Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

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It's funny, I see this comparison a lot and the people using it don't see how it misses the mark: the reason (the majority of tech) people hated SO MUCH on IE6 was not because it was proprietary, but because it was static and didn't bring get any advance, thus blocking the web's progress. Chrome doesn't have that issue, at worst you can claim it gives too much power to Google on decision about where the web goes, but not that it keeps it from progressing.

It was also not respecting the standards but only after a while (at release it was at the forefront of it), and that is also not a problem that Chrome can relate to.

I say that as someone who uses Chrome, enjoy it, but would also prefer if we didn't go back to a single engine being supported on the web (and I switched back to firefox on mobile, because of chrome lacks of support for ad blocking there).

By confusing what the fight is about and trying to make it about what it's not, I fear you make some people like me ignore it.

>It's funny, I see this comparison a lot and the people using it don't see how it misses the mark ...

You seem to be missing the link between monopoly and stagnation though. IE wasn't always stagnant. It brought us XMLHTTPRequest for instance.

I think the debate has to be about whether or not Chromium being open source changes the equation.

IE6 era's Microsoft had an interest in the web stagnating, while Google doesn't. If anything, they used their position to push forward new things that others wanted to slow down.

It appears to me that Google is pushing forward some things while slowing down others. Obviously, Google will never be at the forefront of limiting what advertisers can do.

My biggest worry with a Chrome quasi monopoly would be the erosion of browser making competence and financial resources outside of Google.

So whenever Google's vested interests clash with what users want, there would be no one left to step up. Chromium would be open source, but only Google employees would know the source well enough to do anything with it.

It's a worry. I'm not saying it's the same as with a closed source IE back then.

Progression != improvement.

When ad blockers won't work, when you get DRM everywhere and trackers will be embedded in the browser, the tech will have progressed. Yet it will not be the progress you want to live.

It's like if suddenly you had only one car maker and say "it will be easier to design infrastructure for it". Yes, it will be. But it also mean you won't get innovation for you, only for the car maker.

For google that would mean pushing techs serving the ad and data collection business of course. But also in general, that would mean building for big companies. Adopting standards that are mostly beneficial to people that have the money to buy patents, setup many CDN, have high end engineers, invest in specialized hardware, etc.

None of what you say corresponds to what I said.

"Chrome being a monopoly is bad because X" and I say there are lots of issue with only Chrome remaining but not X, it doesn't apply to Chrome. You answer by saying "but there is Y, and W, and Z, and ..." which is basically my point: no need to focus on what is not the issue.

IE6 wasn't at the forefront of standards compliance when it was released.

Mozilla (then at 0.9.x) and Internet Explorer 5 for Mac were both significantly better.

Chrome is just as bad but for different reasons. And perhaps even more dangerous (like slowly eroding privacy, or shaping the browser around Google’s revenue generating services). I think the analogy stands and the damage is similar in magnitude.

I think you are wrong, or at least, I don't share your impression at all...

I was there when IE 6 was a thing, and no, nobody was complaining that IE was too static. That wasn't the main reason at all. One of the main problems is that it was too dynamic, but in a proprietary and unsafe way (ActiveX).

Read, for example, this article from 2002, when "Phoenix" (aka Firefox) was launched: https://www.geek.com/news/mozilla-launches-new-faster-browse...

IE was pushed down the throat of everybody, and the main consumer complaints was "it's bloated".

For developers instead, the craze of the day was to pass the Acid test: we are talking about CSS implementation. We are talking about open standards.

Open standards where the main concerns for developers: http://davidnaylor.org/blog/2005/04/web-standards-acid2-test...

Acid 2 and Acid 3 where a the main thing during the browsers wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars). And they were ALL about standards.

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