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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

Chrome has been the new IE for years. "just use chrome" is an endless refrain from webdevs who don't want to test on Firefox. Not sure why it is so hard for people to see what is going on here. Google has a massive conflict of interest with their web development efforts. This is classic Microsoft-esque Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

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That's a bad example. In technical progress, Chrome is the complete opposite of IE (which seems to be replaced by Safari these days) and way better than the rest in pushing forward new features. Also 99% of the time Firefox and Edge work just fine.

EDIT: Yes, IE was great in the beginning, but then it stagnated and earned the wide reputation of being terrible obsolete anchor that it is now known for. It's with this late-stage IE that I don't see the comparison since Chrome is still on the cutting edge.

I think you forget that in it's time IE was massively innovative.

It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX.

They did it by ironic accident.

Bill Gates wanted their browser to be the best, but also wanted it not good enough to replace desktop apps. However the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. The Outlook team was told to make a web version. They got the IE team to add XMLHttpRequest for their use, everyone implemented what they needed to, then went home and forgot about it.

Then Google recognized what the feature allowed, and used it in gmail and maps. The rest of the internet said, "Wait, what, you can DO that?" Studied it, popularized the technique as AJAX and the rest is history.

This origin story of XMLHttpRequest being an afterthought explains why the class name has inconsistent capitalization which interestingly enough I never noticed until now.

Many style guides for CamelCase recommend not writing acronyms in all caps past a certain length.

It's possible that Microsoft's style guide at the time set three characters as the limit.

You can find verification of it in the various references provided in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12067185/why-is-it-calle.... In particular https://web.archive.org/web/20170424220609/http://www.alexho... is a snapshot of an explanation from the person who actually created the feature.

Gmail was not even close the the first Ajax based email not by MS. Oddpost which later became Yahoo mail (Yahoo bought them to upgrade their mail) preceded Gmail by a few years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oddpost

That may be, but the original articles that I saw making AJAX the new hotness referred to gmail and Google maps.

Furthermore I remember gmail's keyboard shortcuts being a shock to a lot of people. Me included.

And IE4 added webfonts, still doesn't mean that IE6 & 7 were the least standards-compliant browsers of their time, in contrast to modern day Chrome.

> It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX

...in 1999. Then IE6 was released in 2001, and then Microsoft scrapped the Internet Explorer team and didn't release another browser for 5 years, leaving us with 90%+ of users stuck on IE6 bugs and non-standard features.

That's what the GP is talking about.

... which occurred during/after the anti-trust case against them (which led to Bill Gates stepping down as CEO). If we wanted to be honest with our commentary, you would have to realize that to compare apples to apples, you have to compare Chrome to IE 3-5, not IE 6.

XMLHttpRequest was nice but hardly necessary, you could do same thing with frames. Just another little trick so Outlook Web Access would suck on the standards browsers. Oh, and of course it required ActiveX for no reason but to limit it to the Windows platform.

IE at its core was technically very advanced, way faster than Netscape, and pushed a ton of new features.

Dynamic HTML as it was called, CSS, encryption, and so much more stuff came to IE before any of the competitors.

Then it became the IE6 we all came to know. The analogy with Chrome starting as a trail blazer and progressively taking the same trajectory is perfect, really.

That is known, but the point is that IE stopped. That has been reported somewhere, can't find a useful link right now but I remember the discussions. It was reported - and what was observable matched the description - that as soon as Netscape was out Microsoft stopped pretty much all their efforts, and IE became the laggard that due to its market share prevented innovation and became a huge obstacle for quite a long time, until loss of market share and the rise of the web app forced their hand.

I can confirm this. I used to work on the IE team. Went from a team of hundreds to just a handful.

How is Chrome taking the same trajectory when it is actively developing and releasing new features?

As far as I can tell, it's still on the bleeding edge and only recently met there by new advancements from Firefox.

Some of Chrome's decisions are definitely IE-like.

For example, the FF team felt that flex/grid should become the new layout standard, and deprecated or accidental behaviors of the past could be sunset by doing it right on Flex/Grid. So, for example, margin-top: 10% would be percent of height instead of percent of width when on a flexbox or grid item.[1]

Chrome did it their way and wouldn't discuss the issue, and eventually FF caved because Chrome has a near-monopoly.

This idea of implementing bad design and forcing it on the world, won't end well for the user.

Not to mention the whole recent hullaboo about hiding the www / m / whatever prefixes.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2085 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972

    That's a bad example. In technical progress,
    Chrome is the complete opposite of IE

When IE started to _gain_ internet share it was a paragon of technological development. It was far faster then navigator, more reactive and performant.

Only little-by-little did Microsoft start adding in features no other browser supported. By the time the mid-late 00's roll around and Chrome was released. IE was this red-headed step child, with a lot of unique Microsoft only extensions.

Chrome is walking the same path, a technological superior browser slowly breaking compatibility with the rest of the web. But in such a way that developers _arent too unhappy_, but enough that most business users, and home users keep using it.

Saying Safari is the new IE is a short sited look at only the tail end of the problem from IE7 or so out. When IE was this slow laggy thing people kept around from Windows XP. Instead you need to look at Chrome like somebody would look at IE4 compared to Netscape Navigator. Sure IE4 breaks standards, but custom webfonts, OpenSSL encryption, ActiveX containers! All these new tools developers can use to make a richer more interactive web experience!

Code formatting quotes makes quotes very difficult to read on mobile. I wonder why we couldn’t just use quotation marks?

HN is so non-optimized for mobile to the point of user hostility why bother?

"Being on the cutting edge" is exactly how Embrace, Extend, Extinguish [1] works. The "cutting edge" is the "extend" part. When Google uses their market position to make their desired functionality, service or standard the new hotness other vendors have to either adopt that standard or be left behind. When those standards are something Google themselves created that benefits them directly (and harms competitors) they are extinguishing those other vendors.

This is directly out of the Microsoft playbook and is why IE became as despised as it is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

What standards of Chrome are harming competitors? We have a lot of major progress in web standards because of Chrome going first and getting it done. Even Firefox has built novel new rendering with a brand new language.

Meanwhile Safari and Edge continue to lag behind with basic features. Either way extinguish only works if there's no ready competition, which is not the case here for the majority of users.

> "just use chrome" is an endless refrain from webdevs who don't want to test on Firefox

This. I get to hear this from my colleagues at work all the time.

> "just use chrome" is an endless refrain from webdevs who don't want to test on Firefox.

Not at all. I used to start developing while netscrape was still a thing. Chrome is (and it was) a bless for developers. I try firefox like once a year and see no reason to switch.

THe actual case is also no reason to switch (for me) but ill watch it.

This seems to reinforce my statement? Chrome may be easier to develop on but that means sites break on Firefox or other browsers when Google differs from those other vendors. Google abuses this market position and developer preference.

Safari is the new IE, Chrome has been responsible for a huge number of positive changes in the browser landscape.

I develop in Chrome because that's where the majority of our conversions come from.

I (my QA team) also tests Safari, Firefox and other browsers where a significant number of conversions come from. I never heard "just use chrome" in any professional environment.

Same was true for IE, IE for instance pioneered asynchronous requests (which is pretty much the norm these days) and things like that - still was a bad browser though.

That's one point of comparison that glosses over Chrome's compliance with standards in stark contrast to IE.

Google is just playing the game (embrace, extend, extinguish) - meaning the outcome they try to achieve is the same.

I think the difference is that IE stopped innovating once they had the market cornered. Chrome is continously on the cutting edge of features and specs, even after it became the #1 browser.

It became bad when it stopped making progress, because the team was largely disbanded and the product stagnated in maintenance mode.

This reinforces my point about "just use Chrome". Google knows devs like Chrome and they make it easy because if more people use Chrome they can abuse their position to shape the rest of the internet to their preference. Why do you think they put energy into Chrome at all if not to get more eyeballs on Google services?

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