Because at the time IE6 was a terrible browser with poor standards support, while Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support. It is a gilded cage.
> Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support.
Google learned it can be "standards compliant" if it submits a draft spec to WHATWG/W3C, and while the comment and revision process is still ongoing, roll out those features in Chrome and start using them in YouTube, Gmail, Google docs, and AMP. Now Firefox and Safari are forced to implement those draft specs as well or users will leave in droves because Google websites are broken. Soon enough, Google's draft spec is standardized with minimal revisions because it's already out there in the wild.
The debate, revision, and multistakeholder aspects of the standards process have been effectively bypassed, a la IE6 and ActiveX, but Chrome can claim to be on the cutting edge of standards compliance. This is a case of Goodharts's law.
I don't mean this to doubt you, it is a sincere question. Do you have any examples of that happening? It sounds very believable, but it would be great to have actual sources for future reference.
Anytime you see someone on HN lamenting that Safari is the new IE because it doesn't implement something, 99.9% of the time it's Chrome-only non-standards.
- Most of standards advertised on web.dev as "new exciting opportunities you can try now". E.g. WebTransport https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/webt.... The status of that spec is "scribbled on a napkin", but somehow already released in Chrome.
Can I Use had to create a special UNOFF tag for all the web APIs that Chrome (mostly Chrome) ships. If you go to MDN and look at all APIs marked as "experimental", you'll find that most of them are already shipped in Chrome: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API
push notifications, webgpu and webusb are examples of chrome being a reference implementation and using things for their services while simultaneously pushing the standard.
Push for mail, webgpu for maps (iirc) and I believe WebUSB is used for Android flash/debug.
WebGPU is the only one of those I’ve really followed, but hasn’t that had a huge amount of input and changes due to other voices in the working group? That seems to contradict the simplistic picture painted above of Google just dictating standards to the industry.
To add insult to injury, we probably would have gotten WebGL 2.0 Compute, which was initially done by Intel, if Chrome had not refused to ship it on Chrome, arguing that WebGPU was right around the corner, and it would take too much space, this was about 5 years ago.
And to those rushing out to point out the excuse part about OpenGL on Mac not having support for compute, WebGL already back then wasn't backed up by OpenGL on all platforms, see Windows (DirectX), PlayStation (LibGNM).
Also eventually Safari also moved their WebGL implementation from OpenGL to Metal, and Chrome did as well, replace their WebGL to run on top of Metal on Mac.
So not really that much of a problem regarding the state of OpenGL on Mac as "required" implemenatation layer for WebGL.
If Google websites break on Safari, users will stop using Google before they stop using an iPhone. They will blame Google as well. Safari has refused to implement standards multiple times.
That is revisionism, IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition, like Chrome is today, and Microsoft withdraw most of the development resources from the team.
WPF XAML was originally designed by ex IE team members, and they were the same that a few years later proposed XAML Grid concept as CSS Grid initial design.
Many JavaScript devs have to thank their abuse of JavaScript in the browser to XMLHttpRequest introduced by IE.
> IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition
Yeah, people forget that IE was a great browser. It was easily the most performant, I think driven by the Outlook web (I believe the first web app to make use of XMLHttpRequest) team demanding IE team make it so. The issue, like you said, is they won and then stopped updating.
> Internet explorer became the dominant browser for one reason only: it came by default.
Default helped, but IE was the far superior browser for a long time. People chose to use it.
I was also a FF user and it came out a few years later than IE6. When FF came out IE6 was still the superior browser, though it was eventually overtaken by both FF and Chrome.
It was sad to me watching that battle unfold. Maybe i was ignorant (and maybe i still am), but I learned most of what i know about web dev on Netscape sitting in a mac lab at university viewing source code. I HATED when IE started to takeover and eventually won that first battle. I miss Netscape :-(
Revisionism? I was around then and I implemented plenty of sites in IE. It always had bugs that other browsers did not (and there were more than two engines back then). Maddening lack of support of features that other browsers had implemented, often requiring crazy workarounds. Transparent PNGs didn't even work! Not to mention all the proprietary crap like ActiveX.
"Leading" being the operative word. Ship a new feature, submit it as a standard and encourage its adoption so things only work on chrome and further increase market share when people find other browsers "broken".
MS did exactly the same shit with IE - the only really difference was that the standards body (w3c) was independent, so they couldn't self declare it as a standard. Now the "standards" body (whatwg) is mostly google...
CSS Canvas Drawings
CSS filter() function
Video Tracks
Audio Tracks
FIDO U2F API
SPDY protocol
JPEG XL image format
HTTP Live Streaming
HEIF/HEIC image format
SVG fonts
CSS hanging-punctuation
And broken support for:
CSS font-smooth
CSS Initial Letter
Speech Recognition API
CSS -webkit-user-drag property
CSS3 Multiple column layout
CSS text-indent
Synchronous Clipboard API
HEVC/H.265 video format
TLS 1.1
text-decoration styling
CSS display: contents
CSS Container Style Queries
CSS clip-path property for HTML
CSS Counter Styles
Ruby annotation
WAI-ARIA Accessibility features
Media Fragments
autocomplete attribute: on & off values
DOMMatrix
SVG effects for HTML
X-Frame-Options HTTP header
DNSSEC and DANE
WebXR Device API
DeviceOrientation & DeviceMotion events
Permissions Policy
asm.js
Network Information API
theme-color Meta Tag
Document Policy
Your copy&paste does not support your argument. Just looking at the top items on your list, it's basically a bunch of Safari-only features which no other browser vendor ships:
- CSS Canvas Drawings is not a web standard. It's a WebKit-specific feature, only Safari implements it. Chromium removed it in order to replace it with an actual web standard (CSS Painting API).
- Likewise, the CSS filter() function is Safari-only.
- U2F API has been deprecated for years, was replaced by WebAuthn, and only Safari still implements it.
- Same with SPDY, which was replaced by an actual web standard (HTTP2). Only Safari still ships it, but has marked it deprecated.
- SVG Fonts were removed from the SVG spec.
- HLS, JPEG-XL, HEIF/HEIC are essentially Safari-only as well.
CSS hanging-punctuation and audio/video tracks are new features that haven't been widely implemented yet.
