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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

I'm almost equally scared of the Chrome dominance now as I was for IE6.

I'm starting to see sites which work in Chrome but not Firefox - and not because of fancy web standards Firefox hasn't caught up with, but web page bugs showing the developers haven't bothered testing in other browsers.

> bugs showing the developers haven't bothered testing in other browsers.

I see this a lot and it's clear that most designers are building for Chrome and that they trust Firefox to render everything the same as Chrome will. The assumption that following the standards ensures a page will render the same in at least Chrome and Firefox has started to feel safe. That's a big improvement from the era that preceded, when you knew with certainty that cross-browser issues would exist. But it's not a completely safe assumption yet and may never be. Always test.

I nearly got caught by this just 5 or 6 days ago with handling dates. Chrome would parse:

> 2014-12-15 08:00 PM

For example, but firefox needed the RFC3339 format.

I'm less scared because at least Chrome (or rather Blink / webkit) is open source so can (and is) implemented in other browsers. However I do agree with you that it isn't healthy for any single rendering engine to monopolise the internet.

The fact that Chrome is open source doesn't helps me, a Firefox/Safari user, when I see the site that works correctly only on Chrome.

Open source or not, I don't want to use Chrome. There was a time when Chrome was lean, now Chrome is a pig. Not to mention blatant Chrome push from Google - the last one is Inbox, "it works only on Chrome". Set Safari user agent to Chrome? Everything works well. Shame on you, Google. That's exactly what Microsoft did in '90s.

This is a developer of the site problem, not a Chrome or Firefox problem. No self respecting web developer would ever make any site work only in one browser.

It has nothing to do with "self respect". If Chrome dominates why would you waste time/money testing on other browsers?

I should have said, no knowledgeable web developer would do such a thing. There are other browsers out there, including mobile, and no web developer worth his salt ever targets one browser alone.

My point is that you can still have Chrome (well, Chromium) compatibility without having to run Chrome, as demonstrated by the amount of webkit browsers in ArchLinux's repos:

    $ pacman -Ss webkit browser
    extra/epiphany 3.14.2-1 (gnome) [installed]
        A GNOME web browser based on the WebKit rendering engine.
    extra/kwebkitpart 1.3.4-3
        A WebKit browser component for KDE
    extra/qtwebkit 2.3.4-1 [installed]
        An open source web browser engine (Qt port)
    community/dwb 2014.03.07-2 [installed]
        A webkit web browser with vi-like keyboard shortcuts, stable snapshot
    community/luakit 2012.09.13.r1-7
        Fast, small, Webkit based browser framework extensible by Lua
    community/qupzilla 1.8.5-1
        Cross-platform QtWebKit browser (Qt5)
    community/qupzilla-qt4 1.8.5-1
        Cross-platform QtWebKit browser (Qt4)
    community/rekonq 2.4.2-3
        A WebKit based web browser for KDE
    community/surf 0.6-2 [installed]
        A simple web browser based on WebKit/GTK+.

And that's only a subset of the available browsers based on a very basic search. There's quite a number of bigger names missing from that list, such as Opera.

So while I do agree that more variety of rendering engines is better (on the provision that they do follow HTML standards to minimize wasted developer time), things aren't quite so bad with -Chrome- webkit as the de facto standard as they were with Internet Explorer as webkit is open source so you're not tied to any specific browser.

What's more, Internet Explorer actively pushed technologies that were not only tied to IE, but to Windows as an OS (ActiveX controls, being the biggy. But that wasn't the only IE-exclusive technology). At least with Chrome, the technologies are platform agnostic so non-webkit browsers could still support them if they wanted to / had the developer resources.

I'm not trying to stick up for Google nor Chrome here. In fact aside Chromes developer tools, I don't like it much either. But pragmatically, a Chrome monopoly is less dangerous to the web than Microsoft / Internet Explorer ever was simply because all the parts of Chrome that matter are already open source and have already been forked and/or ported to other (new) browsers.

Chrome is no longer webkit, and they have chosen to drop basically everything not directly applicable to chrome in blink.

To be honest you're just arguing semantics as Blink is a fork of the same webkit components that Chrome was using previously. So little has changed from a rendering perspective.

Given the amount of redundant code in webkit due to Google and Apple pushing the library in slightly different directions, it does make some sense to fork it. And it's really no different to Apple forking webkit themselves (webkit2).

However when the forks diverge more in the future, your point will be more relevant (just as the difference between kHTML and webkit is now quite pronounced).

In any case, I did reference Blink in my first post. So your point isn't lost on me :)

"Blink is a fork of the same webkit components that Chrome was using previously. So little has changed from a rendering perspective."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

[Citation needed]

But seriously, simply stating someone is wrong is less constructive than not replying at all. I'm open to correction :)

I'm far less afraid since Chrome users actually get updates to their browser.

Well-scheduled, advanced warnings, what could possibly go wrong.

Dominance is always bad even if the product is good. ( look at Steam )

Not sure what to say -- Steam is horribly slow, as it is Firefox.

He was not talking about speed, but about up to date features and treatment of customers.

Steam has terrible customer service, Origin's is far better.

I noticed that google street view has stopped to work reliably in Firefox in Ubuntu (not tested elsewhere) but still works fine with Chrome. This thing really looks intentional.

There should be no fear. IE6 held the web back. Chrome pushed it forward.

You're looking at things from the perspective of IE6 in 2014, not IE6 in 2001. Of course it seems shitty today, but that's because browsers from then are shitty compared to browsers today. It's only a victim of its success and the fact that rolling updates weren't a plausible model then.

If the contemporaneous Netscape 6 had been anywhere near as successful as IE6, you'd be cursing it now. Almost certainly more than you curse IE6, whose problems come not from the software itself but the fact that it was good enough for companies to lock it down as the standard and the fact it went for years without real competition. Netscape 6 didn't see this fate, because it was... outcompeted in the marketplace.

Netscape 6 did not stagnate for five years. Even Netscape 4 stagnating was only because they decided to cancel "Mariner" which was a mistake.

I said nothing about IE6 being shitty. Only you did. Netscape failed due to the illegal activities of Microsoft as outlined in the anti-trust complaint against them back then.

But IE6 held the web back by not keeping with the standards or making improvements and only letting it work on Windows. It took Mozilla and Firefox to get things moving and they took away 30% of their market share all by themselves. Then, when Chrome came along, that signaled the huge drop off. All by moving the web forward.

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