I don't think IE6 really compares to Chrome. IE6 froze the web in time and made impossible for standards to evolve. Chrome may be in danger of becoming synonymous with the web but it's hardly standing still. In fact the most common complaint is that it's adding features too quickly and trying to do too much.

IE6 was the most innovative browser of all until it won the race. I don't think we're at the stage yet where we can say if Chrome can be compared or not.

The features they are adding are often unnecessary and designed to help them further lock down the web, prevent ad blocking, etc.

I’m surprised no ones even noticed that Portals are basically AMP Supercharged to where you’d never leave Google. Truly dystopian future they’re trying to slowly cement.

> The features they are adding are often unnecessary and designed to help them further lock down the web

Reminds me of the Browser Wars of yesteryear, when Microsoft and Netscape invented their own unnecessary, easily abused, proprietary HTML tags, such as blink and marquee.

[1] https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/blink-marquis-tag/

It's easy to look backwards, with the benefit of more robust and fast (relatively!) standards bodies, and shake a finger.

But my memory at the time is that there were essentially no effective, consensus-based evolutions of web standards, because everything was so new.

Even the idea of running executable code in a browser at all was "That's weird. Is this a thing we want to do?" and resulted in 10+ variations (of which javascript ultimately triumphed).

It was certainly a worse time for the consumer, and web developer, as essentially everything was broken on every platform but your target w/ your target plugin installs.

A lot of people noticed and I thought the gave a reasonable counter argument as to why this was not the case.

examples?