Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

No not even close by every single possible measure.<p>I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change.<p>I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth&#x27;s most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth&#x27;s browser that I freely installed.<p>The most important one from an anti-trust perspective, every device I&#x27;ve ever had Chrome on I&#x27;ve had to seek out and install&#x2F;make default Chrome, that includes my mobile devices which used the manufactures browser by default.<p>If I want to use chromium I can, Safari has been VERY late in implementing certain industry spec standards (SSE&#x27;s, web sockets, IndexedDB API, animations, relative color syntax, container queries, a bunch of &lt;video&gt; stuff, flexbox, the list goes on and on.)

As an example of how perfidious some of the discussions on web standards are, on Wikipedia:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_browser_engines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_browser_engines</a><p>In teeny tiny font near the bottom:<p>&quot;Given the market-share dominance of Blink-based browsers,[4] if Google chooses to not support a standard, like JPEG XL,[30][31] it will not become relevant on the Web.[30][31] Such standards are not listed in these tables.&quot;<p>So if Chrome implements something that Safari doesn&#x27;t, then its a deficiency in Safari. If Safari supports something Chrome doesn&#x27;t, its not relevant so will not appear in any comparison tables.<p>Chrome is 100% the new IE, as it is the being treated as the sole arbiter of what is a web standard or not.

Yes.<p>If it works on Chrome, no one cares or even tests for other things.<p>If there is a JS feature in Chrome they want to use, so it’s impossible to use other browsers (instead of looking wrong) people do it.<p>Performs fine in Chrome? Ship it.<p>Yes, Chrome is the new IE in that it’s the <i>only</i> browsers companies care about, just like IE was for a very long time.<p>Everything has to be Chrome compatible to succeed. That’s the benchmark, not what the spec says.

One issue I keep see cropping up with various corporate websites is they will only allow Chrome and will block any other browser. I would say in 9&#x2F;10 cases, this isn&#x27;t because the site uses features not supported in other browsers but rather, developers restrict it to Chrome because that&#x27;s all their QA&#x27;s test on.

Not even close. IE 6 didn’t get any updates or new web features for years. It was closed source. It was dead and everyone used it. float:right; zoom:1; was a common necessity… to compare them is an insult to the immense progress and effort spent over the last 24 years… (yes chrome started in 2007, but the teams from Firefox get credit too, many of them went on to build chrome ). The open source movement won, IE is dead - MS shipped edge. We can argue about how Google is evil all day but it’s night and day compared to what the web was like in 2000

When I parked a rental car in downtown SLC last week I had to find a way to pay to park. There was a kiosk with a functional screen, but the touchscreen part of it was broken, so I couldn&#x27;t interact with it. I plopped my stuff down and sat on a concrete bench in the cold and dark to try to figure things out on my phone.<p>The QR code sent me to a website to install an app. Google Play store said the app was designed for an older version of Android and couldn&#x27;t be installed on my device. I eventually found a &quot;pay online&quot; link hidden down the page a bit, then spent several minutes filling in my credit card number and what not. Then when I got to the part where I was to select the expiration month and year, the drop-down menus simply didn&#x27;t work. I had no way to continue in my default browser, Firefox.<p>It had been 7 or 8 minutes, the cold was starting to numb my fingers, and I was no closer to actually paying for my parking space. I debated just canceling my appointment and driving away rather than risk a parking ticket, but I decided to give it just one more try in the Vanadium browser. Lo and behold, the drop-down menus worked, and after over 10 minutes of messing with a broken kiosk, a broken app, and a broken website, I was able to proceed to the point where I punched in my parking space number. Which, of course, wasn&#x27;t marked.<p>At that point I looked up and down the side of the street and noticed a post with numbers for two spots behind me. I noted which number was bigger to infer whether my space would be one higher than the higher or one lower than the lower and punched that in. After my appointment I came out to find the car parked behind me had a parking ticket, while my car didn&#x27;t. So I guess I managed to punch the right sequence of buttons on my phone to avoid a parking fine.<p>However the fact remains that I couldn&#x27;t legally park my car in Salt Lake City unless I was in possession of a functioning smartphone and was running a Chrome-based browser on it.<p>Not sure if this is more a story of Chrome being the only browser that&#x27;s tested and&#x2F;or compatible with critical services I need to use to function in a major U.S. city or if it&#x27;s a story about municipalities like Salt Lake City making things as difficult as possible for people so as to collect more revenue from fines.

I remember this blog. Magic Lasso Adblock is Apple ecosystem only. Its view on pretty much everything is basically Daring Fireball.<p>&gt;tends to be misunderstood to mean that Chrome is like Internet Explorer was in 2009<p>&gt;Despite being the market share leader, there is significant evidence that Chrome is trailing in speed, efficiency and standards interoperability.<p>&gt;Perhaps the browser with the most disruptive potential is from Microsoft with Edge...... It has also avoided alternative-browser compatibility issues by being based upon Chromium.<p>Every time this subject came up and I will find people who have never used all three browser at the same time. Or wasn&#x27;t there during the IE era.<p>The phase &quot;is Safari the new IE&quot; was actually coined by someone who wasn&#x27;t even there or doing Web Dev during IE era. It was IE6, not IE7, and definitely not 2008. And the phase somehow catches on to become is Chrome the new IE.<p>IE was absolutely dominant with 95%+ of browser market share during its peak. Neither Chrome &#x2F; Blink nor Safari &#x2F; Webkit ever achieved that. And the most important part was that the HTML &#x2F; CSS and IE implementation had so many low hanging fruit but <i>NO IMPROVEMENT</i> were made for years. IE 7 &#x2F; MSHTML released 5 years after IE 6 offered little to no improvement other than a few small fix.<p>Both Chrome &#x2F; Blink and Safari &#x2F; Webkit have continuous development over the years. We may not like some of the direction they are going. But every year there are improvement being made with HTML &#x2F; CSS &#x2F; JS features.<p>Second part being Chrome is a resource hog or slow. Chrome has made tremendous effort into making it memory efficient since 2021 when complain started to pile in. By 2022 and definitely 2023 multi tab on Chrome is far better than what it was. Safari on the other hand isn&#x27;t doing well on MultiTabs for over a decade but gets <i>zero</i> attention on the issue. Meanwhile Firefox being the fastest browser in terms of least janks and best for hundreds of tabs gets No recognition either.<p>And lastly Interop. Since 2019 and I believe the first Interop was in 2021. We still dont have a 100% coverage on any Interop year for all three major browsers. I wish Interop could at least agree and publish baseline support that aims to have all browser support by 2025. Instead we are forever stuck in 95% with quirks everywhere.

The number of websites that only work on chrome really sucks. It&#x27;s a small percentage, but it&#x27;s enough that you run into them and I hate that very much.<p>But unless I&#x27;m actively campaigning everyone I know to switch in an effort to save them from it, I&#x27;m going to reserve the term &quot;the new ie&quot; for another day.<p>Not to mention the developer story. Just getting a website to look right in every browser was difficult, with IE very often being by far the hardest.<p>IE was a nightmare for a long time.

Yes, Chrome is the de facto standard, and often the only browser thoroughly tested against. Even now though it isn&#x27;t as dominant as IE at its peak though.<p>No, Chrome isn&#x27;t significantly behind on adopting new standards compared with other major browsers (I&#x27;m looking at you Safari). IE6 to IE7 was about five years!

The only problem with Chrome: It&#x27;s controlled by an advertising company.

When was the last time you wanted to build a website and <i>web browsers</i> got in the way? Those days are long gone. Compared to a decade ago, everything is amazing.

Mobile Safari is the new IE. Random idiosyncrasies that are poorly documented dictated by the whims of a single corporation. Apple has broken stuff multiple times in the past few years.

Safari, the browser that claims to support standards but always comes with caveats, like saying they support transform&#x2F;transitions and then everything with box shadows flickering

Just to (mostly) preempt this because the exact same discussion is had every time this sentiment comes up: Isn&#x27;t safari the new IE?<p>Answer: They both are like IE, for different reasons:<p>Chrome: Pushes proprietary extensions onto the web, which due to their absolute dominance others are somewhat forced to adopt, people develop for it and don&#x27;t test in any other browser, just like IE<p>Safari: is coupled to operating system version, lags behind on implementing new features, thus single handedly slowing down when everyone can use new features. Has weird quirks that other browsers don&#x27;t, just like IE (though not nearly as bad as IE)<p>So which is like IE? It just depends on what you mean when you say &quot;like IE&quot;, the label applies to both because IE was bad for more than one reason

Yes. By virtue of most other popular browsers being based on it (chromium), with the exceptions of Safari and Firefox. The controller of the project is still Google.<p>Safari trails chrome because Google didn&#x27;t like Apple being in charge of the Webkit repo, which led to the Blink fork (the Chromium engine).<p>Firefox is still a great browser, but it has fallen back to square one on popularity.<p>From an anti-trust perspective Google should offer to fund their competitors directly instead of splitting the browser out, the eventual result should be revisions to web standards specs to ensure they are correct and detailed enough to be accurately implemented, which in turn makes new browsers easier to implement. Eventually if specs are close to 100% correct it should be reasonable to generate new browser engines from them. Currently that&#x27;s not possible due to chasms of ambiguity and contradiction, and because browsers like chrome occasionally implement their own design of stuff just because they want to.

&gt; Perhaps the browser with the most disruptive potential is from Microsoft with Edge... With Edge, Microsoft has a chance to claim the position of the disruptive alternate browser.<p>I believe moving from Chrome to Edge does not change a lot in terms of privacy, proprietary ecosystems, data mining practices, or other reasons that made you switch. In the end, it’s a transition from one tech giant to another of comparable scale with the same practices.<p>Safar? I don&#x27;t think Apple has the intention to dominate this sector, so it won&#x27;t push Safari beyond its current <i>geography</i>. All that it cares about is its * walled garden<i>.<p>Firefox? Although I use it as my default browser, it is still far from mass adoption. The fact that they </i>beg users to switch to Firefox* say it all: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38806270">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38806270</a>

Yes, in terms of market share.<p>But the key difference is that it&#x27;s leagues better than other browser engines on quality. From the perspective of competition this isn&#x27;t great, but the network effects are hard to ignore. Firefox and Safari (webkit) just tend not to work as well.<p>It&#x27;s very different in terms of quality though. Internet Explorer was a terrible browser and often lagging in implementing standards. The better comparison would be Safari now, which often completely breaks many sites on mobile for me. It also doesn&#x27;t eliminate a lot of newer CSS animations properly.<p>This is really very unfortunate because it&#x27;s good to have competition in browser implementations. Everything is Chrome under the hood now except for Safari and Firefox.

Safari. I assumed this was overblown until I had the rich experience of developing a Flutter app that needed to work on every platform. Somehow, even Androids chaos is notably better to work with.

I think it might be worse. Google has lied about Chrome and privacy so much that you can just assume it phones everything back to Alphabet even if you set it not to.

Yes it is. I use Firefox wherever I can to not allow one company to take over the internet with their toxic patterns (manifest v3, disallowing screenshotting on pages, breaking their services on other browsers etc.)

Where I work, edge is the new IE, and there has never been an interregnum. I think people forget that institutions have their own logic.

Safari is great and very performant. Not every rushed “standard” Google forces everyone to catch up to is a good thing.

Unlike IE, Chrome is still moving forward with new features and depreciating old features.

As a Firefox mainliner for &#x27;legacy&#x27; reasons to be fair, I often have to revert to Chrome to get sites to work. I guess there are a lott of dev shops out there that just test on Chrome&#x2F;Edge (and maybe Safari)

every time i get a new work machine i attempt to use a browser that is not chrome. last time was firefox, this time was safari. eventually i start using chrome on certain sites because of ublock origin. then, as was the case with aws, certain websites are flakey enough times that i just give in and use chrome full time.<p>side note: hey aws, why is your rds performance insights dashboard broken on safari? 33% of the time it will &quot;freeze&quot; and i have to reload the page. very un-dude like.

if any browser is the new IE, it&#x27;s Firefox -- poor compatibility, very few people use it, but enough that makes people think we need to support it<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;analytics.usa.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;analytics.usa.gov&#x2F;</a><p>We&#x27;re now at 0.8% Firefox usage on Gov&#x27;t websites, that means Firefox support is no longer required at a gov&#x27;t level (2% usage is the threshold)<p>Firefox should be shut down in 2025 if all trends continue

It is, except this time around it&#x27;s worse.

Yes, Chrome is the new IE in only one category when IE was popular: market share. Everything else? Not so much.

&gt; Is chrome the new IE?<p>Oh it&#x27;s way worse than that: Chrome is the new IE, and Google is the new (old) Microsoft.

Only use chrome when safari on mac, edge in win11 and whatever browser on Ubuntu failed.

(2023)

Are web standards the new proprietary extensions?

can i run chrome on my mobile and sync to chrome on my pc and put an adblocker on both?

Is Apple the new Microsoft?

Safari has been the new IE

okay then i wanna see your chrome IE alternative to v8

Chromium is, not Chrome<p>And that&#x27;s not a bad thing<p>- open source<p>- portable<p>- crossplatform<p>- efficient<p>- always up to date

I always find it comforting to know that a site would work in chrome.

I just bought a new computer and was curious, so I thought I&#x27;d try Windows first, and . . .<p>No. Chrome is not the new IE. I am constantly pushed to use Edge for everything, to &quot;make it better&quot; for myself. It&#x27;s actually sorta creepy . . .

(2023)<p>And, No.

Chrome is controlled by Google.<p>The US government will be controlled by the owner of X, Tesla, and SpaceX.

No because Chrome is actually a good browser.<p>We’ll never see a reasonable competitor unless someone like Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos gets involved. But that’s not feasible because their companies aren’t internet ad agencies.