Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

I remember this blog. Magic Lasso Adblock is Apple ecosystem only. Its view on pretty much everything is basically Daring Fireball.

>tends to be misunderstood to mean that Chrome is like Internet Explorer was in 2009

>Despite being the market share leader, there is significant evidence that Chrome is trailing in speed, efficiency and standards interoperability.

>Perhaps the browser with the most disruptive potential is from Microsoft with Edge...... It has also avoided alternative-browser compatibility issues by being based upon Chromium.

Every time this subject came up and I will find people who have never used all three browser at the same time. Or wasn't there during the IE era.

The phase "is Safari the new IE" was actually coined by someone who wasn't even there or doing Web Dev during IE era. It was IE6, not IE7, and definitely not 2008. And the phase somehow catches on to become is Chrome the new IE.

IE was absolutely dominant with 95%+ of browser market share during its peak. Neither Chrome / Blink nor Safari / Webkit ever achieved that. And the most important part was that the HTML / CSS and IE implementation had so many low hanging fruit but NO IMPROVEMENT were made for years. IE 7 / MSHTML released 5 years after IE 6 offered little to no improvement other than a few small fix.

Both Chrome / Blink and Safari / Webkit have continuous development over the years. We may not like some of the direction they are going. But every year there are improvement being made with HTML / CSS / JS features.

Second part being Chrome is a resource hog or slow. Chrome has made tremendous effort into making it memory efficient since 2021 when complain started to pile in. By 2022 and definitely 2023 multi tab on Chrome is far better than what it was. Safari on the other hand isn't doing well on MultiTabs for over a decade but gets zero attention on the issue. Meanwhile Firefox being the fastest browser in terms of least janks and best for hundreds of tabs gets No recognition either.

And lastly Interop. Since 2019 and I believe the first Interop was in 2021. We still dont have a 100% coverage on any Interop year for all three major browsers. I wish Interop could at least agree and publish baseline support that aims to have all browser support by 2025. Instead we are forever stuck in 95% with quirks everywhere.

Actually, quick search leads to [0] (not very reliable, but still better than nothing) shows that Chrome and derivatives take 72%.

As other commenters mention, Safari is mostly locked to the Apple ecosystem, so IMO Chrome on non-Apple systems is around 90%. Firefox is metered to 3% which is lower than reality (due to adblocking).

My personal experience is, however, very similar to IE golden age. In order to interact with state office web apps I need to switch to Chromium. Neither Firefox nor Safari are supported. Vivaldi is a mixed bag (not sure why though). For me this answer questions is Chrome the new IE.

[0]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

>Neither Firefox nor Safari are supported

Depending on which country it is, but Safari is anywhere from 30% to 60% of marketshare on smartphone. I have yet to see any government website that is not tested against Safari.

It depends on the context.

In US I believe that might be true (same site reports around 35%). But those numbers are dropping by a half when you move out.

In India 90%+ reported is Chrome. In Europe Safari is ~20% on average and where I reside it’s around 7% with Chrome being 75%.

Nobody here cares for web correctness. Situation is absurd: e.g. using Safari to input masked password letters for a bank login causes a random number of fields skipping forward. Called that in, no one cares.

When looking at the numbers I would say that US (because of high Safari usage) actually resists Chrome’s monopoly and might not (yet) experience the effects of Chrome IE-ification.

> Meanwhile Firefox being the fastest browser in terms of least janks and best for hundreds of tabs gets No recognition either.

This is likely subjective. Out of the browsers I use regularly, Firefox is by far the one with the greatest number of rough edges as well as the least likely to see those rough edges polished.

To some degree this is inevitable with the difference in amount of resources at Mozilla’s disposal relative to those of Google and Apple, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. In a relatively short time many of these issues have been improved by a small team in the Zen Browser fork of Firefox, which suggests it’s more of a lack of will than it is lack of resources.