I'm sort of, but not really, surprised so many smart techie people are so adamant about using Chrome when we're well on our way to Blink being the new IE6.
Chrome is a good browser. When it works better than Firefox, that's because it really works better, not because it has a weird nonstandard quirk that everyone designed for because it is the dominant browser. Chrome/Blink has some quirks but it is nothing compared to IE6.
The problem with Chrome/Blink is different: is is essentially a way for Google to push whatever standard they want. Emphasis on "standard". Microsoft wanted to control the web on the client side. They made IE, and therefore Windows a near-requirement to access the web, the whole embrace, extend and extinguish thing. What Google want is the opposite, they want every machine to use Google services, and the meaning of Chrome is "here is how a web browser should be, please copy me".
Unlike Microsoft with IE, Google wants Firefox to implement every feature Chrome supports, and for that reason, these new features are much less quirky. The problem is: what Google wants Firefox to implement may not be in the user best interest.
Monopolies and monocultures are bad news anywhere, like in my city of Winnipeg where we have one of the largest elm canopies in the world which is expected to disappear in the next 10 years due to disease and infection.
Yes, during IE6's heyday, we designed for its quirks. When we moved on, we built standards-based code and then broke it to run in the lingering IE6, 7, 8...
I'm not really sure exactly what you're getting it. None of what you say is false, but if Google gets a certain share of the market, they won't care at all if Firefox goes along with it or not.
That's what I'm afraid of.
I had a huge retail client who's customer base was largely on Win 2000/XP equipment, so they insisted on it until usage dropped off enough. Sorry I can't be more specific.
Luckily, it's not actually quite that bad yet, but I've built PWAs and some of the bugs are truly awful.
I think it was iOS 11 where the camera didn't even work in PWAs for months- we had to get people to use the website through the actual Safari browser on their phone. It wasn't actually fixed until 11.3. It was brutal.
Sounds like the current Firefox situation only because 1. Google deliberately ignores Firefox support and 2. Firefox does not support some standard APIs that even Safari supports.
The former is only Google’s bad politics while the latter is just Firefox playing catch up. Neither attributable to the monopoly.
Even if I don’t use Chrome, it’s currently the best browser by far from a user’s standpoint. This was not the case for IE6.
A big feature of how chrome, firefox, and edge work today is that everyone updates to the latest version usually within days of their releases.
IE6 was still in use when IE7, IE8, and IE9 had been deployed for years with better rendering, CSS, and javascript support. Primarily because a lot of websites and internal applications had stupid things like "activex" plugins required for proper usage.
To say that chrome is the new IE6 really misses out on how horrible the internet was during the heyday of IE6. It's fairly hard to come up with a website that works well in Chrome and not so well in Firefox. Unless you are pulling out brand new CSS or JS features, you are very likely to get relatively consistent rendering between the two.
Some people did. I complained -- at the time -- that the monoculture was harmful, and I used Firefox as my primary browser for that reason (but there were lots of sites that would only work on IE). I loved Chrome when it first showed up: a new entrant increasing the diversity and bring lots of new technical and UI innovations. But once Chrome reached the point where it dominated the browser ecosystem I returned to Firefox because I really DO think that diversity is important.
Specifically, I believe that when the largest player in the market has no more than ~40-50% market share AND there are at least 4-5 different widely-used tools, that producers of content (as well as the tool providers) will feel compelled to focus on delivering a compatible experience. But when the largest player in the market has 75% of all users, it's advantageous for content producers to focus on delivering for that platform AND it starts to be advantageous for the producer of that tool to become incompatible with other tools.
To keep the ecosystem healthy, I want to see more diversity than we have today.
It's kinda like chrome all over. IE6 was faster than other browsers and supported the APIs site developers were using. From the user's standpoint it was the best browser by far.
IE6’ advantage was the ActiveX features, which were not documented nor a standard, unlike Chrome’s features.
There are plenty. People are just coding to Chrome instead of standards, just like they coded to IE instead of standards.
> This was not the case for IE6.
It sure was. For years. IE6 was a _much_ better browser than the contemporary Netscape versions, for example.
Like what? If there’s a standard, Chrome follows it. If there’s no standard, they propose one. They used to have a lot of custom features with prefixes, but that rarely happens anymore.
That happens to not be true all the time. Some examples off the top of my head:
* https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102719... points to various places where Chrome's security checks don't match the spec and therefore can allow things that other browsers and the spec don't.
* https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=878491 -- non-spec implemetation of document.close (shared with WebKit)
* https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100027... -- broken .complete attribute behavior, broken since forking from WebKit.
Those were all found due to sites coding to Chrome instead of the standard and therefore not working correctly in Firefox.
If you want something more long-standing, https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=286670 is a clear bug in selector-matching optimization that leads to incorrect behavior and just turned 7 years old.
Or you could look at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=340414
Or https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=352144
There have also been multiple cases in which everyone just gave up, and changed the standard and all other browsers to match Chrome's behavior in cases where it was causing serious compat problems for everyone else.
Such as?