The rise of Chrome and the end of #edgehtml: a look at today’s browser monoculture by drawing comparisons to yesterday’s browser monoculture. With pictures!
In the 90s, Microsoft’s engineers put a ton of effort into IE, just like Google has done with Chrome. This made IE broadly appealing to devs and users at the time in much the same way that Chrome is now. Here’s a glowing ZDNet review of IE5 from 1999: http://web.archive.org/web/199...
Each new release added cool stuff for developers: AJAX, <iframe>s, rich text editing, innerHTML, VML, web fonts, etc.. Some were proprietary, some not—VML was a draft W3C standard, and IE3 was the first commercial browser to ship with a CSS implementation! #browsers class="text-blue-500 hover:underline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://www.w3.org/Style/LieBo...
Over time, the actual & perceived inferiority of Netscape as compared to IE turned many developers off supporting it at all. (And they were often delightfully juvenile about the whole thing.) This same thing seems to be happening now, with Edge/Firefox as today’s antagonists.
For most others, the creation of IE-only sites was less “holy war” and more about pragmatism. Why spend limited resources on a small and shrinking market? In 2018, it seems more companies are starting to agree: let’s only support Blink/WebKit.
Microsoft illegally used their OS business and endless revenue from Windows licensing to fund and position IE in a way their competitors couldn’t match. Google illegally used their OS business and ads revenue to do the same thing for Chrome. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...
(Aside: when Microsoft coerced Apple to make IE the default browser on Macs in 1997, Steve Jobs emphasised that they’d still include other browsers because they believed in browser choice. Today’s Apple bans any engine but WebKit on iPhone. 😒 #t=2m22) class="text-blue-500 hover:underline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There were those who raised the alarm about Microsoft’s actions fairly early on, as this NYT article from 1996 describes: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/0... (Online, anti-IE protests were possibly even more colourful than the anti-Netscape ones: http://toastytech.com/evil/ind...
Similarly, people now have been warning about the rise of the Blink/WebKit monoculture since at least 2013, when Opera decided to abandon their Presto rendering engine for WebKit (now Blink): https://www.sitepoint.com/5-re...
In the 90s/00s, there were *tons* of “browsers” that wrapped around Trident/MSHTML. Even Firefox for Windows had an “IE Tab” add-on for web compatibility. (Chrome *still* has an IE Tab extension today, used by over 4 million people.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now, Edge is joining the ranks of Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and others, becoming just one of many “browsers” that wrap around Chromium: #Other_browsers_based_on_Chromium class="text-blue-500 hover:underline" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(In the end, none of the IE wrappers gave much in the way of user choice, and I’m not sure Chromium being OSS changes much—it’s doubtful any Chromium user other than Microsoft could fund a hard fork, so any non-mainlined engine changes are unlikely to be more than superficial.)
Even though IE’s market share peaked around 2002, there are *still* apps in 2018 that require the IE5 renderer. The web became so reliant on this one broken implementation that Microsoft had to invent Compatibility View in order to fix it without completely breaking the web.
It’s speculative—but not hard to imagine—that long-standing spec violations in Blink could lead to a similar problem, given that Microsoft adopted Chromium precisely *because* there are so many sites already relying on WebKit/Blink-specific implementations of features.
I hope that seeing these similarities (and there are probably more I don’t know about—please share if you’d like) makes it easier for those who don’t remember the first browser monoculture to understand more clearly why there’s doom and gloom about the current situation.
I’m not in the all-doom-and-gloom boat, but I *do* believe that supporting and testing in all modern browser engines is an inexpensive hedge any developer can do to avoid trouble in the future—for both their products *and* their users. So please do that!
(And hey, if you’re on board, why not stick a sweet https://anybrowser.org/campaig... badge on your WWW site next to your guestbook the next time you webmaster some DHTML?!! 🙃 More seriously: donate to http://archive.org. Without them, this would have been impossible.)
