Comment by mumblemumble
6 years ago
> We were all mad when IE was holding back the Internet
As I recall it, we weren't mad about IE "holding back the Internet", we were mad about IE encouraging web designers to stick a bunch of dynamic clutter such as ActiveX controls into their webpages. Largely because they created this lock-in where sites only worked well on one browser.
It turns out that JavaScript has been co-opted into being the new ActiveX, and Chrome is the new IE. But since JavaScript is nominally an open standard, and Chrome runs on the big 3 OSes, nobody seems to get mad that alternative browser projects are dying because they can't keep up with all the stuff that needs to be implemented in order to work well with sites that were only tested on Chrome and WebKit.
Amen, amen! The ignominous "best viewed in" which we fought in the Second Browser War is creeping back in - except now it says "this hour's current Google Chrome" instead of "MSIE 6".
TBH, I think it's worse than it was with IE6. Targeting just IE was annoying, but, even so, 20 years ago, I could use BeOS as my primary desktop OS, and Net+ was a decent enough browser. Nowadays, the bar to successfully render a modern JavaScript-heavy website is so high that even Microsoft couldn't successfully maintain their own independent rendering engine, and is shifting over to Google's.
Anyone who has heard of the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish" should be at least a little bit uncomfortable with this situation. For example, it implies that any potential alternative OS needs to be able to compile Chromium (or, as what can only be seen as a second-class substitute nowadays, Gecko) before it can really be viable. If you're the kind of person who likes a free, open and competitive software landscape, that's a looming threat.
That's a different issue altogether, but still salient.
- 1. you need a beefy device to render in a reasonable timeframe
and
- 2. you need The One Blessed Renderer to even see anything
I do recall the situation 20 years ago, when I could use about 2/3 of the relevant Net, with the rest going "meh, chronic complainer, just use IE. What? Yeah, that's your own fault for not choosing Windows." The second part is far more worrying, as it is not resolvable locally, either by optimization, or by horsepower.