, the eventual result should be revisions to web standards specs to ensure they are correct and detailed enough to be accurately implemented, which in turn makes new browsers easier to implement. Eventually if specs are close to 100% correct it should be reasonable to generate new browser engines from them. Currently that's not possible due to chasms of ambiguity and contradiction, and because browsers like chrome occasionally implement their own design of stuff just because they want to.

redbell 2y ago

> Perhaps the browser with the most disruptive potential is from Microsoft with Edge... With Edge, Microsoft has a chance to claim the position of the disruptive alternate browser. I believe moving from Chrome to Edge does not change a lot in terms of privacy, proprietary ecosystems, data mining practices, or other reasons that made you switch. In the end, it’s a transition from one tech giant to another of comparable scale with the same practices. Safar? I don't think Apple has the intention to dominate this sector, so it won't push Safari beyond its current geography. All that it cares about is its * walled garden. Firefox? Although I use it as my default browser, it is still far from mass adoption. The fact that they beg users to switch to Firefox* say it all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38806270

markgoho 2y ago

if any browser is the new IE, it's Firefox -- poor compatibility, very few people use it, but enough that makes people think we need to support it https://analytics.usa.gov/ https://analytics.usa.gov/ We're now at 0.8% Firefox usage on Gov't websites, that means Firefox support is no longer required at a gov't level (2% usage is the threshold) Firefox should be shut down in 2025 if all trends continue

whatthedangz 2y ago

[dead]

p0w3n3d 2y ago

Yes it is. I use Firefox wherever I can to not allow one company to take over the internet with their toxic patterns (manifest v3, disallowing screenshotting on pages, breaking their services on other browsers etc.)