A good point that we all have to take on board but (for some of us) perhaps a little too pessimistic.

If you are targeting the public at large with your new web site/start up then the IE6 issue looms large. However if you market is the "movers and shakers" then you are going to care a lot more about FireFox, Safari and IE8 right now - and will be looking to Google's Chrome to join in and take a share.

Of course the point stands that developers _probably_ still need to look out for IE6 users.

However, what the hell is Hank trying to say here? Is there a point to this blog post?

Is he suggesting that innovation should be halted simply because a large minority is still using outdated technology?

Exactly. All I could find in the article was vague naysaying. (Which, actually, seems to be the general tone of most of his posts.) Having a new decent browser that does a few innovative things is good. It won't solve the Internet's problems overnight, but it is clearly going to be beneficial on the long term.

His blog is called whydoeseverythingsuck seems like you should go in expecting whine over substance.

Oh, and according to W3C IE only has about 50% of market share, which is a lot different than the 75% he claims. is there a more accurate source he's going off of, or is it hyperbole?

Well the article was saying is that from a developers perspective, it is the bottom chunk of the market (IE6) that determine what he can or can't do, not the top.

Assuming of course, that whatever he's doing needs to run on all computers.

I agree. It does really depend on what type of user you are targeting. For some sites IE usage barely registers.

Unfortunately though, the people who use IE6 are the same people who click on "You won $10,000!! Click on the monkey to claim" adverts, so you can't really ignore them if you're going after advertising revenue.

"Unfortunately though, the people who use IE6 are the same people who click on "You won $10,000!! Click on the monkey to claim" adverts"

Um, not necessarily. Some of us are stuck on corporate machines that prevent you from running anything else. My back of the envelope guess is that this contributes to at least 25% of IE6 use.

I would guess significantly more that 25%. I used to work at a huge consulting company that still ran IE6 and was only recently looking to upgrade. I consulted for a government agency which was using IE6 and had no intention of upgrading soon. In fact, IE7 is banned by some government agencies.

All it takes is one killer app that only runs well in Chrome, and it'll have an installed base faster than you can believe.

Chrome itself will be the first attempt at that killer app.

Doesn't the very nature of Google Chrome prevent such an app from emerging? They seem to be sticking to the standards as far as possible. If you add google gears to any other (decent) browser the added benefits of Chrome will be lost for any single app.

I haven't used it so I have no idea. And all I've read is one comic about the architecture -- and while that comic is amazing, it still doesn't have every detail.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the multi-process architecture and the new JS engine turn out to make a surprising qualitiative difference in the performance of certain classes of JS apps.

Maybe so, maybe not. But even though I'm not writing anything particularly complex -- like, say, Gmail -- I've already had the thrill of working around situations where my one-lung JS interpreter is holding up the whole browser.

Heck, perhaps Gmail itself will be significantly smoother. Given the market penetration of Gmail, that would be a pretty good marketing hook for Chrome, all by itself.

An efficient javascript engine would enable, finally, awesome javascript graphics (via canvas).

Assuming said browser has implemented much faster JS, etc, etc.. Chrome seems more ambitious than just fancy browser skin + webkit + gears..

I'd hazard a guess that Chrome may have a technical advantage over safari / ff / opera for almost 12 months.. (To be specific - over end user stable versions --> not install-you-own-renderer or use SVN to grab the nightlies)

And especially if it's a Google Killer app - How do you beat their distribution?

I think the standards issue is important - because this browser is just the thing to appeal to corporate IT departments. They have been happy to live with IE even while acknowledging (individually) that FireFox is the better browser.

But now Google are offering a genuine technical advantage to go alongside those all important standards. It may be the "killer" platform that makes a reality of "zero install" web browser applications for business.

Look at what Apple is doing with Safari: whenever you update QuickTime or iTunes it tries to slip in an install of Safari. Google could build market share by doing the same thing with Google Earth, Google Desktop, and/or some new killer app.

Google already has deals with manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo (I think) to install its desktop search software and Google Toolbar on their computers. It won't be too hard for them to include Chrome in this bundle as well.

Google Chrome looks cool. But the only thing that would prevent me from "switching" from Firefox is the exclusion of an ad-blocking feature. For me, surfing the web advertisement free is the killer app. I will put up with Firefox's inefficiencies forever provided efficient ad-blocking is available.

you know that won't happen when Google's primary source of revenue is advertising lol

Its open source.

All this hand wringing over old browser compatibility puzzles me. Aren't marketers always trying to segment the market? Don't we go through great lengths to track and id, who's young, who's rich, who's what ever?

So isn't IE6 a dead give away with who you're dealing with? And how could advanced features and functionality also be targeted at the same demographic?

If you detect IE6 bring out the flashing "click here to win a prize" shit.

If you see Firefox 3.0 go nuts with web 2.0 "Learn Erlang now!!!!"

Absolutely not. I expect only a tiny segment of IE6 users are doing it because they don't want to upgrade, the rest are because they cannot upgrade (i.e. in a corporate environment).

So we should stop developing browsers because

"Stop using IE6! Use this browser, which is marginally better."

is more convincing.

This is definitely an interesting time in the browser market. Currently, everybody is in love with Firefox. But, Firefox will quickly take a back seat to IE8 (which is "good enough" and will have huge market share) and Google Chrome (which will be technologically superior). This time next year, I wouldn't be surprised to see IE6/IE7/IE8 market share at 10/5/60%, leaving 25% of the market to be split approximately evenly between Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari.

Chrome is a "thing." A "thing" is a subset of "everything." According to this blogger, "Everything sucks." Ergo, according to this blogger, Chrome sucks.

You're all missing the point. IE6 only has 25% left. Yes, it's horrid and we waste a massive amount of time supporting it, but the market share is dropping. It was 90% of the market 2 years ago. Once it drops below 15% we can stop supporting it and move into .. 2006 (which is when IE7 was released)!

Chrome has all the potential to be huge. Google is a brand — everyone knows Google, even all those people still using IE6. They may not have heard of Firefox or Safari, but they sure will hear about Chrome (I hope Google really pushes it out there).

IE6 users will only be motivated to upgrade when a significant part of the web no longer supports IE6. Unfortunately, most of the web will only consider dropping support for IE6 when its market share is considerably lower.

You also need to take into consideration, that a lot of users just don't have a skill to upgrade any application. For example, my parents: I installed FF3 of their computer, set Google as homepage and told them that when they want to go to the internet, they need to click the orange icon, and write to the google box where they want to go.

I wanted to go further, but then I realised that they don't even have a clear concept of what is the difference between Internet, Google and Web browser...and you want them to upgrade browser? ;) I think out of those 25% IE6 users, there is a large portion of users like this.

I work in an environment where most enterprises still cling to IE6. These enterprises do so, because they've built up an internal expertise in keeping IE6 secure (kinda) and stable (kinda). At some point in the future, it seems like that internal expertise will be too expensive or will fail to maintain that secure and stable (kinda) environment. At that point, it seems, there will be a fairly quick migration to newer technologies. I don't think it'll be the killer app that draws the enterprise market... it'll be the bottom line.

Completely agree here. I think that a good portion of IE6 use is tied to corporate environments that prevents users from running anything other than IE6.

Since Chrome is open source, its improvements will be immediately available to Firefox. A part of the point is to get some better technology out there. CHrome is worth the effort on this alone.

Why, in this age of great VMs and Generational Garbage collection is a User app like Firefox plagued by memory leaks and fragmentation? Couldn't we retarget the compilation of Firefox onto a VM and have all memory be allocated through a table of pointers? Is Firefox so bloated at this point that it couldn't take a 4X hit to its performance? (Maybe it is?)

Firefox will be able to share approximately 0% of the code of Google Chrome. WebKit is designed totally differently than Gecko, and the overall architecture of Google Chrome (multi-process) is totally different than that of Firefox (single process, single threaded).

You can usually use code from a multi-threaded code base in a single threaded program. I'm sure that all of Chrome won't be reusable. But to say that it will be 0% is a bit of a stretch.

Are you implying that none of the code in Firefox or Chrome is going to be orthogonal to rendering web pages? Is this how you architect your programs?

As was pointed out earlier, for rendering, Chrome uses WebKit (of Safari, Android, and S60 fame). Firefox uses Gecko. It's not as simple as picking random functions out of one codebase and dropping them into the other one. It just doesn't work that way.

However if you meant the spread of ideas can flow from Chrome to Firefox (or even Safari; WebKit is open source as well), then yes, you're right about that. But its highly likely that the underlying code for said feature will be the exact same in all three browsers.

Memory management is largely orthogonal to a whole lot of stuff. That's a big area where Firefox can improve.

All I said was that the code can't be copied and pasted between browsers. (probably.) Doing so A. wont work (most likely), and B. lead to poor memory management on the application if it somehow does manage to work.

Instead, the ideas will be taken and copied (and hopefully made better). But idea's aren't code. So unless you're talking about human memory (which seems highly unlikely given you said "…where Firefox can improve") I'm not quite sure what benefits in terms of memory usage Firefox (or Safari or even Opera) gets from this.

Entire subsystems like Google Gears can probably be put in place, with a lot of code used without modification.

Also, if someone implemented my original proposal in this thread, this would be entirely orthogonal to any code currently in Firefox.

Gears and WebKit were designed to be reusable, other features such as the process model would be much harder to integrate into Firefox.

I'd be interested to see Firefox embedded in a "wrapper" VM, but I think you'll find it harder to implement than you expect. Please post to HN if you give it a shot.

I'm doubtful that google will actually make an effort for the code to be reusable in firefox specifically, while I'm sure that there's a possibility google can and will contribute lots back to webkit.

Sure, some of the codebase will likely be reusable in ff, but it's not something you should really count on. And even if it isn't reusable, you can probably take a hint on some of the more interesting features and reimplement them if it turns out the parts you care about aren't reusable.

Ironically Apple's me.com would probably run better in Chrome, than in Safari...

The idea isn't pure market share -- it's the spur on a floundering browser market. Enough feature-twiddling, more innovation.