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Comment by seivan | Hacker News Reader

IE9 is not available on OS X and most Linux distros. Not the same :)

Exactly.

The reason that there's so much focus on web standards is because Microsoft used their browser to force platform lock-in.

I don't see going webkit only as being a problem: Chrome is available on the three major PC operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux), it's free and it's not owned by a PC OS vendor.

Now if it was Safari-only or IE-only, then that would be a problem.

No, Chrome is owned by an internet monopolist. But hey, that's better than a small OS vendor, right?

Can either Apple or Microsoft really be accurately described as 'small'?

The Chrome trademark is owned by Google. Webkit is BSD and LGPL [1], and Chromium is GPLv2 [2] and virtually identical to Chrome except for branding and some proprietary plugins Google doesn't control the licenses for [3].

So yeah, while you're technically correct by your wording alone, I'd argue you're wrong in spirit.

[1] http://www.webkit.org/ (see bottom left) [2] http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/licenses [3] http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoog...

Actually, Chrome is not the same on all three systems. I can't remember the site, but a while ago someone wanted to share with me a site using advanced CSS3 transitions and it didn't work as expected on my Chrome on Linux (the latest beta version at the time). Only after switching to Windows and using Chrome there (the latest beta version too) I was able to see it.

It's free, unlike those other, costly browsers.

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