Having lived through the MS/IE6 era of being the monopoly web browser, and effectively determined and held back web standards for a long time, it's bittersweet that we now have Google/Chrome era.
At least it's not hard wired into the OS and we're not going through another era of mega-corp hard wiring browsers into their OSes any more.
Do you remember how we got into the IE6 situation?
IE was actually very innovative, did stuff like AJAX before everyone else and the developers adopted the ways of IE. Websites did not work well on other browsers, every website had a disclaimer at the bottom: Works best in IE.
Now I see similar situation with Chrome and gives me goosebumps. Some people say that Safari is the new IE but I think they got it wrong, I think the new IE is Google Chrome.
IE become bad when Microsoft dropped the ball and made it into a browser with a reputation to crash all the time and bring down Windows with it.
IE6 was hated by the developers because it had the largest userbase but had non-standart features, which meant that CSS and HTML and JS had to be written in a way to accommodate IE and Mozilla.
Today Chrome is very good but if Google takes something from the Microsoft playbook, we will be screwed. Some already say that Chrome is not what it used to be and Google no longer abides by the "do no evil" motto. They are even notorious to favour their own services, i.e. if you sign in into a Google website, Chrome treats that website differently than the rest, assumes that session as the browser account.
I don't see the issue with Chrome. The new IE it's obviously Safari and it's in the worst way possible since in iOS you're actually forced to use it. Apple is also being accused of breaking their own browser to force you using their AppStore. Don't see Google doing that.
Apple forces you to use the rendering engine, not the browser. You can download Chrome to your iPhone.
Anyway, that's not the point. IE wasn't bad because it was a shitty browser. It was bad because it had features that other browsers did not have and it was very popular because it was very innovative and it was heavily marketed. This resulted in websites being made for IE only, which resulted in a lockdown of huge userbase that even Microsoft couldn't get rid of once decided to get rid of IE.
Safari is nothing like that and there's no Safari lockdown. On the other hand, Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share, forcing web developers to make everything for Chrome. That's exactly like IE.
If anything, Apple's refusal to allow the Chrome engine into iOS is the only thing that keeps us from complete lockdown into Chrome.
I don't agree with you and as a developer I find way more issues with Safari than with Chrome/Firefox/Edge.
Also, what matters in a browser it's the engine. If it's always WebKit and you find a issue or something else in iOS you can switch the browser but the result will always be the same since Chrome and Firefox are forced to use WebKit.
Chrome's engine it's Chromium which is open-source and used by other browsers like Microsoft Edge for example, so I don't see as much of an issue with Google Chrome, since you're not actually forced to use it.
> Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share
Even Firefox has it's own non-standard features and I don't see people complaining about it.
Okay, check out Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Exterminate strategy and I hope you understand what's the problem of having a dominant platform that does it's own thing instead of abiding by the standards. Now Chrome is in the "Extend" stage and obviously you don't feel any pain but if Google chooses to take another step, then you will feel it.
Maybe they never will do it but I simply don't want Google has the option to go to the next step.
Google obviously has to gain by doing that, but not as much as Microsoft had. I mean, IE could run basically on one platform, which was Windows, so it makes sense Microsoft forced people to create dependency on IE.
I'm more concerned about Apple nowadays, they're doing everything to keep people locked down on their own ecosystem.
It's not obvious to me, Google has everything to gain by going evil. Google has power to choose how privacy will be managed, they can choose to kill Facebook(not that I'm fan of FB, but still).
Apple makes a lot of money but Apple is an underdog with it's tiny market share. Apple can and does evil stuff but it's nothing compared to the potential of Google.
What you fear from Google it's what Apple's already doing. With their new iOS 15 privacy settings they are hurting Facebook (and other companies that rely on your data pretty bad). I mean, I don't feel sorry for Facebook or whatever company profits from your private data, but you can see how damage Apple can already do.
> a browser with a reputation to crash all the time and bring down Windows with it
IE post-dates the addition of process isolation to Windows - IE never brought down Windows because it ran as a normal process. When people say IE was integrated into Windows they just mean applications like the shell used it as a component, it wasn't actually in the kernel.
IE6 also had the infamous ActiveX plugin architecture, which was a security hell, but were way better than Java Applets. Several pages with the "Works in IE" used ActiveX plugins
Why does there only need to be one web villain? We've unbundled IE's horrors.
Safari is now the browser that resists web standards and an open internet for its parent company's personal gain. See: PWAs, webgl, webview.
And Chrome is now the thousand pound gorilla forcing standards nobody wants, for its parent company's personal gain. See: manifest v3, cookie security.
Resisting web standards is alright, if people make standards compliant websites it will simply mean that Safari users will miss out some stuff.
The problem starts when you implement alternative standards and you have a market share to make people code for your standard. In this situation, your users don't suffer but everyone else suffer, that's what I call villain.
Check Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Exterminate strategy. This is the evil thing, making browser that doesn't adopt some web standards is not evil.
The market forces work the other way. If Safari can't do something, like say if it can't work with webgl 2.0 until four and a half years after every other major browser adds support, devs will avoid using it and middleware will have to maintain support for webgl 1.0 longer. This slows down adoption of web standards and affects everyone.
The only property that benefits from dragging your heels on webgl 2.0 adoption is the App Store, which could see its influence and revenue easily be cannibalized by progressive web apps using modern gpu rendering. And would you look at that, those are exactly the two web standards Safari has dragged its heels on.
Sure, it will have an effect but Apple's market share is tiny. If there was something great to be done with the stuff that Apple is dragging their feet to implement, we would have it on other platforms and Apple will actually be forced to act on it.
There's many ways to measure market share and when you look at monetizable users, Apple platforms have an outsized amount of big spenders compares to Android or web platforms. As I already said, this gives them considerable influence in what does and doesn't get adopted by developers. This is the opposite of how you claim it works.
We're going to have to agree to disagree because your argument you've made twice now without adaptation is a bit absurd. If Safari doesn't implement it it must not be important? I am now conscious of my original comment being inexplicably downvoted and I'm worried I might be banging my head against Apple fanboys instead of having a discussion about corporate influence over web standards. There is considerable evidence for this and I've given it in this thread.
I'm not sure which is worse. The problem with Chrome is that Google isn't content with the web being a document platform. They want it to be this all-encompassing OS-like amalgamation of worst technologies possible that's never complete. This endless feature creep with WebUSB, WebMIDI, WebBluetooth, WebNFC... No, it's not "cool" that I'm for some reason able to install a beta version of Android on my phone using a macro in a hypertext document.
In the IE era, if you wanted a "web application", you simply used Flash. There was a clear separation between the document and the application. It was nice. I miss it.
Say what you will (I am a sole firefox user for a decade +), at least chrome keeps improving and having development. Now that the web is more of a "VM in a window for applications", it's _not_ like the IE era of no updates, buggy crap, un-debuggable, etc.
Yes and no, Chrome does what's good for google with no regard for most of the rest. To make it worse google goes out of their way to break compatibility with other browsers when it comes to their stuff. It's really no different and in many ways just as bad. The only major difference is google's incentives do align with innovation for web; insofar as it furthers advertising revenue for google.
The situation with Safari is nothing like what we had back in the IE6 days. It was like developing for multiple platforms, not just a multiple browsers.
Thats not to say Safari isn’t dragging it’s heals, but it looks like Apple are finally ramping up development speed. I gather they have been expanding the Safari dev team, and the latest announcements at WWDC look really good.
I actually use Safari as my primary browser, I prefer it (as a user) to Chrome. Although for debugging Chrome dev tools are better, I probably open it 2-3 times a day to check stuff, but never leave it running.
In at least one way, it's worse. You have a large percentage of users (everyone on iOS) who is stuck using a single rendering engine (Safari's) and locked out of installing another one. Although you can install Firefox, Chrome, etc on iOS, it's still Safari's webkit engine underneath.
It's not as bad in some aspects, but the iOS ecosystem is essentially another platform. My current client has an app that's built on Ionic, and the sheer amount of bullshit I've had to deal with, specific to Mobile Safari, is insane.
In a lot of ways it's worse, Microsoft never banned the competition. It's utterly outrageous that Apple has been able to get away with such clear anti-competitive behaviour for this long.
There's only one reason Web Apps are not currently viable on mobile, and unless you're down in the trenches building these apps these issues are invisible.
Firefox was also clearly a better user experience at the time, which made it much easier to convince people to switch.
I switched back to Firefox a while ago for ideological reasons, but the majority of people are not going to switch to something that is more or less the same, just without their bookmarks, passwords and history.
All the standards required to render the modern web are too complex to be implemented from scratch in a reasonable amount of time by a reasonably sized team.
- A GDPR-style mandate to make cloud apps secure by certifying all libraries and upstream authors that run your stack, down to the OS,
- Thus cloud providers providing “Debian, only for amateur purposes, PII forbidden”,
- And “Amazon Linux, certified GDPR III, all upstream identified.”
That would be the end of free software. But at the same time, it would be the only reasonable move from EU, it drives me crazy that websites all use random NPM modules, half of them written by Russians we’re at war with.
At least it's not hard wired into the OS and we're not going through another era of mega-corp hard wiring browsers into their OSes any more.
Oh wait.