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Comment by karmasimida | Hacker News Reader

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer now. And it is creating its own cardinal sins

I think there's a case for arguing Safari is the new IE.

In a way, but as long as Apple doesn’t have a 95% market share it’s not an abuse of a monopoly like it was with MS. As such, Apple cannot use embrace, extend and extinguish tactics either. Google can and could, given Android’s dominance in some markets (eg. ~95% in India), though globally its share (~70%) is not enough to allow really abusive tactics.

Marketshare is only one factor. In mid-late 2000s, you could have pushed users to install Firefox and then Chrome and say IE is not fully supported, didn't work with enterprises but for captive audience and startups it made sense. Now that isn't an option as users can't migrate away from Safari. So, it is worse now, Safari will decide the baseline and if it doesn't support some feature that you need, you'll have to let go richest x% customers or move to the walled garden.

See, the thing is that you are not thinking of each companies incentives. Google makes money out of the web. Apple and Microsoft make money from people using their operating system. They don't want web standards to be more powerful and to replace native apps.

And the market share doesn't matter, cause for iOS users, 100% of them use Safari, and you are not allowed to build a competing browser for it. This freezes web standard development, since it is a major player in the space the is literally against improvement in the space.

To have IE's status, you need to be in a place that people are hating on you, but can't really deal without you.

Safari isn't popular enough to have the latter.

That's exactly where we are at now, it's not like you can tell users to use something else whenever Safari breaks something on every new release, you have to use workarounds.

The defining aspect of Internet Explorer’s impact on the WWW is that, once Microsoft killed Netscape and Internet Explorer 6 gained >95% market share, they shut down development for five years. When Firefox started to become popular, they restarted development.

That’s more than five incredibly long years where front-end web development was dragged down to an absolute standstill by Microsoft. Even the subsequent Internet Explorer 7 was just a quick patch job to fix the weirdest rendering bugs, add some CSS selectors, and add tabs. It wasn’t until Internet Explorer 7 (released in 2006) dropped out of use that web developers could rely upon post-2001 CSS, and it wasn’t until Internet Explorer 8 (released in 2009) dropped out of use that web developers could rely upon post-2001 JavaScript. In that entire 2001–2006 span, the most significant forward motion that happened was a slight change to how a couple of HTTP headers were handled if the user had installed Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Safari, even on its very worst day, is not even remotely on the same scale as the horrific effect Internet Explorer had on the industry. Anybody telling you that “Safari is the new IE” simply has no clue whatsoever what Internet Explorer was like to deal with back in the day. Browser support for absolutely everything was at a complete standstill for most of a decade because of Internet Explorer.

Safari has all of the iOS users locked to it in a level that not even a campaign to get users to switch browsers would liberate them, cause you are literally not allowed to make a competing browser in iOS.

Google's Motto was "Don't be evil" Now it's "Do the right thing"

The irony.

"do the right thing (to maximise profits for the shareholders)".

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