For me the primary characteristic of IE6 was not that it had a large market share like Chrome, but that it didn't update for over 5 years. Chrome is nothing like IE6 in that regard.

The web would be better off if iOS users could benefit from the full Chrome codebase.

That might be, as you point out, the primary thing for _you_. At the same time, Safari updates plenty of times, just because they don't shout about it doesn't mean it's not happening. Same goes for the backing engines (including Blink and V8 in Chromium and derivatives like CEF and node; but also WebKit and the likes).

The web would be better if it wasn't dominated by a very small set of platforms. Adding 'a few more browsers' on a single operating system hardly helps.

Right now, the 'web' isn't much more aside from Google, Facebook and a few commercial offerings like the various eCommerce websites, and they are all accessed on 2, maybe 3 operating system foundations, with perhaps 1 or 2 relevant browser engines. Adding Gecko or Chrome on iOS changes nothing.

> That might be, as you point out, the primary thing for _you_.

I'd be willing to bet that most people would consider that the primary characteristic of Safari that reminds them of IE. The market share was important to the IE hate but it wasn't because "everyone had it" it was because "everyone had it and it sucked" (sucked~= lagged/slowed development/entrenched users with shitty and unique experiences). Don't get me wrong Chrome also shares some of those secondary (imo) characteristics but I imagine when people speak of "IE" it's because of the , what the parent comment and I, consider the primary characteristic.

> The web would be better if it wasn't dominated by a very small set of platforms. Adding 'a few more browsers' on a single operating system hardly helps.

Now that's a hot take. Can I assume you're an Mac user ? honest question

I suppose I use macOS about 40% of the time, Windows 10% of the time and the rest is various Linux/Unix/BSD systems. Not sure how that matters.

I'm also of the opinion that for the vast majority of 'users' a locked down, managed device is the best option. To clarify: with the internet we have a vast amount of interdependent and interconnected systems, which in itself depends on everyone operating and maintaining those systems while they are part of this larger 'whole'.

I think most people neither know, nor want to know how this works or how this is done, and as such, taking part in a system that is dependant on this would be a risk for everyone involved.

Coming back to the 'the internet would be better with more diversity' (as that seems to contradict my earlier statement): diversity can come in many forms and apply on many ends. Having multiple server implementations, multiple client implementations and multiple transport implementations would benefit the quality of every implementation as it would need to be robust and tested to the point where it integrates properly. That does, however, not mean that all those differences need to be present at every layer of every implementation. Having a combination of many vendors all vending a single device with a single implementation would add plenty of diversity, same as a few vendors vending many devices with lots of device-specific variations.

Safari is in no way any slower that chrome. Sure you might have some features that dev care about, but 99% of the sites works in safari as well as they do in chrome.

Also primary for me, and probably a couple hundreds if counting my colleagues and their families and my close friends and their families and of course my families. Huge proportions of them using iOS. So I concur with previous reply. Don't get too fixated with market share. Apple isn't that niche if you include tablets and phones.

Yeah: Chrome is the new IE4, pushing ridiculous new technologies simply because they can.

It's interesting to look back at the difference technologies/tags that survived and which were forgotten: XMLHttpRequest, VML, marquee, etc.

Chrome's dominance wasn't enough to get something useful like WebSQL to stick.

'Ridiculous' is unfair. Google has enough technical chops and market heft to set new internet standards and not look as silly as Redmond did in the 90s in the process.

I think you’re equally being unfair to who Microsoft was and employed in the 90s.

Very possibly so, especially on an individual basis.

Yet the echos of a bazillion BSODs that have seemed less prevalent with Chrome are there.

To your point, comparing an OS to a browser is lame.

I'm not sure how you expected MS to prevent BSOD, which often derived from behavior of programs or drivers. The worst BSOD timeframe seemed to predate computer resources being so vast that common OS protections were viable. And when programs were more hard-crash prone in general.

The high number of security vulnerabilities is also something both IE and Chrome share.

>I like Firefox a lot on the desktop, but I have no illusions it'd stand in the way of total Chrome domination on its own. The only thing that really throws a wrench in Google's plans is iOS.

The thing that currently is holding Google from extreme derivations is actually Microsoft's edgium I think. Microsoft is one of the few companies out there with enough resources to hold a hostile fork of Chromium capable of easy/fast adoption.

If Chromium decides to do something ridiculously egregious. It is possible for it to 1) not affect Microsoft browsers or 2) for Microsoft to maintain a fork and win marketshare fast.

> I don't mind if you simply chose not to serve iOS/Mac/Firefox users at all, though of course most would then take their business elsewhere.

I use FF as my daily driver, but as much as I hate to admit it, whatever service I am using is almost always a stronger draw than FF, so I just open it up Chrominium or Brave. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the market for strictly native/browser-agnostic services is large enough to support most uses.

>Unfortunately, I'm not sure the market for strictly native/browser-agnostic services is large enough to support most uses.

I guess "strictly" is debatable, but the point here is that the market for at least somewhat browser agnostic services includes, well, the entirety of iOS at the least. Precisely because there is no "choice", which means big services/developers can't force a choice on us either. If I browse somewhere on my iPhone, I won't be told "go install Chrome" because a I can't (or rather, it'd make no difference because an iOS browser is still the same engine so like "iOS Firefox", "iOS Chrome" is mainly a skin). Sometimes I may see a "better in the app" which I don't mind if it's dismissible because if it's somewhere I actually like, well, maybe I really will try their app. And while iOS users aren't remotely the majority of the global market by user count, they tend to punch above their weight in spending; they aren't a random sample of the population. It's a not insignificant market to entirely forego.

Different people will have different services they depend on and different views of the web in turn, so YMMV, but at least for me that seems to have been enough. I completely uninstalled both Chrome and Chromium, and between Safari and Firefox on Mac and FF on FreeBSD or Ubuntu I haven't encountered anything critical that was non-functional. Apple has effective collectivized the buying power of a picky subset of people. That's definitely not always good, but nor is it always bad. I think at this point a lot of us are making a conscious choice to join that ecosystem, and those of us unhappy with some of it handle it by keeping our main computing environment mixed up.

> and users begin to lose the ability to use other browsers

Begin? No. This has been happening for years. This is what killed Opera browser rendering engine.

The web is the only open platform we have ever had and probably will ever have. To shun it for proprietary app stores and OSes is really disheartening. I'm the exact opposite, the more web apps the better. And sadly, Safari is holding the web back. Not only does it miss many features of modern browsers, it's very buggy. I find I have to make work arounds for Safari specific bugs in almost every website I make now.

>The web is the only open platform we have ever had and probably will ever have.

Are you trying to make some sort of joke here? How is the Web more open than Linux or the BSDs running FOSS applications? And in fact how is the web under Chrome any more open than macOS or Windows? Seriously. In all cases, you can't just freely modify everything about the platform you're running on top of or most of the "applications" you're running. There's a megacorp behind each whose interests may or may not align with yours. You don't get to choose what they do or how. But you can still make whatever you'd like on top for no cost, though you may have to spend money to get attention. And if you make something malicious, you might get added to a blacklist that is distributed to all users. Etc.

In essence Google wants our "operating system" to be Chrome or another of their properties, either as a sort of meta-OS layered on top of the hardware OS or more directly via Chrome OS/Android+Google Play Services. And their financial interest in that is almost exclusively to get data about us to run ads at us, and to the extent possible prevent or hinder avoidance of that harvest or those ads.

It's not just that I don't want an ad company to make my operating system, I don't want an internet-required OS at all. And I want a wide variety of software with zero WAN dependency beyond maybe initial delivery somewhere in the chain. If that's not something you're interested in fine, but lots of us will remain willing to put our money where our mouths are on that one.

I also disagree that Safari is "holding the web back" because I like simple, readable and parseable websites.

You're conflating two issues. Chromium's dominance is a problem for sure, but that is separate from the web being an open platform. The web is more open than Linux (which I use btw) because a web app can run on Linux, MacOS, Windows, FreeBSD, Android, iOS and more without recompiling, redistributing or re-anything. Would it be nice if it wasn't HTML/JS/CSS based? Absolutely. But we gotta take what we can get.

I couldn't agree more that Google's dominance in web technology is a problem. But you're throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And just to add, the current situation is still better than proprietary native apps on MacOS and Windows. I can at least use Chromium in many forms and on virtually any operating system. Not ideal, but the alternative people in this thread are suggesting is far worse.

Works for simple web apps, but for anything complex you are going to run into performance and especially UI issues. (Maybe also being limited to HTTP(S) can be an issue?)

There has been a ton of work to address all of that such as web assembly, webgl, webgpu, webworkers, websockets, http2, sse, on and on. There's a lot of web tech out there (for better or for worse). You really can make a webapp that's just as feature rich, complex and performant as a native app these days. Still tons of work to be done though, web assembly in particular needs some additional features before it can really shine.

In theory you can, but it's a mindset of "if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail", happily pushed by Google trying to wrestle control over people's computers from Microsoft.

Yeah I agree with that. But Apple has an app store hammer, and Microsoft has a Windows hammer too. Of all the hammers, I feel Google's is the least evil of them all. They're all really bad, the state of technology today is er ... something. But at least with the web, I maintain hardware freedom and really the most freedom overall.

Is it really the least evil ?

There's a wide panoply of programming languages that can be used on Windows PCs, including specifically to make user interfaces, which are cross-platform, like Qt.