Now, this is from the perspective of the web developer. I don't think IE was ever hated the same way from the end-user perspective.

Chrome is still innovating, but now end-users hate it, because it's trying to be too much. The "new IE" hat still belongs to Safari.

The JS and CSS and HTML box model worked differently, the websites were displayed correctly only on IE or only on other browsers. People put text that says "best viewed in Internet Explorer 6" at the bottom of the page or straight out blocked users from displaying the page in other browsers and encouraged them to download IE - just the same thing we have with Chrome today when anything that's using some advanced API.

IE was hated after the fact of cornering the whole marketshare and making the web developers build all the websites to work on IE only.

Initially, IE was very innovative browser too and they were the inventor of technologies like Ajax, introduced in IE5. Back in the pre-hate days, the web developers loved IE and it's innovative ways that let them to cool stuff.

Chrome being still innovative doesn't mean much. Once they make sure that websites are built to work in Chrome only, they can relax and stop spending money on it and increase profits and stock prices by rent seeking.

We should probably be glad that Microsoft basically stopped all IE investment when the dot-com crash happened (IE6 came out 2001), if they had kept investing the internet might still be dominated by MS

But yes, ultimately a good thing.

Though the phone fail was a huge fail. Those initial Windows phones were really awesome. These were the ones that competed with Blackberry before Apple took over the market.

Which sounds a lot like Chrome, except closed source. Those considering how big and cumbersome browsers are... does open source that matter that much in the grand scheme of things? Just browser complexity is a HUGE moat, there are probably 5-10 organizations that can sustain leading edge browser development 10+ years.

But if community-developed web browsers were required the complexity wouldn't slow the process down much. It just happens Google does a really good job.

I said browser complexity, not OS complexity.

If a project is too complex for a single organisation, then break it up into 2-3 projects. That is how OSS software handles complex tasks. Someone could do a real LLVM-style browser project then we don't all have to use javascript which'd catapult us all into the 21st century.

This is where everything has gone screwy. A browser should only be rendering and displaying html files. Browsers should be minuscule in size, and /definitely/ not run any 3rd party software.

You can try to close the door on that stable, but the horse that escaped has died of old age it's happened so long ago.

They killed[1] cross platform apps and they made software updates hard, so everyone just flocked to the web.

[1] Not through a single blow, death by a million cuts.

No they didn't! Extremely lazy devs deciding that they should just be able to deploy javascript and html anywhere and using Electron "killed" native apps. Why would anyone ever invest even 1% more into a native app when you can just hire intern javascript kiddies, pay them terribly, oversee them with one or two expensive javascript bros, and all your users will blame the slowdown on the operating system and Microsoft as they always have?

I'd argue each native version costs about as much as an web app.

The real shame was Gtk and Qt not getting the support they deserve.

I, on the other hand, find that "browser as OS" is one of the best things that has happened in recent software history. I can run Photopea anywhere, on any platform that has a decent browser. Absolutely magic!

Also remember the context: Netscape was just as gung-ho with standards as IE and everyone was kind of figuring out what did and didn't work on the fly. To just ossify a standard at some point just made no sense. Good standards respond to what's going on in reality.

Apart from that, IE6 also had massive rendering bugs and no CSS2 support. They only fixed the worst stuff five years later, with IE7. Of course web developers still had to wrestle IE6 for years after that, as its market share declined only slowly.

No one implemented standards back then, and IE WAS the de-facto "standard" as it had something like ~98% market share. I'm not saying standards should have been made bug-compatible with IE or even that they should have gone out of their way to accommodate IE, but stuff like the box model which was 1) actually better (or, at the least, equivalent), and 2) a huge pain for everyone could have just been in a "CSS 2.2".

It would have reduced headaches for everyone, especially non-IE users as the people who suffered the most from this weren't the IE users and devs who only cared about IE, they were the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Opera people and devs who cared about them. One has to wonder if uptake of things like Firefox or Opera wouldn't have been much faster in an alternative universe where these changes were made.

Mindlessly following standards just makes no sense. Also see GNU and POSIX_ME_HARDER/POSIXLY_CORRECT.

This was required for compatibility with Netscape. Developers coded for the Netscape box model when it was dominant, so Microsoft had to follow the same model to prevent the pages from breaking when viewed in Internet Explorer.

Both of them did that. The box model in question was invented by Mozilla (internal code name for Netscape), and Opera 7 also implemented it.

Of the items in the link, only one is “adding functionality”.

The others are (1) not supporting an image file format and (2) removing functionality from extensions.

> IE was absolutely hated for not evolving

IE was also hated for activex along with a number of non-standard extensions added to support Microsoft use cases. See https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ie-5-5-anger... for adding new html elements and a new system of dhtml behaviors as an example of syntax only supported by IE.

Making Windows a requirement for the web. Things like ActiveX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

It doesn't disprove your point, it's just a cute bit of trivia.

I mean, I've had iOS crash while using safari more often than I had windows 98 crash while using IE.

At least back in the IE days, when a user found a site they couldn't open in IE, they could go download firefox.

When a user encounters a websites that doesn't work on iOS safari, they can't download a different browser.

Even worse, when you report the bug to the site owner (say your friend), they'll then say "Oh, sorry, I don't own an iPhone or macbook, so I'd have to pay $800+ to reproduce your bug", while with IE, it ran on basically any computer, and I think windows back then still had a trial version you could use for free.

And with Safari, I can’t test any specific issues because we only have one mac, and it’s old and can’t run a current Safari. The situation is slightly better than with IE, as multiple macOS versions apparently (or so I was told) can run a newer Safari, but still not all.

Netscape had lame <blink> while IE had the very cool <marquee> instead.

Well, back in the late 90s it was all about ActiveX and integration with other Windows components and applications in order to shove all other browsers out of the marketplace, gain dominance over the web, and further bolster the Windows hegemony by doing so.

So, as one trivial example, you could export a Word document as a web page, open it up in IE and it would look great. But then you'd open it up in Netscape and you're left wondering "WTF?" because it looked terrible and the images were horribly degraded - intentionally degraded, as it turned out.

You'd open up the page source to figure out what was going on and you'd see a bunch of ActiveX crap for the images that would only work in IE. And, IIRC, the images themselves were BMPs, rather than JPEG or GIF (can't remember if PNG was supported at this point in any browser, but it certainly wasn't by IE or Office apps). So the images would look high quality in IE (and have massive file sizes, because BMP), whereas Netscape and other browsers didn't support ActiveX or BMP so they were just displayed as low-quality (IIRC) GIFs with extremely low colour depth. They could have displayed high quality images if they'd used a more suitable format, like JPEG, but they deliberately chose the most crappy image format, so that photos would look terrible in anything other than IE and people would think IE was a better browser as a result.

Once the EU's antitrust case against Microsoft gained pace, IE development really stalled, and that's when it stopped evolving. This was around the time of late IE4/early IE5 era. You'd be hard pressed to spot any substantive differences between IE5 (released in, what, 1999?) and IE6 (release, I think, in 2001). So then, fast forward to the 2010s and IE6 is still around all over the place: doesn't support PNG, doesn't support HTML5, doesn't support much of CSS, polyfills can only cover up so much, etc.

You had IE7, IE8, and IE9 as well, which were also dogshit (IE9 marginally less so), and didn't implement standards properly or had some MS-centric view of functionality implemented (old habits die hard, even though the battle was lost by that stage).

IE10 was starting to feel like Microsoft were taking web standards seriously, but still didn't support loads of recent APIs (Web Audio springs immediately to mind). Same with IE11: better but still too far off.

Edge was better again but caught in the middle: it still wasn't as good as Chrome and Firefox but now it had also removed all vestiges of IE support, for addins and suchlike, so it had alienated that crowd too.

And then Microsoft just sort of gave up: they moved Edge to Chromium which, at the time, I thought was a mistake and bad for the browser landscape and, no surprise, so it has turned out to be.

Now you have all the Chromium based browsers (including Brave), and Firefox (which is substantially funded via Google), and there aren't really any other mainstream capable browser engines out there. And, no surprise, Google are abusing their effective monopoly power because that's what effective monopolies always do.

Chrome actually is the new IE because with it Google are doing (much more successfully) what Microsoft tried to do with IE in the late 90s.

And it wasn't just that JavaScript and DOM manipulation were slow: it was incredibly lacking in capabilities. Any kind of basic drawing? Nope. Multimedia support? Nope. Local storage? Nope. Decent networking capability and access to remote APIs? Nope. Good, standardised browser APIs? Nope, and hence the arrival of JQuery, Dojo, et al.

I completely agree with you but Microsoft's approach was deliberately and calculatedly shady.

It also had the nice side effect of being the security equivalent of a sucking chest wound. Flash and Java Applets were bad too (c.f. the famous Java classloader vulnerability, which could be exploited by loading a malicious applet), but they didn't seem to be nearly as bad as the horror that was ActiveX. Perhaps it was because ActiveX was intentionally designed to integrate with the host OS, or because it was more deeply integrated into the browser, but my recollection of ActiveX is that Microsoft never managed to get security right for ActiveX, and the way that ActiveX security was "solved" was by ditching ActiveX entirely.

I personally loath Microsoft, and xame up through the Commodore tract, into Linux. Never could stand the company, their products.

I won't blindly dislike, I had my reasons, but it's been a long time since the early years. So I tried Edge for android, back when Microsoft was going on about not being an ads platform like Google.

I thought, OK, maybe they've ripped out Google's tracking. Made it less invasive, maybe they'll even enable pinch zoom and reflow, like Opera does.

Nope. None of that. And the amount of phone home I saw with tcpdump was mind bogglng.

So sad. They could have taken chrome, made it non-invasive, added pinch zoom and reflow, and lots of other such things. I'd have used it, been happy with it, sing their praises.

But instead, it's the same old, short range, junk.

IE6 was the best for a long time, also it had

VML which it kept in place and didn't move on SVG for a looooonnnnnngggg time, because of course VML was integrated in office products as the vector markup format and probably because it was made in MS.

So they had a vision for a vector image markup, and that was what they did.

SMIL-like extensions to HTML, and the use of behaviors in css were also part of their "vision" https://www.jb51.net/shouce/dhtml/time2/time.html

visions, like ideas, are a dime a dozen - in a browser market it matters if your visions are standards because if not they break the web.

IE's visions were not standardized and not supported by other browsers, they tried to instead do an end run around standardization. Chrome is the new IE. Chrome removing JPEG XL seems a pretty good indicator of that.

Also Safari had advanced color profiles before the other browsers, Safari does better work on accessibility than the other browsers, if most web developers thinks Safari is the new IE and Chrome is great then I think they aren't paying more than superficial attention to things.

As an example, take "double margin bug" [1]. It cannot be explained by alternative standards.

I remember there were more bugs of this type, but can't google them quickly.

[1] https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...

So again on its initial release, IE6 was the best browser. Did it have bugs? You bet! Were those bugs as irritating as the ones in Netscape - well the XSL-T that was generating html for a site once put a p inside of an li and Netscape would blue screen my Windows machine 75% of the time when that happened, unfortunately it turns out you cannot do a quick CSS hack for that.

Apple seem to be better than most at accessibility features and have been since day one. It's a shame that the best in business for accessibility is a private company.

MS seemed to innovate most in breaking hacks that helped to work around their "quirks".

It still has a broad market share, and even Chromium forks are not making a dent. They are evidently doing something right.

They do? That's quite a claim. I work with a number of people who were simply told that installing chrome is part of setting up your computer and don't really have any opinion -- "chrome" is the word for looking at a web page and "chrome is just how computers work". At least for the {desk,lap}top, I think that's the vast majority.

First time seeing it, I personally don't like how much power Google is getting with ownership of Chrome, and they already try to force direction of whole world into places that benefit them at cost of whole mankind (ie wasm, tracking everybody to hell, trying to fight adblocks).

Having 1 core browser and no competition is plain bad, Google wins and everybody else loses down the road. That's enough to get opinion and use Firefox + ublock origin. Getting a better version of Internet via that is a nice bonus.

Yep, for various usability reasons, I used IE as my daily driver until Windows updates disabled it. Never liked Chrome. Using Firefox now.

IE introduced DHTML and made designing webpages way easier than just using the DOM , IE also introduced AJAX. Sure it stagnated at some point but IE contributed a lot to the web.

For all IE's weaknesses, it didn't "make" banks do any such thing. They chose that.

Chrome is doing worse than not evolving ...

... it is evolving towards evil.

Compared to this, stasis would be a blessing.

For developers, IE was the browser for which you had spend hours debugging issues. Sounds like Safari to me. Considering you have to buy a whole device to use Safari, I’d argue it’s worse than IE was.

(Sent from my Safari browser)

Until Edge (which is just Chrome essentially) the only way to run IE was on a windows computer. Not sure how that’s different.

Safari can only be run on Apple machines manufactured by Apple.

Nowadays something like BrowserStack feels like a requirement anyways since I’ll never have all the devices I need to test.

Also Browserstack is still using Apple devices and you have to pay for them.

These are all unnecessary justifications for the new IE

I spent more time chasing Safari bugs and rendering idiosyncrasies than I did dealing with IE11, frankly.

Holding back Notifications and other PWA-related specs left a sour taste to me because it meant I couldn’t build a PWA …but you could buy Apple hardware a developer license and make a native app (even if it was mostly CRUD).

The worst I deal with in Safari is lack of certain features (often things that weren’t standardized and Chrome just added) and some minor CSS quirks. In some of those cases when I dig into the “issue” it appears that Safari is handling it in a way that makes more sense. The only Safari issue that I have run into multiple times and disliked is the viewport height issue but new CSS units (dvh I think?) should fix that.

On the other hand IE11 had a whole slew “Why isn’t this working?” Issues that made zero sense. I _loved_ the bugs that would not reproduce if you had dev tools (or what passed for IE dev tools) open or things related to cross-origin that just behaved differently for no good reason. QA found way more issues in IE browsers than Safari in my experience.

And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost. IE6-10 (and 11) caused me immense pain and frustration. Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner? A 1px wide image to display a gradient? Or just images as buttons in general since CSS support was shit?

The gross hacks I did for IE do not compare to what I need to do for Safari and anyone who says differently either didn’t live through that period (as a developer) or has a short memory.

If you want a time travel portal this morning. ;)

I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.

I find it interesting that folks assume I was comparing to Chrome - I have used Firefox as a daily driver for nearly two decades now. That's what everything got tested in first, and yes - even Chrome had a number of stupid flex bugs at that point in time.

> Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner?

I hope you didn't forget that HTC file to make transparency work...or you'll have nice grey backgrounds on your rounded corners!

> I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.

Fair, your comment makes more sense when I reread it through that lenses.

I remember the "cut" step I would do in a lot of designs when I got a PSD from a designer. I'd go through the file looking for all the things (assets) I needed and export the PNGs for use. Nowadays I get a Figma and I rarely have to grab anything directly from the figma except for SVGs (and of course looking at things like font-size, border-radius, etc).

Most bugs I've found aren't bugs but valid "defense in depth" agains the bastards who want to steal my grandma's money.

Did I say "all browsers"? Sorry, not quite. iOS Safari outright refuses connecting. And it won't say why. I had to connect the damn iPhone with a cable to an Xcode machine, to open up browser console and see the error there. Turns out Safari is a special snowflake that requires doing some preparation ahead of time (no less than 3 steps!) 1) getting the Root CA into the phone, 2) install it in the cert storage, by the way you won't be able to do it if used a non-Apple app for step 1; and 3) enable full trust in the new CA. All that for a phone that I quickly borrowed from my flatmate. Thanks but no thanks! Not all developments are enterprise projects with proper laboratory devices.

Yes, it's always been much like the "Everyone I Don't Like Is Hitler" meme.

It's all about the $$$. Apple is no different than Google in that regard :)

- Apple: Asking premium price and reducing alternatives

- Google: Free for the end-user, get money from other means if possible ( eg. ads)

Mobile web apps failed because they are inherently worse in every single way than native apps. There will never be some magical feature e.g push notifications or installation on Home Screen that will change this. Apple even was going to use web apps instead of native until they too realised how bad they are.

So no there is no conspiracy by Apple to prevent the rise of web apps.

There’s so many little things that need to be gotten right for a mobile app of any kind to feel good to use, and on the web it’s all entirely up to the developer since it’s “bring your own everything” with no shared known-good foundation and scaffolding to rely on (even React doesn’t really fit with the wildly different ways it can be used). There’s so many variables at play that the average incidence of papercuts is markedly higher.

The other thing is that to make a great web app, the developer needs to care a lot about delivering quality and polish, which is somewhat rare. This can probably be attributed to the web as a platform often being chosen to keep costs down (multiplatform, large pool of devs) — while in theory the savings from not having to maintain codebases for separate platforms could instead be invested in quality of the web app, it’s usually not, instead being put towards more marketable things as the app is forever stuck at “technically works” in all its janky glory.

Did apple go for web apps before or after the app store?

Note: PWA's were after the app store fyi and I mostly use the web, not apps.

In comparison, there aren't many SAAS with apps, eg. Azure, AWS Portal, ...

There were no new HTML standards between 4.0.1 in 2000, and 5.0 in 2014.

> enforcing its own vision of the web thanks to its enormous market share

Modern web is only possible because Microsoft implemented non-standard XMLHttpRequest in IE5. However, they didn’t do that to enforce a vision. The goal was practical — save network bandwidth for their Outlook Web Access product.

Also in that period, Microsoft was failing to comply with the standards for CSS 2, standardised in 1998, ES3, standardised in 1999, and PNG, standardised in 1996.

Web developers preferred Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox because it had better development tools and ran on Linux. Chrome is the heir of that. The web has always succeeded in spite of standards committees, not because of them. You're the one who doesn't know your history.

It wasn't because they had poor feature adoption. It was because they'd tend to adopt features in a way that's incompatible with other browsers (of the top of my head, handling of localStorage in private browsing). It was a bit of a "fuck you" to devs since you often had to do browser detection for Safari (much like you used to have to do for IE) and have special branches or polyfills for Safari.

> What made IE the IE everyone hates was its departure from standards(?) and enforcing its own vision of the web

Apple is just as guilty of this. They crippled and bastardised a bunch of features just to push for a more native adoption (depends on how cynical you are, but some say it's for more control over device usage patterns, and some say it's for longer battery life)

It's gotten better and more aligned with other browsers now, though. But alas, I know most are just chromium clones these days

However, Apple did not attempt to divide the web then use its dominant position to make all the content only compatible with their stuff.

With the IE situation, you couldn't just download Firefox and live happy thereafter because every website was made to work in IE and any other browser would simply fail to display the webpages properly either due to the way HTML/CSS is handled or due to some proprietary technology. Apple hasn't done that, maybe only because its tiny marketshare compared to the alternatives but that's how it is. Unfortunately, due to the marketshare of Google Chrome, they can pull an IE and there are signs of it.

The hate towards Safari comes from the Web devs who are angry that they can't send push notifications and have to pay 99$ to Apple to embed their webpage into a WebView to pass as an app.

There's no much hate towards Safari in its userbase, it's by far the most convenient Web browser in Apple's ecosystem, by far the most battery efficient and the performance is top notch too.

Completely different situation with the tragedy of IE.

For example the "standard" implementation of web push is straight up bad. I don't think websites should be able to throw popups asking users with enable notifications, because users are so used to accepting TOS agreements and cookie prompts that they just click "ok" and "accept" on everything, and now your grandma has gambling app ads in her notifications because she accepted notifications from some sketchy site she was linked to on Facebook.

Apple made the right move by requiring you to add a website to your home screen before it's allowed to send you push notifications.

Flash would like a word with you.

Google tried to support Flash, even it was listed as Android's "strength" over iOS but the tech that came to handle the most use cases of Flash was much superior and it killed Flash on desktop too.

Of course they didn't, because they outright want to kill the web so all your content is locked into Apple reviewed and taxed apps. Why would they divide the web when their goal is to make sure it's not a viable platform for their newest devices?

If that is the case, why does Apple continue to add functionality and features for web apps on Mac OS and iOS?

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10120/

Apple has banned any browser engine except Safari from iOS.

However, it's not using Gecko, so it's not actually Firefox. It's a browser whose web capabilities are controlled by Apple rather than Mozilla.

Excuse me? We are talking about "App store" Apple here, right? The Apple that prevents any 3rd party browsers on their platform so devs have to support safari? The Apple that refused to support progressive web apps to push devs into their store?

The Apple which literally won't let users install software they don't approve of, Apple? That Apple?

That's the company you're picking as "didn't attempt to divide the web"? Ooof.

You've been drinking so much Kool-aid your tongue is purple.

Check out the linked article, the moment Chrome have its way into iOS, the web will die because Google will have IE level dominance. The web as we know it goes away, the browser becomes an AppStore where everything is optimised for data collection and ad serve. We already have an AppStore, let's keep having a WWW.

And about the anger towards the AppStore? Well, you should be able to overcome it by drinking some herbal tea.

You do understand that a browser is an application?

And that Apple cripples literally ALL of them on iOS to push devs to their own non-compatible app ecosystem?

How in the ever-loving fuck is that not dividing the web in your eyes?

Because this is the half Apple broke off to sell as iOS apps. A domain that is entirely exclusive to apple, and requires all sorts of hoops to gain access to (including purchasing Apple specific hardware).

Further - they enforced that domain by strictly locking down down the capabilities of literally ANY browser a user might try to install on iOS. Because otherwise users might have chosen to use a progressive web app and Apple wouldn't get their fucking 30% store tax.

The problem isn't that other clients exist, a company that wants to have complete control of the UI can make an App that ensures it, they can deep link into it - no problem.

The problem starts when the main platform used to consume the web starts having specialised features which make some websites work only on this one platform because the developers build specifically for this one platform.

And no, this is not the same for the AppStore because the AppStore is not the web. Apple controls a minority share of the market, its not universal and it's not supposed to be universal - its a an additional distribution channel of content to Apple specific devices.

The "App Store" might look like a website to you but it's actually what we call a "native" app, which means that it's not a website at all but a computer program that runs on your iPhone if you have one.

Divided them, if you will. Made it so that there is a closed system of software that only users on certain "approved" hardware can access and use, and also locked those users into that system by preventing real competition.

I certainly am unable to see how that is entirely related to this conversation. It's a real puzzle to me...

Gosh, I'm so silly. I hardly even noticed that the web is also a distribution platform for perfectly acceptable applications. They come with their own code and logo and everything! They even... wait for it... run locally on your iPhone if you have one!

Except they don't do it so well on iPhones - because Apple refused to implement or support a bunch of features that might have threatened their revenue on their app store. Which is fine, but then... they also stopped ANY other developers on the planet for being able to do that work on their platform.

They sure are nice fellas, those Apple folks.

Did I mention their app store is also an internet site? Literally. It has to be. Apple did a shit job making the HTML view, but the whole fucking shebang of a platform is delivering content to users over... the internet. Through a website.

They just locked the UI their users see for that content down to something they call "an iOS app" which is really code for "We turned your general purpose computer into a less general purpose computer for you!"

Which... is exactly the same fucking thing Google is doing now. Making my general purpose computer less general.

Ah. I know of this, but I've never experienced it first hand.

This is more of a nuisanc for users than devs though, but I see what you meant now.

Maybe I am too young, but I vaguely remember using IE5.5/6 and it already slowly being slowly phased out. I also remember the struggles as it tried to stay relevant. I can't even remember a website that was made "for IE"; all I remember is sites saying IE is poorly supported and to download literally anything else lol

When TypeScript came out the type support was what made me become a very early & passionate adopter even though it was very bleeding edge & a pain to use with other libraries. The cuts were worth it because they always saved much greater pain later. It was also an easier sell than something like Elm.

That sounds exactly right to me, at this moment.

I would add that Firefox -- which has been improving noticeably in recent years, -- is "the new Chrome."

In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.

I’ll never forget in 2006-2008-ish I developed a website for my computer repair business (I was in High School) and was very proud of it. Then I opened it in IE (I had developed it in Firefox) and it all fell apart (I was using floats IIRC). I then rewrote the whole thing using tables because I knew my target audience would not be running Firefox.

In Safari sometimes things aren’t aligned correctly but nothing to the degree of hacks I’ve done over the years for IE. Gradients, transparent pngs, rounded corners, the list goes on.

Safari is fine in comparison.

    <!--[if IE]>
    Styles/elements here
    <![endif]-->

IE6 lasted from 2001 to 2006 in terms of being the latest browser, which is eons. But worse is that due to the fact that browsers were not evergreen, supporting IE6 remained relevant for far longer. Well into 2010 many sites still had to support the dinosaur of a browser due to its still-relevant marketshare. In fact, I bet IE6 in that era had more marketshare than Firefox does now!

Squabbles over standards like this are nothing particularly new either. The only reason Safari was? the new IE is because you have to test in it. caniuse says you can use Wasm, but the commonly-used initiateStreaming API came over a year later in Safari than it did other browsers.

What Chrome is today is far worse than the new IE. IE did a lot of dumb garbage, and even some kind of sabotage, but they never had the opportunity to do the kinds of things Google is working on now.

Safari is the new IE 6, when MS stagnated because they had won in large enough areas not to really care any more and designers were forced to hold back on using things for compatibility's sake. If we're more generous, maybe Safari is more like IE 9/10/11 when MS at least tried to be more up-to-date but were behind and non-compliant enough to be a significant pain. Though for us IE11 is still the current IE11 as one or two clients still have a few users on it, we can say “not supported” all we like, but we'll still get complaints if things flat out don't work (display issues and slowness we can tell people to deal with, dysfunction we can't).

(Not to mention all the other ways how they undermine the web, like refusing to properly support PWAs and forcing you to go through Apple reviewed process for apps.)

I've used Wipr for a long time on both my Mac and iPhone, this isn't true.

Safari content blocker rules are limited. Formerly 50k, increased to 150k: https://adguard.com/en/blog/adguard-for-safari-1-11.html

A cynical part of me thinks Safari supported JPEG-XL for pure tribal warfare, as its the "anti" AVIF. That would be so petty...

This isn't entirely accurate. Confusion on the issue abounds.

From 2010 to 2019, the safariextz format had support for webRequest BlockingResponse https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... and indeed there was a Safari version of uBlock Origin. This was eliminated in Safari version 13.

The "newer" (2015) Safari content blocker API is similar to Chrome's declarativeNetRequest. However, Manifest V3 is far broader than just eliminating webRequest BlockingResponse, though that's what people tend to focus on. For example, there are strict limits on script execution that also cause problems for userscript extensions.

Safari web extensions (2020) will continue to support Manifest V2, albeit without webRequest BlockingResponse, which Safari web extensions never supported. Apple is in the process of adding MV3 support to Safari web extensions without deprecating MV2 (just like Firefox).

In a sense, Manifest V3 and delcarativeNetRequest are separate issues. After all, delcarativeNetRequest is also supported in Chrome MV2. Chrome took the "opportunity" to eliminate webRequest BlockingResponse in MV3. Safari took the opportunity to eliminate BlockingResponse much earlier. But MV3 could have supported BlockingResponse if Google had wanted; there's nothing inherent to MV3 that precludes the API, other than an arbitrary decision.

Everyone hated IE because once they won the browser war Microsoft stopped improving their browser. Why bother? There was no market to gain.

Google is of course much smarter than Microsoft. Google avoids this by declaring everything Chrome does to be a standard. And then far from being criticised from departing from the standard, their competitors get criticised for not implementing whatever thing Chrome came up with yesterday.

For many years in IE4/5/6 every browser was criticized for not supporting IE standards.

That's how IE6 got a huge marketshare and then kept that marketshare for far longer than it ever should have.

That's why those of us that remember browser history worry that Chrome is the new IE. It's defining the standards. It has crazy momentum behind it. People are (victim) blaming Safari and Firefox for not "keeping up with standards", even though the standards they aren't keeping up with are often things Google decided to do without finishing the standards process first. That's what IE did.

People remember the years after the interregnum of the web slowly cleaning up that mess. Of standards finally getting passed and IE being the one incompatible. They don't remember as well that IE was the problem child so much because it defined standards for years and that's what cemented its huge marketshare and inability to go away quietly when it came time to clean things up. Cleaning things up was so hard because it had defined so many standards. Worrying about "Chrome is the new IE" now is trying to prevent that mess from happening a second time.

Private mail servers becoming near impossible to setup on our own because of GMAIL and DKIM witchcraftery with mail servers?

With the main online media tracking the user preferences on music and video too, minus the porn?

They cut down Gtalk/Jabber integration, too.

Heck, Google is what we were afraid of MS in late 90's/early 2000's on galaxy levels.

I blame Google instead.

The author of that phase, and those that commented on issue at the time admitted they wasn't even programming during IE era. And falsely claim IE era as IE 7.....

Not only that. A lot of people actually quite like IE 5.5. I would even argue IE hate wasn't even because of enforcing its own standard ( Although that is certainly an issue ). It was because they conquered 95+% market share and stop innovating when there were insane amount of low hanging fruit and bugs.

But yeah. Most vocal engineers of today joined the industry in post iPhone era. One reason why Silicon Valley are full of people continue to reinvent the flat tire.