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Comment by tpatke | Hacker News Reader

Who cares? Whatever browser is the market leader doesn't matter because you will still need to support IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari for the foreseeable future. Nobody has ever made a (significant) profit from a browser. In fact, Microsoft lost billions for their efforts (see U.S. vs. MSFT).

Can someone please explain to me why this matters?

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In terms of affecting what devs need to do, it doesn't matter. However, if it happens (and it's a big if), it would certainly be noteworthy, because it will cement html standards-compliance.

As you say, you need to support IE, Chrome, FF and Safari - but (at least for IE < 8) this has always meant supporting the standard and then tweaking it to make it work in IE. I've never had significant differences in webpage functionality between chrome, FF and safari (YMMV). IE 9 is MUCH better at standards compliance - but this is purely because of MS's losses in marketshare.

If you don't see this as a significant thing, then I'm guessing you're too young to have been coding web pages when IE had a 90%+ market share. You kids have it easy. :-)

A large enough market share for Chrome means that developers can target more of the features in modern browsers. For example, companies can write WebGL games knowing that the majority of installed browsers support it. Google can add new features to Chrome and since everyone gets the automatic update, and Firefox will soon follow, the feature becomes mainstream.

Microsoft made billions from their browser by derailing competition from the web that threatened their stranglehold on the desktop.

Google are doing the same in reverse, making billions by pushing the web platform on the desktop and mobile.

If Chrome is the market leader, you have a viable argument for not supporting IE at all. Or at least making it a low priority.

It really depends on the target market, regardless. Plenty of people will be quick to tell you how many enterprise companies are still stuck with IE6. And most of them are willing to write fat checks to maintain that status quo.

It matters because Microsoft's browsers have held back browser progress for more than 10 years.

I'm assuming you must be very young...

If you focus on mobile you can safely ignore Microsoft's browser. Why do think web developers love mobile devices.

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