Yes, they almost own the entire JS ecosystem at this point.

They lost a decade of battles for the web, but it seems they just found a way to get back in the fight.

Now at the IE 6 times, that meant monopoly, and it was terrible news.

But today, it means more competition between the giants, which is very good for us.

One could argue that the IE6 of our times is Google Chrome at this point..

Safari.

Care to explain? Safari has one of the highest standards compliance of any modern browser [0], which IE famously did not.

It has been argued with various success [1] that Chrome is the new I.E., due to "Chrome exclusive" web standards.

[0]: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-11.2/chrome-30/...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16070595

I think the honest truth is that a lot of developers see Safari similarly to IE because Firefox and Chrome are quick to jump on and ship new features and "if only Safari kept up" they could be used "everywhere". Combined with the fact that iOS is large enough that you can't just drop Safari support and tell them to use Chrome.

It's a weird world where webdevs apparently ideally just want everyone on the 6 second old version version of Chrome. I totally get it -- it's an absolutely rational stance but it feels a lot like how devs felt about IE6 at the beginning.

You're right, IE6 was amazing at the time. It made a ton of things possible that previously hadn't been, and the standards bodies were lagging behind it. Had MS actually kept updating IE6 and kept it ahead of the standards, the standards would never have mattered, and we'd never have developed this sick taste for IE. No one hated that they had a monopoly, we hated that they had a stagnant monopoly.

Those of us that were using non-MS OSes like Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris back then hated it that sites were made to work correctly only on IE.

Your comment just triggered the box model. Which is what I call my flashbacks about when hasLayout was true or not.

If you are going to compare browsers make sure you aren't comparing against a version of Chrome from 2013.

Here is the correct comparison: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-11.2/chrome-68/...

Which clearly shows its the worst of the bunch.

Edit: Also just noticed, the latest Chrome version that the site has is 68. We're currently on 80+

A more up-to-date, although not complete, comparison is available here: https://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+74,chrome+80,safari+13

I've worked with projects that used iframes in safari. It had some of the weirdest bugs. Some random times it didn't render changes to the DOM. Sometimes when clicking input fields it would focus the surrounding iframe element.

A webview in iOS could sometimes crash system wide. Not enough to restart the app. You'd have to restart the device.

Felt like a sitcom when I had to ask customers if they'd tried turning it off and on again.

Chrome is pushing version 80, I'm not sure why that website is using a version from seven years ago…

Safari is way behind Chrome and Firefox on web features and has all kinds of proprietary rules on existing implementations.

It's not even required or the default install on any OS. And it has rapid updates that constantly test new features and improve performance and security.

Any "exclusive" features are just early testing for later standardization. It's Safari that's lagging in implementing them.

Not for Javascript it doesn't.

Plus because it's tied to the OS and the phone determines the maximum OS you end up with a bunch of users stuck on ancient and buggy versions.

This is to say nothing about the remote debugger purposefully locking you out of older versions for no reason to make debugging them harder.

Want to try something fun? Install any browser in iOS and do a test. Then do the same test with Safari. Now ponder why they are exactly the same no matter which browser you install.

If you're referencing Apple's mandate that WebKit be used as the engine for all iOS web rendering, then yes, that's a poor policy ostensibly made in the name of security. Not sure if that's what your point is, though.

Can you imagine how much legal trouble microsoft would be in if they blocked alternative browsers in windows? Simply providing a single default was too much.

I also can't run Safari on my Windows or Linux machines.

Safari doesn’t have the market share that IE6 had, though. Chrome has.

I think it's important to remember that IE6 was an amazing browser when it was first released.

The problem is that it was left to stagnate after Microsoft won.

In fairness to Microsoft, they did at least spend a little bit of time considering / working toward maintaining the runtime part, before deciding otherwise https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore/issues/628#issueco...

To be honest I like this new Microsoft. VSCode is a really good tool, C# is amazingly performant and they don‘t talk quite the same BS lingo as some other big players. Also MS research produces some really good stuff.

These tools are worthwhile additions. Vscode is a important toolkit item for many. Just having it on multiple platforms is a useful common denominator that reduces friction.

They could fork it, the core of the runtimework is moving to WebAssembly anyway which is a much more tractable problem. Sure this is a boatload of JS work to do at the interface boundary but the amount of hard compiler and jit work that needs to be focused on by main runtime is much lower.

Someone at MS knows strategic and tactics. When MS and Windows bootstrap themselves into the cloud, they will have some software to land on.

to be clear, Chrome's overall value to Google probably dwarfs all those things combined.

Also the new Chromium Edge is making its way. This will give some leverage on the browser front too.

What leverage?

Let's not forget electron, atom and a few other things...

and Edgeium.