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.
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.
Congratulations you have recreated IE.