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Comment by lallysingh | Hacker News Reader

It's fair play after the IE-ification of the web before that.

Is it? The complaint at the time was the number of websites that outright blocked non-IE browsers rather than just letting the non-IE browsers try their best to render the pages, closing the web. Just because the tables are now turned it's appropriate for Google to break the open web? It seems evil from the standpoint of trying to support an open web (the arguments are the same now as they were back then), and it seems peculiarly childish and immature for a company as big as Google.

Not to mention if you were going to do it based on standards support and caniuse.com statistics, it's Safari now that is the one that lags behind. Shouldn't Google also start blocking Safari now? Isn't that closer to "fair play"?

works on Firefox and Safari as well as Chrome. There's a difference between the old-school Microsoft efforts to break competitors and current efforts to support a (popular) subset of browsers.

But the point is that with current standards, things that work on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome just work on Edge. It's extra effort on Google's part to throw up "not supported" banners and pretend like Edge is the worst scum and villainy on the planet. It's a terrible marketing effort disguised as "building a better web" and it's doing a disservice to the open web, modern standards, and basic common sense "do the right thing".

How is not devoting time to supporting a proprietary browser doing a disservice to the open web?

Sounds like parent is saying Google is spending time to deliberately block/not support Edge.

How much time would they have to spend with support requests if they don't spend the small amount of time required to tell people to use something else? I understand your point, but I personally don't care about proprietary software not working with certain websites -- they chose to make it their problem alone. It sucks that Google isn't choosing to not support them because of _that_, it's because they've had bad experiences with old IE implementations of standards.

Since when did Google accept support requests for their broken websites? o_o

1) Google generally doesn't answer support requests, they let a random Google Group handle it for "community support". (Unless you are an Apps customer in which case you might expect a reply somewhere between a week and a two years later, and it's still recommended you try the "community support" first.)

2) This isn't a "We won't support you, use at your own risk" banner, this is a Chrome ad. It's a Chrome ad disguised as a support banner. It's a Chrome ad that is designed to get ignorant users to install Chrome out of some fear. This is no better than those "Your computer is unprotected, install this fake anti-virus to fix your computer" malware ads you see everywhere! Sure, maybe Chrome isn't malware to you, but it's unneeded confusion to, say, my grandmother, to have her browser suddenly change because she installed a thing Google told she had to to stay "supported"...

3) This is a case of "Proprietary" versus "Proprietary" on Windows: Chromium is open, Chrome is not and especially on Windows has adware and custom extensions that are fairly opaque and proprietary. On the other side of the fence: Edge's JS engine (Chakra) is open source and community developed, and Edge's WebGL renderer just became open source. Edge is already more open and standards compliant than IE ever was. Blaming Edge for IE's old problems is like kicking your new puppy for things your recently deceased dog did.

4) Yes, as a web developer, I remember bad experiences with IE's implementations of standards, but unlike some I also remember some of the good experiences. I also am aware enough as a web developer to know that IE's "bad" implementations helped make the standards better. Plenty of people can talk about how IE contributed XHR and AJAX. Another example is that "box-sizing: border-box" you see littered throughout CSS these days is "Hey, use the modern version of the classic IE way because it is easier to math." The point of the "Open Web" is not that "mistakes shouldn't happen and standards should be implemented in lockstep", it's that anyone can and should implement the standards and when the implementations don't agree we use that to make the standards better! Chrome owes a legacy to IE, and "bad experiences in the past" don't outweigh the benefit to the Open Web today by not interfering with users that choose to use Edge regardless of whether or not that's simply because it is Windows' default browser.

Because an open web means the freedom to choose which browser you want to use. Even if that choice happens to be proprietary. Please remember that with the Internet of things, more and more devices will be running closed or non-upgradable browsers, from games consoles and smart TVs through to portable gadgets.

> Not to mention if you were going to do it based on standards support and caniuse.com statistics, it's Safari now that is the one that lags behind.

It is?

http://caniuse.com/#compare=edge+14,firefox+50,chrome+54,saf...

Skimming it, Safari seems to do a bit better than Edge if you just count boxes; at any rate it's not significantly worse.

More specifically, I meant iOS Safari, which seems to lag wildly behind Desktop Safari. Plus, iOS Safari has a much bigger userbase than Desktop Safari, which you see in the "Usage Relative" views on caniuse.com.

That said, it was also a dumb joke. :) I do not recommend adding banners saying "This site is not supported on iOS Safari". Imagine how many users you would anger doing that.

It doesn't matter if it's "fair" - I don't want Chromification to become the new IE-ification. Vendor lock-in is always bad.

That was the old IE. Edge is a whole new browser and management has changed since ballmer era. It's like punishing current generation of Germans because of hitler.

Comparing IE to hitler - be fair, he wasn't that evil.

Who, Hitler?

Someone trots out Hitler analogy #879274032890, and it's the poster who at least turns it into a laugh who gets downvoted?

Edit: And this post downvoted within seconds. What a fucking joke this place is thanks to assholes abusing their karma. (If I'm going to be downvoted, it may as well be for something real.)

I don't think Chromification is any better.

Indeed, in 2016 requiring IE can be forgiven as a symptom of Microsoft captivity and/or being behind the times, while requiring Chrome is a proud proclamation of some mixture of not caring about standards, not caring about UX, not caring about users, not caring about proper web design (in order to avoid proprietary features), and being an ignorant and arrogant Google fanboy.

It's strange too, because if you are building a production-ready (i.e., not a proof-of-concept demo using bleeding edge technologies supported in only one browser) website or webapplication, the bare minimum level of browser support that grants you a very modern set of features you can depend on is to only support up-to-date evergreen browsers. That means Chrome/Chromium, Edge, and Firefox.

I can get dropping Edge if you are an individual developer and simply don't have any Windows machines around (testing websites from a VM really sucks), but going Chrome-only pushes us back to the monopoly position that harmed our field so much in the first place.

Actively moving towards a webkit-monoculture ultimately harms our profession.

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