Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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> I really hope Chrome doesn't become the new IE.

Too late.

Ironically we who fought IE6 are partially responsible for this: if we hadn't done that Chrome wouldn't had a fighting chance and we had all had to deal with whatever Microsoft prescribed insteas ;-)

On a more serious note: if we allow the Chrome monoculture to continue I guess it will prevent the next big breakthrough for the web just like IE6 held back the web for years.

For those who doubt: Do you really believe Google will allow their developers to waste time on the browser once they own the market alone or do you think they will finally remove ad blocking and then go to maintenance mode?

It is now our turn to fight again just like we did against IE6:

- relentlessly bug any organization who creates websites or libraries that doesn't work across all modern browsers

- keep suggesting regulators look into the massive market position abuse that allowed Chrome to become as dominant as it is

- keep poking at Mozilla to remind them fix Firefox (it is still awesome but sadly a shadow of it former self on the extension side)

- keep reminding developers that this is about professionalism and also too important to leave to PMs and execs.

Finally: remember, when we started the fight against IE6 it was in many ways superior, in some ways more than Chrome today.

For your prediction to come true, Chrome has to stagnate, and there are several reasons to believe it won't happen the same way:

- Google is well aware of Internet Explorer's history

- Automatic updates mean that there won't be an IE6 problem

- Google's own web developers will push for new APIs

Assuming that history will repeat seems too simple?

Chrome does not have to stagnate to become the new IE6, browser monocultures are bad, doubly so if sponsored by an adnetwork megacorporation like Google.

Besides, if all other browser engines die, why would Google continue to innovate beyond their own needs? This is already the case except they still have minor outside pressure to innovate beyond that but barely.

I'm assuming you are not a FireFox user, otherwise you often (particularly here on HN where "fancy stuff" gets showcased) run into stuff that does not work for you. I suggest you try FF for sometime, you may find that there already is a problem.

> "fancy stuff" gets showcased

Often I find it is just as much utter carelessness: using Chrome specific hack that offers nothing in return and not doing even the most trivial test in Safari and Firefox.

Imho very true, which is exactly why Chrome can be called the new IE indeed.

It can still stagnate by only improving things Google considers important enough. We'll get new API's, but they'll be Google's API's.

The problem of IE wasn't stagnation, it was the proprietary "features" it was implementing instead of following standards.

Chrome becoming the "new IE" doesn't mean becoming "bad", it means becoming closed and uncooperative. It means pushing it's own weirs APIs on the web while simultaneously refusing to implement other vendors' ideas. And that is exactly what Chrome has been doing for years.

All of the 3 points you mentioned are exactly reasons why Google has been so successful at taking over the web and will continue to be in the future.

- They know how IE died, so they've embraced the openness just enough to avoid any kind of backlash regarding new features,

- the automatic updates mean web developers can jump on new features immediately without having to wait for them to propagate, giving other vendors basically no time to catch up, and

- the fact that Google's websites account for a gigantic percentage of the web traffic and are unavoidable for most people, means that even if web developers want to wait for broader support of new features, Google's own websites can implement them immediately and force their users (==almost everyone) to Chrome.

> Ironically we who fought IE6 are partially responsible for this

There is some truth to this, but in a different way: after IE6 was "beaten", it started falling behind in terms of features and the web dev community as a whole (myself included) started caring less and less about IE compatibility, I suspect partially because we disliked IE on principle.

Fast-forward to Chrome's launch and it felt in many ways like going from IE to Firefox. Devs started dropping FF support just like they did with IE, not entirely realising, that the situation was much different: whereas the first time, we were going from a worse closed browser to a better open one, we were now abandoning a worse open one for a better closed one.

I'm of course not blaming this on the web community. The open-source license of Chromium made the switch feel safer, but despite the code license, the decision-making process behind the browser is far from open. Now that I think about it, this is starting to sound familiar... Something about Embracing..and Extending, with a third E-word rising up at the horizon, but I can't make it out quite yet.....

You forgot:

-- keep reminding users that Google is literally an advertising company, that makes billions of dollars spying on everyone to sell hyper targeted ads.

Chrome is essentially spyware.

Yep. I forgot. So lets add:

Every letter you type into the address bar in Chrome goes directly to Google[0][1].

If they don't log everything you ever put into the address bar it is either:

- because of the goodness of their hearts (heh)

- because they haven't gotten around to it yet

- because the marginal privacy they could squeeze out from that isn't worth the complexity, storage and processing cost and the risk of getting caught red handed.

PS: If I sound annoyed, yes I am. There's no one you despise more than those you used to love but who betrayed you, right? ;-)

[0]: for autocomplete, but still true.

[1]: this is true for the default settings in modern Firefox as well, but there I can always easily flick a setting and get ny search box back. (Maybe you can do something similar in Chrome as well but I don't know as I only ever use it for compability testing and for websites that just doesn't work in ny other browsers, -and I only do that if I have to and typically after complaining to whoever I can get hold of, just like I did with sites that only worked in IE.)

> Every letter you type into the address bar in Chrome goes directly to Google

This can be turned off.

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