Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6 | Hacker News Reader

Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6

theverge.com

50 pointsneonhomer27 comments

Except that Chrome can never turn into a new IE6. It keeps updating automatically, it respects the standards and is nice to use. Oh, and it isn't installed automatically on Windows or Mac. It also is made by a company whose business is based on Internet services - not by a company that used to mainly compete on a completely different area of software business.

It's an entirely different thing to just create a great product that people want to use instead of "being forced to" use. Firefox has been dragging itself behind for a long time and was nowhere near enough competitive as a whole package. Quantum has changed things but there are still some rough edges that need polishing (e.g. sometimes it just likes to freeze the tab completely). Chrome's web development tools are IMO top notch and I'd say it is the biggest reason why all the development happens on Chrome.

PS. This message is written on Firefox Quantum.

>it respects the standards

What about the time they broke passive event listeners for no other reason than "we say so"?

Same for when they broke HTTPS support because "we say so". The proper solution of updating the RFC is too slow for them.

The passive listener case is, IMO, a bit more severe since when several web developers complained after having their websites broken, the chrome devs merely yelled "it's faster!" and there was that.

Chrome shouldn't be going around breaking webstandards without atleast consulting with other browser vendors, if Chrome breaks passive listeners and Firefox and Edge don't then that is an issue, period.

IE 6 was trash because IE won the browser war then went home. Chrome keeps innovating. Personally (and professionally) I use Firefox, but Chrome is great too.

Not just innovating, but all browsers are fixing bugs. IE 6 was full of positioning bugs, which meant that it was extremely hard to make something look the same in 2 browsers.

Nowadays browsers achieve pixel perfect positioning and compatibility with each other.

The other big reason IE 6 was trash was Microsoft's overuse of vendor-specific functionality, ignoring standards and doing things their own way. This caused people to have to sometimes develop completely different solutions to a problem for IE and the rest.

This is where Chrome and IE 6 look very similar.

It seemed to me that Microsoft hinder IE purposely. They felt they were stronger in the desktop and tried to keep computing there. They perceived the internet as a treat.

Meanwhile. Google tried to break that by funding Firefox. Eventually they decided they needed to do it themselves. They probably felt that Firefox was not moving fast enough.

There's a huge difference between pushing new standards and Microsoft's lock-in strategy. Chrome pushes features that developers are eager to use, so they end up building things (perhaps unwisely) for Chrome's draft implementations. In my experience it's just the case that other browsers are usually behind, but eventually get there. This is different from Microsoft's proprietary technologies baked into IE6.

According to the people who worked on IE that was never really the intention, it was just assumed from the outside. They intended to create this whole new "amazing" updated browser all baked into Windows that would be maintained and updated. Anyone old enough to remember Windows 98 would remember things like active desktop which was a precursor to this. But legal and technical issues followed and before long they had gone years without a browser update.

If anything, Safari is the new IE 6. Just like IE 6 in its long twilight, it is the slowest to implement standards by a wide margin. Just like IE 6, it is used by many who essentially can't switch (though in this case due to iOS policy restrictions instead of merely OS defaults). Just like IE 6, there are websites that target it that don't work on standards-compliant browsers — Apple develops sites that work only in Safari (assuming the browser implements HLS instead of implementing it in JavaScript on web standards).

That's three for three. Chrome only scores one out of three.

The article doesn't mention my biggest annoyance:

"Hangouts video and voice calls don't work in Firefox for now. Google is working to fix this as soon as possible. Until then, use a different supported browser."

It's been over a year! They can't really be "working to fix this as soon as possible", can they?

I think video might actually be working, but phone calls (via Google Voice or Google Fi) aren't and that is the message I get.

I stopped using hangouts about a year ago. To damn buggy on chrome, let alone other browsers. It’s a significant waste of time having 5 - 10 people wait 10 minutes for someone to get hangouts working on their computer.

I rarely do video calls. The thing I can't live without is SMS from my computer (via the Hangouts/Voice integration). Is there another good way to do SMS from a computer?

Phone calls from my computer (with my own number) were nice until they stopped working. Now I just open Chrome when I need that, but it would be nice to have it working in FF.

I use Firefox as my main browser at home. I have yet to run into an "Only works in Chrome" site or message, personally.

I've run into sites that simply don't work in Firefox; it's definitely the exception rather than the rule though. Usually the site that doesn't work has come from a HN link.

The biggest issue I've seen personally was when a vendor we were using would append query strings to filter data. On the second filter add, it would just break in Internet Explorer, but Chrome and I think Firefox would work fine. Come to find out, their code didn't check the existing query string and was either adding extra # items or ? items, I can't remember which. Looking it up, though, the standard was that there is only one, so shockingly IE10 was the only one honoring it.

The vendor, who works heavily in Chrome, was gobsmacked and their response was basically "well, yeah, but who uses Internet Explorer anymore?" to which we had to say that's fine, well, and good, but we must support IE10+/Edge.

I switched back to Firefox when Quantum came out and so far I've run into two sites that don't work in Firefox but work fine in Chrome: The Home Assistant web interface (at least the log in page, I can't get past that) and the UniFi cloud management site (it works fine locally).

I've seen this with safari/apple videos. "Hey, come watch us demo our latest products....oh, you don't use all our products, I guess we won't show you what's coming"

That's mostly because HLS support is still not where it should be.

I've had plenty of sites break in FF because they were only tested in Chrome.

In fact, in my own work I have to test Chrome first because I've learned the hard way that Chrome will surprise you with the weirdest bugs.

Recently I delved into the rabbit hole that is the Web Audio API. It exists... but apparently it's completely broken because Google shipped a half-assed implementation before the standards were ready.

Mozilla hurriedly did the same out of fear of losing market share, and now the spec is an absolute mess. The audio latency is on the order of 500-1000ms on average.

A solution to the latency issue was finally hammered out, but now the API is dead in the water and no one is implementing the new spec. Thanks, Google!

One thing people often forget when bagging IE6 is that all browsers were rubbish back then. None followed standards. IE6 was actually a better browser than Netscape and Netscape's next gen browser was too late to be released due to development issues.

I remember how I used to check browser stats every month when FireFox came out. At some point, I don't remember when it didn't matter any more. But, it is interesting to see the trends of past years. https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/

I feel like trends from w3schools would be biased. Most people who visit w3schools are either developers or students wanting to learn web development and Chrome is the go to browser for web development.

Ahh ... The Verge, the epitome of tech analysis. Why isn't this submission flagged?

I think part of why developers are targeting Chrome first these days is not market share per se, but that the Chrome developer tools are so much better than the equivalent in Firefox, Safari, or Edge.

MS Edge fails both the Acid 1 and Acid 2 tests on my computer :)

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