It's the "IE6 Only" of the modern web. I really hoped we (as an industry) would have learned enough from that pain, but I guess not. Institutional Knowledge seems to suffer from serious memory loss.
That's not the point gp is making. You're right of course: Chrome is competent, IE6 definitely wasn't.
Chrome is, however, proprietary and driving further that way. IE6 showed that a single, dominant browser is not good for consumers or progress. Especially when it originates from one of the two leading surveillance tech firms.
[As an aside, I was disappointed to see MS admit defeat with Edge and jump into bed with G. Still seems a bit suspicious tbh].
Competence is also a transient determination. IE6 was highly competent in its time, it is only retrospectively that it "earns" most of its incompetence. IE defined the modern CSS box layout strategy of choice (and realized that box layout model was something underdefined in the specifications), for just one instance. Most of IE6's particular incompetence was the "mic drop" peace-out of Microsoft declaring victory on web browsing and disbanding the team for far too many years; unless you are crazy, you don't "mic drop" on what you think to be an incompetent project, and there's certainly a delicious irony in being considered "too competent" becoming a major part of your core incompetency in a "mic drop" incident.
Sometimes. But motivation matters. The motivation behind ghc is clearly and unequivocally to advance the Haskell ecosystem. The motivation behind Chrome's dominance is another thing entirely.
In addition, the Haskell ecosystem is only one among many programming ecosystems that we can choose among for any given task. If the Haskell ecosystem is a monoculture, and isn't headed in a direction that suits your needs, you can choose another environment.
There's (pretty much) only one Web that needs to serve us all.
Not when one of the concerns is to make it possible to maintain compatibility with it.
Microsoft threw the towel for this very reason. It is quite hard to keep up when you have an implementation used by more than 70% of the market, because that makes it the de facto standard, regardless of what the standard really is.
We are going to see the same issues as with IE6: chrome does (and breaks) things before the standards are updated, and dictate huge chuncks of poorly-thought features on the web platform, that might become required for any kind of serious business (think flash, java, silverlight, widevine).
This really is the E part in EEE (the middle one...)
If you're worried about there being a browser monoculture, being able to fork is useful but not sufficient. For example, suppose Microsoft's new browser gets a large enough share that they (along with Firefox) can veto some of Chrome's changes? Since they have enough technical competence and resources to maintain a branch, upstream doesn't control what they release; they can take changes or not. And they also have ways to gain significant user share.
We are probably past the point where a scrappy new open source browser could gain enough developer talent and user share to be relevant, though. Particularly since it can't be done without mixing in some proprietary code for DRM.
So there may be competition, and a significant chunk of open source code will be involved, but it won't satisfy the folks who want a pure open source browser.
The problem with IE was that it wasn't standards compliant. Oftentimes it seemed they even did so on purpose. Chrome appears to follow the standards nicely. We don't need quirks mode settings to render websites "designed for Chrome".
First, quirks mode wasn't for websites "designed for IE". IE6 already had a quirks mode and a standards mode. Quirks mode was for websites designed for Netscape 3 or so.
For the rest, I work on Gecko (the rendering engine in Firefox). We get a fair number of bug reports about sites that work in Chrome but break in Firefox because Firefox is following the spec and Chrome is not.
Chrome is definitely closer to the standards than IE was, but that's at least in part because of all the changes standards have been making recently to match Chrome when Chrome makes it clear that they have no plans to implement what the standard says. When IE tried that sort of thing, people just wrote standards that didn't match implementation reality. That had its own drawbacks in terms of leading to standards so divorced from reality they were useless (see XHTML 2.0, for example)....
The discussion in https://github.com/heycam/webidl/pull/357 is one example (the Web IDL spec defined the behavior of all the non-Chrome browsers as the spec behavior, then Chrome introduced a third behavior that they want to implement and is trying to get the spec changed to match it).
There were several things in the flexbox spec where Chrome refused to implement what everyone else was doing and the spec ended up getting changed, but I don't have links offhand, sorry. It would take me some hours of digging through bug reports and mailing lists to find them. In general, there have been a lot of things like this in the CSS world that I see peripherally, but I'm not as involved in that personally, so don't have them at the tips of my fingers.
A recent thing that came up is that the behavior of the `disabled` property on `HTMLLinkElement` in Chrome does not match the (very long-standing; literally decades) spec, and it looks like at this point we're going to need to change the spec to match Chrome because sites are writing code to the Chrome implementation, not to the spec, and it's causing compat problems for Firefox (which does implement the spec).
Now don't get me wrong: there are lots of cases in which Chrome _does_ fix longstanding spec-compliance issues. But that's not the only dynamic happening here.
