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Comment by jimjimjim | Hacker News Reader

everybody likes piling on google but i'm still thanking them for killing ie. people have short memories

I'm thankful for that but now they've given us a new even worse monster and we are right back to square one.

Remember: IE6 was the best browser for a while, the problem was it did things slightly different and people targeted IE instead of the web, exactly as they target Chrome instead of the web today.

I think you're misremembering.

IE6 was a broken implementation of the standards of the time.

And Microsoft decided that web browsing was done and did not update their browser.

It was a scheme for vendor lock-in.

End result is the same. I care a lot about cross browser and the amount of aggravation I have to go to get the developers I work with these days to even look at a site in just safari and chrome, (Firefox is completely ignored) is absurd and the amount of backchat and sarcastic comments of “can’t we just tell them to use chrome” is ridiculous.

My career started in the IE 6 era and even then people tested in at least 2 browsers.

At most I’ve been lucky to have 1 team member who cares about this stuff. Maybe other companies are better but this is my experience the past 5 years or so.

Yes, they didn't care much for standards. But the larger problem was that they basically stopped implenting new web standards the moment IE was dominant, protecting their Windows monopoly.

I don't think many web developers who have really lived through the IE 'glory days' would say the current situation is even nearly as bad.

Just curious, what is the best way to “target the web” these days? I remember back in the xhtml days that you could validate against standards. But as I understand it these days with google eating up the standards development it seems like html5 is synonomous with chrome.

Mostly it is really really simple:

Do test in Firefox (and Safari). If it works in FF it mostly works everywhere, but Safari has some quirks I think.

In fact as long as I test my code in Firefox I haven't been caught with something that didn't work in all browsers any of my customers supported the last 4 or so years.

There are a few Chrome-specific things one shpuld

Mozilla killed IE. Google swept in after Firefox did the hard work. (Ab)used their search monopoly to drive Chrome ads.

I stopped using Firefox because it was a bloated mess that frequently ended up with memory leaks despite shutting down the browser. Creating a new window with no history and killing all other windows still didn't get Firefox.exe to release all the ram it gobbled up.

Mozilla has a habit of taking a decent, slimmed down browser (Phoenix, for those who remember that era), adopting it as their primary because their previous became a bloated mess... then taking the new fork, making it unwieldy and forcing people to create yet another fork to reign it in.

Tell me again how this is Google's fault.

They simply made a better browser.

Even though I disagree with that perspective, it has no bearing on the fact that Firefox had already dislodged IE from a dominant browser position before Chrome even appeared on the scene.

Correct. But I also switched because chrome was better. There was no abuse by Google that impacted my decision. It was Chrome's per tab process that created more stability and overall less bloat.

> I also switched because chrome was better.

Chrome was better for me for about 15 min until it crippled uBlock origin - at the same moment Chrome took action against non-Google advertisers, that Google didn't like.

Meanwhile my memory issues with Ffx decreased while Chrome's grew; I've no memory issues to speak of at all now. Ultimately, FFx plugins wound up helping craft a positive browsing experience on Ffx, that can't really be duplicated in Chrome.

Now I use Chrome to open up a single, overseas website because their native translation really is the best. Firefox (95%), Opera, Brave even Edge all see more use, however.

Yet Opera, Brave and Edge are all based on Chromium.

True but I rely on them mostly for special use cases. For example, Google voice has recurring issues with several browsers but less so with Brave. It's also easier to spot the Brave icon on my taskbar than trying to figure out which FFx window has my Gmail/GV pages.

thats a fairy tail. mozilla killed ie for home users, but on the business side (a way bigger market) that was not true. mozilla also basically did not target that market that much, I meaan they had no adm/admx templates and msi files for a very long time.

I think it was Firefox who killed IE. IE was declining in usage way before Chrome appeared. What Google killed was Firefox.

With a combination of some actually good improvements over Firefox, and incredibly shady bundling practices. There was hardly anything you could install a few years back without it forcing Chrome as a standard browser on you.

Chrome was beating Firefox way before any bundling because it was just so much faster at browsing the web.

Please don't rewrite history with things that aren't true - Chrome was significantly better browser for a long time with significantly better developer tools which made tech people prefer it early.

Firefox did hard hard work, all the way through the dark ages, it kept the flame alive. I've used firefox since the start, I still use firefox, in fact my progression was netscape->mozilla->firefox, and i'll continue using firefox.

But chrome did the impossible, they shifted the Moms and Pops and most unbelievable, the absolute holy grail, the corporate desktop.

Just looked it up and find it hard to believe how low firefox's share is, under 4% overall. I moved back to it about a year ago from chrome and I think it's great.

Chrome killed IE in the companies because it was manageable and packable before Firefox was

Mozilla killed Firefox. Several times, in fact. How many variants of regular and mobile Firefox have there been now because the primary version always ends up a bloated mess?

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