While msft did abuse their position to solidify an IE centric world, people need to realize that when ie4/5/6 were released they were dramatically better than the competitors. The problem is that post-domination they simply stagnated and so the design shortcomings start being a problem.
It needs to be repeated: at the time IE /was/ a good browser. Just like chrome today. And similar to chrome played fast and loose with web exposed features. Sometimes for the better (XHR was an IE invention), sometimes for worse (so was activeX).
By that logic it was a waste of time for Firefox to exist -- there was already IE, or it was a waste of time for webkit to exist as there was already khtml, or blink because webkit, etc, etc
People only caring about one browser is exactly what caused ie6 to become such a problem - everyone had to reverse engineer whatever it was doing because nothing was specified.
> By that logic it was a waste of time for Firefox to exist -- there was already IE,
No, IE would need be to be open source for that logic to be applicable there, since the idea is to use a well-developed open source code base instead of rolling your own thing.
> or it was a waste of time for webkit to exist as there was already khtml, or blink because webkit,
You actually undercut your own point with these examples: WebKit was a fork of KHTML, Blink was a fork of WebKit. The developers in question believed that it would have been a waste of time to start from scratch, and so they didn't!
Maybe, but they were only possible because web developers had started considering Firefox in addition to IE. Even then the amount of time spent reverse engineering IE behavior was absurd - when webkit forked khtml it could not render yahoo.om correctly (it mattered then ;) ).
This post is saying you only need to test chrome because it’s 80% of the market. Back in the day IE was more than 90% of the market.
If all you do is test on chrome you force every competitor to reverse engineer chrome (you can’t fork chrome to make a gpl browser). Alternatively you give up and just use chrome (skinned or not), and that dictates the features you get (I don’t see chrome getting built in tracker blocking any time soon).
You can’t use alternative browsers because the web is filled with sites that are only tested on chrome.
No, it's not like IE at all because IE was closed source. This was what I was trying to say earlier: the whole reason IE was "bad" was because it stagnated, which would not have been possible if it was open source. In this case, it's more like Linux.
