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.)
Safari hasn't actually been particular far behind implementing industry standards. As far as I can tell, it's more that people seem to believe that Google dictates industry standards and base everything on when Chrome supports it as opposed to when it actually gets standardized.
SSE's
W3C draft standard in 2012. Supported in Safari in 2010.
web sockets
This one is true. IETF standard 2011. Supported fully in Safari 2013.
IndexedDB API
W3C recommended standard in 2015. Supported in Safari in 2014.
animations
If we're talking the Web Animations API, it hasn't been standardized yet (W3C working draft) and level 2 isn't even that far.
relative color syntax
Not standardized yet. It's currently a W3C working draft.
container queries
Not standardized yet. It's currently a W3C working draft.
a bunch of <video> stuff
Need specifics.
flexbox
W3C candidate recommendation 2018. Supported in Safari 2013.
This is very misleading, compare implementation timelines between browsers and you'll see that Safari has implemented many of these things year(s) after chromium, firefox and even opera. This of course was because they have tried as much as possible to push people to closed source/walled garden apps.
As usual, there's supported and "supported" with Safari, nobody could build an IndexedDB app in 2014 supporting Safari, I've been there. It's only been really stable through the past 3 to 5 years max.
It definitely is, I was also there, just like everyone was doing IE only sites, not only plenty of people do the same with ChromeOS vision of the Web, they ship Chrome alongside Electron crap.
Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.
Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.
Except it isn't. Maybe I'm being slightly obtuse here, but the world is not "Chrome Vs Safari". It's "Chrome Vs Safari Vs native apps". If Safari dies we'll be in a world of "Chrome Vs native apps", and that is what Apple wants. Browsers represent a way to deliver software to users that's outside of Apple's revenue mechanisms.
Apple have every incentive to keep Safari being good-not-great at running web apps, so users prefer the native version (even though most of the time that'll be Electron.)
Another piece of evidence is Google tries at nearly every turn to help people write portable code, use best practices like feature detection instead of browser version sniffing, etc... They run https://web.dev/ and the founded baseline https://web.dev/baseline and the web platform dashboard https://web.dev/blog/web-platform-dashboard
MS in their IE days did the exact opposite, trying to make as many proprietary IE only features as possible.
I think some of the complaints in the article were about websites using User Agent string to detect compatibility, rather than individual feature sniffing.
In that small complaint, I would agree. But I think the fault is mostly with the website owners, not with the browser.
Feature sniffing generally doesn't work for anything interactive. Many bugs in controls, animation, events are not sniffable. Yet developers still need to deliver workarounds.
Feature sniffing works best for static HTML documents - and even then the code to actually do the sniffing can be demonic code (a side-effect or correlation or an obscure discovery).
Using just feature sniffing is a great goal but it simply isn't a perfect solution. I do believe us developers should avoid parsing user agents unless there is no other good solution (never a crutch for lazy bad developers).
And detecting the browser for obsolete browsers is usually a perfectly fine solution. The bugs won't get fixed and the browser won't change. There are exceptions of course!!!
Just because Chrome implements a feature and then rams it through a W3C committee does not make it a “standard” that Apple must support on day 1. The arrogance of the Chrome crowd is astonishing.
> Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change
I think the biggest issue with IE6 was not the hostile moves Microosft did, it is that it didn't do anything. The browser was just frozen. That's why it was relatively easy for Firefox to take a marketshare.
Frankly, with some of the APIs Google are adding to Chrome, I'd rather they'd do a little less.
So, no, the problem with IE was 100% Microsoft's hostile competition tactics. Yes, part of that was trying to deprecate the "world wide web" as a platform, so yes, IE6 got very crufty toward the end of its days.
But by that point it was clear it was already dying and IE7 et. al. were introduced late as an attempt to catch up. During the period when the real bullets were flying, IE6 was actually a really great browser, just one that forced you into using a menu of Microsoft technologies because it didn't support the "standard" stuff. Remember that XMLHttpRequest, the basic tool underneath all modern dynamic web UIs, was originally a non-standard Microsoft invention.
And yes: eventually this proved unsustainable and innovation in the standards-based browser world eventually proved too fast for MS to keep up, and it lost.
But the tool that broke the back of that monopoly absolutely wasn't Firefox. It was Chrome.
That and browser sniffing to serve intentionally broken CSS on Microsoft's websites to competitors like Opera, I remember this because it directly effected me at the time.
I mean at least we still have websites like this from over 20 years ago that still document the bullshit, people who weren't there CANNOT fathom the how despicable they were.
Safari was late until a couple of years ago when they started implementing new features more aggressively. Now it's always Firefox. Just check how long it took them to add support for the :has() selector and RegEx Lookbehind. We're years into "manifest v3" and background workers are nowhere to be found.
> 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.
I see this argument a lot. I use Firefox on my Mac, iPhone and my Windows work PC. I can’t remember the last time there was a website that was broken because of Firefox.
Do you happen to have any examples? I’m curious to see how broken/what the issues are.
I don't understand this because I have used Firefox exclusively since it first came out and never run into broken sites. What exactly are these exotic sites you are visiting that break in Firefox? You mentioned an elusive government website but I have used many (IRS, SSA, Edu, etc...)
The likely reason why they don't support Firefox is because it has less than 5% marketshare. It isn't a Chrome only site. You said that they support Chrome, IE, Edge (if they support IE then I'd assume that they might also support pre-Chromium Edge), and Safari.
That is just the nature of using a niche platform. I primarily use Linux on the desktop. I have to keep a Windows install around for the times that I need to do something that can't be done on Linux. Resources are limited and so high marketshare platforms are prioritized. That's just how it is.
The onus is on the app developer to make sure their app runs on a variety of platforms. It's not Chrome's fault for third party developers being lazy and not supporting Firefox.
"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.
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
I manage websites for a couple of non-profits. A very high percentage of traffic is from Safari (mostly on iOS) -- 40% on one site. Only testing in Chrome seems like a bad idea.
No, I dont think this is the case. While a lot of devs use Chrome while developing, we're all well aware that 50% or more of US users are using an iPhone. And that's Safari no matter what. So many do a ton of testing there as well. Firefox often gets the shaft.
I know as a matter of fact that many teams'/companys' approach is "We'll develop and run our CI tests on Chrome only. If it breaks on Firefox or Safari, we'll fix it, but that's as much as what we care about." And I'll be honest, for many organizations, it's a good business and financial move.
> 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.
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.
As I wrote in a similar thread a year ago: Whenever I point out that some bug which happens in Firefox my colleagues usually responds with some variant of "we tested in Chrome, and that is the standard", or "can you ask the customer to use Chrome instead". Even if Firefox or some other browser may be using a proper standards implementation and the Chrome one being the one with some quirk.
What about half-assed specifications that Chrome throws over the wall, ships them, and advertises them as standard everywhere, including web.dev? Even though their status is "not on any standards track"?
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
The open source movement has been co-opted. Its core values were laid out in a world where people owned their own computers and were custodians of their own data. There was no cloud, there was no saas, and that meant that owning source code meant you had some level of control over your digital life.
You're right. It is night and day. In 2024, access to source code is no longer, in and of itself, an effective proxy for autonomy. And using how the world worked a quarter century ago as a yardstick for measuring the relative merits of Google's influence on the digital domain nowadays is specious.
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.
Front end developers bear the responsibility for this nonsense, and many of the guilty post in this very forum!
There is nothing in what you described that couldn't be accomplished with late 90s-era technology.
Why is an app needed? A simple web page with basic HTML, enter number plate or space number, enter payment info, submit, done. No browser features introduced in the last 20 years are needed. The only improvement is enhancements to security - so we're up to TLS 1.3.
Do we really need spinning pinwheels and bleeding edge web standards to process a simple payment?
In the nearest urban center the meters don't take cash. The machines also do not take direct payment. The kiosk on each block also does not take payments of any kind. They force you to use a 3rd party app not actually owned by the city.
There is zero way to pay for parking unless you have a smart phone and data. I have no idea why no one has sued for access yet.
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.
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.
Depending on which country it is, but Safari is anywhere from 30% to 60% of marketshare on smartphone. I have yet to see any government website that is not tested against Safari.
> Meanwhile Firefox being the fastest browser in terms of least janks and best for hundreds of tabs gets No recognition either.
This is likely subjective. Out of the browsers I use regularly, Firefox is by far the one with the greatest number of rough edges as well as the least likely to see those rough edges polished.
To some degree this is inevitable with the difference in amount of resources at Mozilla’s disposal relative to those of Google and Apple, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. In a relatively short time many of these issues have been improved by a small team in the Zen Browser fork of Firefox, which suggests it’s more of a lack of will than it is lack of resources.
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.
Readit News
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.)
SSE's
W3C draft standard in 2012. Supported in Safari in 2010.
web sockets
This one is true. IETF standard 2011. Supported fully in Safari 2013.
IndexedDB API
W3C recommended standard in 2015. Supported in Safari in 2014.
animations
If we're talking the Web Animations API, it hasn't been standardized yet (W3C working draft) and level 2 isn't even that far.
relative color syntax
Not standardized yet. It's currently a W3C working draft.
container queries
Not standardized yet. It's currently a W3C working draft.
a bunch of <video> stuff
Need specifics.
flexbox
W3C candidate recommendation 2018. Supported in Safari 2013.
Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.
Except it isn't. Maybe I'm being slightly obtuse here, but the world is not "Chrome Vs Safari". It's "Chrome Vs Safari Vs native apps". If Safari dies we'll be in a world of "Chrome Vs native apps", and that is what Apple wants. Browsers represent a way to deliver software to users that's outside of Apple's revenue mechanisms.
Apple have every incentive to keep Safari being good-not-great at running web apps, so users prefer the native version (even though most of the time that'll be Electron.)
Last man being propped up Weekend-at-Bernie's style?
MS in their IE days did the exact opposite, trying to make as many proprietary IE only features as possible.
Monocultures that allow for one company to make it hard to avoid advertising and data tracking on the web are even worse.
In that small complaint, I would agree. But I think the fault is mostly with the website owners, not with the browser.
Feature sniffing generally doesn't work for anything interactive. Many bugs in controls, animation, events are not sniffable. Yet developers still need to deliver workarounds.
Feature sniffing works best for static HTML documents - and even then the code to actually do the sniffing can be demonic code (a side-effect or correlation or an obscure discovery).
Using just feature sniffing is a great goal but it simply isn't a perfect solution. I do believe us developers should avoid parsing user agents unless there is no other good solution (never a crutch for lazy bad developers).
And detecting the browser for obsolete browsers is usually a perfectly fine solution. The bugs won't get fixed and the browser won't change. There are exceptions of course!!!
I think the biggest issue with IE6 was not the hostile moves Microosft did, it is that it didn't do anything. The browser was just frozen. That's why it was relatively easy for Firefox to take a marketshare.
Frankly, with some of the APIs Google are adding to Chrome, I'd rather they'd do a little less.
But by that point it was clear it was already dying and IE7 et. al. were introduced late as an attempt to catch up. During the period when the real bullets were flying, IE6 was actually a really great browser, just one that forced you into using a menu of Microsoft technologies because it didn't support the "standard" stuff. Remember that XMLHttpRequest, the basic tool underneath all modern dynamic web UIs, was originally a non-standard Microsoft invention.
And yes: eventually this proved unsustainable and innovation in the standards-based browser world eventually proved too fast for MS to keep up, and it lost.
But the tool that broke the back of that monopoly absolutely wasn't Firefox. It was Chrome.
I mean at least we still have websites like this from over 20 years ago that still document the bullshit, people who weren't there CANNOT fathom the how despicable they were.
https://www.wiumlie.no/2003/2/msn/
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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.
Do you happen to have any examples? I’m curious to see how broken/what the issues are.
That is just the nature of using a niche platform. I primarily use Linux on the desktop. I have to keep a Windows install around for the times that I need to do something that can't be done on Linux. Resources are limited and so high marketshare platforms are prioritized. That's just how it is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Should be, but isn't. At least not in a practical sense.
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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.
You're right. It is night and day. In 2024, access to source code is no longer, in and of itself, an effective proxy for autonomy. And using how the world worked a quarter century ago as a yardstick for measuring the relative merits of Google's influence on the digital domain nowadays is specious.
2024 - 1998 = 26
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.
There is nothing in what you described that couldn't be accomplished with late 90s-era technology.
Why is an app needed? A simple web page with basic HTML, enter number plate or space number, enter payment info, submit, done. No browser features introduced in the last 20 years are needed. The only improvement is enhancements to security - so we're up to TLS 1.3.
Do we really need spinning pinwheels and bleeding edge web standards to process a simple payment?
There is zero way to pay for parking unless you have a smart phone and data. I have no idea why no one has sued for access yet.
>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.
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
Depending on which country it is, but Safari is anywhere from 30% to 60% of marketshare on smartphone. I have yet to see any government website that is not tested against Safari.
This is likely subjective. Out of the browsers I use regularly, Firefox is by far the one with the greatest number of rough edges as well as the least likely to see those rough edges polished.
To some degree this is inevitable with the difference in amount of resources at Mozilla’s disposal relative to those of Google and Apple, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. In a relatively short time many of these issues have been improved by a small team in the Zen Browser fork of Firefox, which suggests it’s more of a lack of will than it is lack of resources.
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.