Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

No not even close by every single possible measure.

I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change.

I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser that I freely installed.

The most important one from an anti-trust perspective, every device I've ever had Chrome on I've had to seek out and install/make default Chrome, that includes my mobile devices which used the manufactures browser by default.

If I want to use chromium I can, Safari has been VERY late in implementing certain industry spec standards (SSE's, web sockets, IndexedDB API, animations, relative color syntax, container queries, a bunch of <video> stuff, flexbox, the list goes on and on.)

> Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change

I think the biggest issue with IE6 was not the hostile moves Microosft did, it is that it didn't do anything. The browser was just frozen. That's why it was relatively easy for Firefox to take a marketshare.

Frankly, with some of the APIs Google are adding to Chrome, I'd rather they'd do a little less.

So, no, the problem with IE was 100% Microsoft's hostile competition tactics. Yes, part of that was trying to deprecate the "world wide web" as a platform, so yes, IE6 got very crufty toward the end of its days.

But by that point it was clear it was already dying and IE7 et. al. were introduced late as an attempt to catch up. During the period when the real bullets were flying, IE6 was actually a really great browser, just one that forced you into using a menu of Microsoft technologies because it didn't support the "standard" stuff. Remember that XMLHttpRequest, the basic tool underneath all modern dynamic web UIs, was originally a non-standard Microsoft invention.

And yes: eventually this proved unsustainable and innovation in the standards-based browser world eventually proved too fast for MS to keep up, and it lost.

But the tool that broke the back of that monopoly absolutely wasn't Firefox. It was Chrome.