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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I use and love Firefox, but I don't think it's really fair to say Chrome is the new IE. The biggest reason why IE was a nightmare was because they were slow to implement new things, and had weird unpredictable behavior and bugs that only showed up in IE. You also had to have Windows in order to test with it. On top of that, crappy or nonexistent dev tools. Also (not their fault, but) many company IT policies required use of IE. Installing Firefox or Chrome made you a rebel ;-)

Chrome is far from perfect but they implement things fast and have great dev tools. If anything, I feel like Safari is the new IE. You have to have a Mac to test it, it's slow to adopt new features (sometimes aggravatingly slow), and it breaks in weird ways that Chrome and Firefox don't. I can't speak to the dev tools in Safari but I'd love to hear from someone how those compare to Chrome.

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I would say the opposite. IE was popular long ago because they were fastest to implement new features. IE is the reason XMLHttpRequest has such a silly name. IE supported CSS grid 5 years before anyone else[1]. The problem is they tried to force features on everyone instead of collaborating. That started decades ago with the <marquee> tag trying to stand out against netscape, and never really stopped until IE11 got feature frozen. Now IE is left with a "grid" that's different from everyone else's "grid", because everyone else waited for consensus.

Google is playing the exact same game now with things like manifest v3 and federated cohorts, etc. They're winning the game so far. They may keep winning forever, or they may not. We can only wait and see.

[1] https://caniuse.com/css-grid

> I use and love Firefox, but I don't think it's really fair to say Chrome is the new IE.

Nobody wanted ActiveX on the web except Microsoft.

Nobody wants Manifest v3 except Google.

The issue in this case, I believe, is that Google is using its dominance as the primary rendering engine to strongarm its own standards. If they want something, they just implement it in chrome and everyone must follow, least the smaller browsers fails to load more and more websites.

> You also had to have Windows in order to test with it. On top of that, crappy or nonexistent dev tools.

Same with Safari and you can use VMs for both of them.

Eh, I don't think I count macOS/Safari as usable inside a VM. Unless you are running a macOS VM on top of macOS, which defeats the purpose.

You can run a hackintosh in a VM but it's not a trivial matter for someone who doesn't know anything about macOS, or hackintosh's, or configuring hardware emulation. I also had it break on me regularly in ways that took lots of time and ducking. I finally decided that if Apple didn't want me to support macOS/Safari, then I wouldn't.

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