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Comment by masukomi | Hacker News Reader

and then it takes over, does whatever it wants, and now you've got IE6 again.

open source is our insurance policy against the next IE6. One may come again, but we can head it off at the pass before it dominates the market.

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While I agree with you, open source chrome didn't really help push for anything good.

Thanks to chrome we now have AMP and basically total web domination by the GOOG company.

> Thanks to chrome we now have AMP

How does Chrome enable AMP?

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

Then you know the answer

I honestly don't know what you might be thinking of Chrome doing that 'enables' AMP. If you said Google Search enabled AMP, by only allowing AMP documents in the carousel for example, I would agree. But I can't think of any Chrome-specific features that AMP depends on, and I believe Google (and Bing) currently serve AMP to Firefox, Safari, Edge, etc.

As opposed to having Chrome, which contributes to Google's ownership of the whole internet? Google does what it wants and developers write for Chrome. Users of Firefox find websites that won't work because someone used some Chrome extension to the spec.

People writing software are no match for behemoth.

At the very least Chrome allows forking (and has happened in practice multiple times), so a competitor need not start from scratch. That's will always be an insurance.

There's hardly any point forking if most or all websites are tested for Chrome and its idiosyncrasies, and don't work well on other browsers. We have seen that playing out for sometime.

It means we can’t end up in an IE6 scenario, where the caretaking company loses interest in developing the browser, and we are all stuck using old technology forever.

Someone can simply fork it, with all its idiosyncrasies, then build new versions with new features.

Do you want a browser that natively supports a language other than JavaScript? Chromium is a great starting point.

Well, I think the argument was more about Webkit, then Chrome itself. Even flow here does not use a JS engine written from scratch - they use SpiderMonkey.

PS: As a webkit-based Chrome alternative, Brave browser does really well.

Interesting they choose Spidermonkey over Webkit's JS Engine .

I could sort of understand not choosing v8 which is now quite bloated as it is also optimising for lots of other things, but Spidermonkey?

Remember when you could test on WebKit, to hit both Chrome and iOS, with OSX Safari as a bonus?

IE6 was the best browser by far when it was released. We got IE6 partly because of that: why to work on something, that is the best in the market. So the team was disbanded. When alternatives started to appear, one of them, and quite popular in some areas was Opera–also closed-source browser. Despite being closed-source they cared a lot about the Web Standards and many of the biggest advocates worked for Opera.

People can run legacy open-source code, too. I fail to see how open-sourcing IE would have solved the old versions. For a better example, look at python 2.7. Open-source legacy code every one's stuck with, drawn-out deprecation dates, etc. Old Java versions are the same thing.

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