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Comment by anuila | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think people complained that IE6 was the only option. People complained because it was buggy and didn’t follow standards so that, compounded with monopoly, meant that apps only worked in IE6.

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.

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Let's not forget that a BIG IE6 issue was that people used IE6 for YEARS. It was tied to the OS.

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.

> I don’t think people complained that IE6 was the only option.

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.

Exactly. Thank you.

What browser was better than IE6? From what I remember none.

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.

IE7 came out with tabs in late 2006 while Firefox had it at least since 2002. Imagine having no tabs in a browser.

IE6’ advantage was the ActiveX features, which were not documented nor a standard, unlike Chrome’s features.

You missed: 3. Cases where Google doesn't follow standards.

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.

> Cases where Google doesn't follow standards.

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.

> If there’s a standard, Chrome follows it.

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.

> Firefox does not support some standard APIs that even Safari supports.

Such as?

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