6 ms·

Is it really something to be proud of? Somehow as a result of IE hate we ended up with a Chrome-dominated world.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
Chrome sucks but it’s miles better than IE ever was.
overgard 1y ago
IE was so much worse than Chrome will ever be. I do occasionally think Safari is the new IE though -- not in terms of terribleness but just in terms of holding back the web by being the slowest to implement big new features.
- troupo 1y ago
  > being the slowest to implement big new features. You mean Chrome-only non-standards that Mozilla usually opposes, too
  - saxenaabhi 1y ago
    SharedWorker was implemented in Safari years after Chrome/Firefox I'm sure there are many such examples.
    - troupo 1y ago
      Shared Workers is weird. Safari released them in 2010, one month after Chrome. And then... removed them in 2013. Firefox implemented them in 2014, Edge in 2020, and Safari re-introduced them in 2022. The was a proposal to remove the spec entirely in 2015: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 I don't think I've seen a feature that was shipped in s browser for years, then removed, and then shipped again. I'd love to know why. They only explanations I've seen seem to be this: https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 "The implementation of Shared Web Workers was imposing undesirable constraints on the engine. It never gained any adoption." and this: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 "This feature was originally removed temporarily during multiprocess bring-up, and actual usage on the web has been pretty low. We're willing to reconsider if there is significant demand."
      - saxenaabhi 1y ago
        Maybe I'm misremembering but i reckon something about shared memory vulnerabilities.
  - overgard 1y ago
    WebGL took forever on mobile. WebGPU still is only partially supported on desktop. Memory64 isn't available yet at all. That's just my short list of things I care about, but any time I look at the boxes in caniuse safari is always the red one.
    - troupo 1y ago
      > WebGL took forever on mobile. Since 2014, three years after desktop, I'll grant you that (though it's not forever) > WebGPU still is only partially supported on desktop. And it's only partially supported in Firefox. Perhaps something to do with actually fleshing out the APIs and not rushing with implementations like Chrome? Edit: Firefox enabled WebGPU only on Windows this year. Safari enabled WebGPU on all devices this year with *OS 26. > Memory64 isn't available yet at all. You mean the one released in Chrome this past February, and in Firefox this past January? Less than a year old? And used on a whopping 0.0001% pages? https://chromestatus.com/metrics/webfeature/timeline/popularity/366 https://chromestatus.com/metrics/webfeature/timeline/popular...
      - overgard 1y ago
        These things sit in standards comities for years. Firefox has way fewer resources than everyone else, but Safari has no excuse other than that they mostly can't be bothered, because they'd rather you use an app. And honestly I wouldn't care except they don't let you USE ANY OTHER ENGINE in mobile. If I could just skip Safari I would, but even Chrome on iOS is basically Safari.
        troupo 1y ago
        > These things sit in standards comities for years. Often for s good reason. Once something is in a browser, there's signs no change in hell to fix it or remove it. Chrome doesn't care. They just ship whatever even if the other vendors are actively against it for many reasons.
- leptons 1y ago
  I wouldn't care about Safari at all if Apple allowed any other browser engine on iOS. The fact that they don't allow other browsers to use their own browser engine is a fucking travesty, and it's part of the reason Apple is being sued by the DOJ. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl
pif 1y ago
The hate was not against IE, but against a popular tool that fought against shared standards.
- syncsynchalt 1y ago
  It was worse than IE not adopting standards. It was a capricious browser, would crash and misbehave for arbitrary reasons, and had an almost perverse implementation of web rendering. People try to equate it to Safari now but that's just not comparable. Safari will render something badly or not support a CSS decorator that you'd really like to use, but it will rarely crash, go into an infinite URL-fetching loop, or arbitrarily fail to recognize random HTML tags.
- gldrk 1y ago
  IE didn’t fight anything; it merely existed. There was no constant barrage of features that you ‘had to’ make use of to ‘keep up with the times’. Microsoft correctly decided that the Web was done in ~1999. They even had ‘Electron’ in the form of HTAs, except it wasn’t remotely as bad.
syncsynchalt 1y ago
As someone involved in web dev during the IE5/6/7 days, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, absolutely.
linguae 1y ago
I think what did IE in was the security issues that IE, ActiveX, and Windows had in the mid-2000s. This, combined with IE 6's stagnation, gave Firefox an opening to compete and to challenge the IE 6 monopoly. There was a sweet spot between roughly 2007 and sometime in the mid 2010s when web developers coded to standards instead of just the dominant browser, and where there was browser diversity: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and IE 7+. It was a good time for the Web. Chrome then became dominant, and unfortunately now we're in a "Best viewed in Chrome" era, and we're back in an era where some developers only code for the dominant browser.
- Flamingoat 1y ago
  It was Chrome, Win 7 and Smartphones that killed IE. Firefox was extremely niche and was downright bad browser when 3.0 was released. Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was lighter and worked better. Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to them. Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging their heels upgrading.
  - babypuncher 1y ago
    Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come bundled with your operating system or have the marketing power of the world's default search engine. It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.
    - Flamingoat 1y ago
      > Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come bundled with your operating system or have the marketing power of the world's default search engine. In 2010 Firefox 3.5 had a estimated global market share of 15-20%. BTW nobody thought any of the stats were accurate at the time as they were easily skewed. Some counters would report 30%, but it was an estimate and not a reliable one. On the sites I was building, which were mostly travel sites, e-commerce and later gambling. Firefox was maybe 5-10%. I am also no in the US. I just didn't see anything like what was reported in site stats for the things I was working on. Later on it was IE and Chrome and Firefox was still at maybe 10%. I really cared about compatibility and web standards at the time and made every effort to make sure that the sites work. So I knew it wasn't a "the site doesn't work in this browser". > It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development. So people that used the net heavily used Firefox and people that didn't tended to use IE. So on some sites Firefox usage would be far higher than it would otherwise be. e.g. People using IE might only use the internet for online shopping, checking mails, so visiting an online shop, booking a flight etc. Whereas many Firefox users would be using Social media, Blogs, Forums or YouTube more heavily. So you will see two completely different pictures depending on what your site's audience would be. That is why the statistics can be misleading.
spankalee 1y ago
You can see here https://www.w3counter.com/trends https://www.w3counter.com/trends that Safari, Chrome, and IE8 all had bumps around that time, and looking at the IE-only chart it seems like the boost in IE8 might have actually slowed IE's overall decline a bit. But the trend for IE started before this and continued after it.
jraph 1y ago
I don't think the chrome dominance is a result of the IE hate. Firefox briefly dominated the web in between. Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas.
- Flamingoat 1y ago
  > Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas. Chrome was simply better than Firefox, Internet Explorer, Legacy Edge. I am not a Windows Admin, but Chrome also offered an MSI package whereas Firefox didn't bother until years later. So it was easy for IT to roll out Chrome as part of the standard corpo install image and not an option with Firefox. As for web development it offered better JS debugging and had a decent phone emulator built in and this was back in 2014. I am sure I could also debug phones as well with some reverse proxy shenanigans via fiddler and some open source tooling I forgot the name of now.
cwyers 1y ago
If you read the article, one of the buttons on the bar prompted people to upgrade to the latest version of IE.

Chrome sucks but it’s miles better than IE ever was.

IE was so much worse than Chrome will ever be. I do occasionally think Safari is the new IE though -- not in terms of terribleness but just in terms of holding back the web by being the slowest to implement big new features.

troupo 1y ago
> being the slowest to implement big new features. You mean Chrome-only non-standards that Mozilla usually opposes, too
- saxenaabhi 1y ago
  SharedWorker was implemented in Safari years after Chrome/Firefox I'm sure there are many such examples.
  - troupo 1y ago
    Shared Workers is weird. Safari released them in 2010, one month after Chrome. And then... removed them in 2013. Firefox implemented them in 2014, Edge in 2020, and Safari re-introduced them in 2022. The was a proposal to remove the spec entirely in 2015: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 I don't think I've seen a feature that was shipped in s browser for years, then removed, and then shipped again. I'd love to know why. They only explanations I've seen seem to be this: https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 "The implementation of Shared Web Workers was imposing undesirable constraints on the engine. It never gained any adoption." and this: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 "This feature was originally removed temporarily during multiprocess bring-up, and actual usage on the web has been pretty low. We're willing to reconsider if there is significant demand."
    - saxenaabhi 1y ago
      Maybe I'm misremembering but i reckon something about shared memory vulnerabilities.
- overgard 1y ago
  WebGL took forever on mobile. WebGPU still is only partially supported on desktop. Memory64 isn't available yet at all. That's just my short list of things I care about, but any time I look at the boxes in caniuse safari is always the red one.
  - troupo 1y ago
    > WebGL took forever on mobile. Since 2014, three years after desktop, I'll grant you that (though it's not forever) > WebGPU still is only partially supported on desktop. And it's only partially supported in Firefox. Perhaps something to do with actually fleshing out the APIs and not rushing with implementations like Chrome? Edit: Firefox enabled WebGPU only on Windows this year. Safari enabled WebGPU on all devices this year with *OS 26. > Memory64 isn't available yet at all. You mean the one released in Chrome this past February, and in Firefox this past January? Less than a year old? And used on a whopping 0.0001% pages? https://chromestatus.com/metrics/webfeature/timeline/popularity/366 https://chromestatus.com/metrics/webfeature/timeline/popular...
    - overgard 1y ago
      These things sit in standards comities for years. Firefox has way fewer resources than everyone else, but Safari has no excuse other than that they mostly can't be bothered, because they'd rather you use an app. And honestly I wouldn't care except they don't let you USE ANY OTHER ENGINE in mobile. If I could just skip Safari I would, but even Chrome on iOS is basically Safari.
      - troupo 1y ago
        > These things sit in standards comities for years. Often for s good reason. Once something is in a browser, there's signs no change in hell to fix it or remove it. Chrome doesn't care. They just ship whatever even if the other vendors are actively against it for many reasons.
leptons 1y ago
I wouldn't care about Safari at all if Apple allowed any other browser engine on iOS. The fact that they don't allow other browsers to use their own browser engine is a fucking travesty, and it's part of the reason Apple is being sued by the DOJ. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl

pif 1y ago

The hate was not against IE, but against a popular tool that fought against shared standards.

syncsynchalt 1y ago
It was worse than IE not adopting standards. It was a capricious browser, would crash and misbehave for arbitrary reasons, and had an almost perverse implementation of web rendering. People try to equate it to Safari now but that's just not comparable. Safari will render something badly or not support a CSS decorator that you'd really like to use, but it will rarely crash, go into an infinite URL-fetching loop, or arbitrarily fail to recognize random HTML tags.
gldrk 1y ago
IE didn’t fight anything; it merely existed. There was no constant barrage of features that you ‘had to’ make use of to ‘keep up with the times’. Microsoft correctly decided that the Web was done in ~1999. They even had ‘Electron’ in the form of HTAs, except it wasn’t remotely as bad.

syncsynchalt 1y ago

As someone involved in web dev during the IE5/6/7 days, the short answer is yes. The longer answer is yes, absolutely.

linguae 1y ago

I think what did IE in was the security issues that IE, ActiveX, and Windows had in the mid-2000s. This, combined with IE 6's stagnation, gave Firefox an opening to compete and to challenge the IE 6 monopoly. There was a sweet spot between roughly 2007 and sometime in the mid 2010s when web developers coded to standards instead of just the dominant browser, and where there was browser diversity: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and IE 7+. It was a good time for the Web. Chrome then became dominant, and unfortunately now we're in a "Best viewed in Chrome" era, and we're back in an era where some developers only code for the dominant browser.

Flamingoat 1y ago
It was Chrome, Win 7 and Smartphones that killed IE. Firefox was extremely niche and was downright bad browser when 3.0 was released. Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was lighter and worked better. Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to them. Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging their heels upgrading.
- babypuncher 1y ago
  Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come bundled with your operating system or have the marketing power of the world's default search engine. It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development.
  - Flamingoat 1y ago
    > Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come bundled with your operating system or have the marketing power of the world's default search engine. In 2010 Firefox 3.5 had a estimated global market share of 15-20%. BTW nobody thought any of the stats were accurate at the time as they were easily skewed. Some counters would report 30%, but it was an estimate and not a reliable one. On the sites I was building, which were mostly travel sites, e-commerce and later gambling. Firefox was maybe 5-10%. I am also no in the US. I just didn't see anything like what was reported in site stats for the things I was working on. Later on it was IE and Chrome and Firefox was still at maybe 10%. I really cared about compatibility and web standards at the time and made every effort to make sure that the sites work. So I knew it wasn't a "the site doesn't work in this browser". > It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a popular with developers for doing web development. So people that used the net heavily used Firefox and people that didn't tended to use IE. So on some sites Firefox usage would be far higher than it would otherwise be. e.g. People using IE might only use the internet for online shopping, checking mails, so visiting an online shop, booking a flight etc. Whereas many Firefox users would be using Social media, Blogs, Forums or YouTube more heavily. So you will see two completely different pictures depending on what your site's audience would be. That is why the statistics can be misleading.

spankalee 1y ago

You can see here https://www.w3counter.com/trends https://www.w3counter.com/trends that Safari, Chrome, and IE8 all had bumps around that time, and looking at the IE-only chart it seems like the boost in IE8 might have actually slowed IE's overall decline a bit. But the trend for IE started before this and continued after it.

jraph 1y ago

I don't think the chrome dominance is a result of the IE hate. Firefox briefly dominated the web in between. Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas.

Flamingoat 1y ago
> Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas. Chrome was simply better than Firefox, Internet Explorer, Legacy Edge. I am not a Windows Admin, but Chrome also offered an MSI package whereas Firefox didn't bother until years later. So it was easy for IT to roll out Chrome as part of the standard corpo install image and not an option with Firefox. As for web development it offered better JS debugging and had a decent phone emulator built in and this was back in 2014. I am sure I could also debug phones as well with some reverse proxy shenanigans via fiddler and some open source tooling I forgot the name of now.

cwyers 1y ago

If you read the article, one of the buttons on the bar prompted people to upgrade to the latest version of IE.