The difference that Michael Muchmore and PCMag are (deliberately) failing to understand is that while these new features are currently only implemented by chrome, this is only because other vendors have not yet implemented them, whereas with IE6 MS prevented other people from implementing them. This is what "lock-in" means.
There is absolutely nothing stopping MS from copy and pasting huge chunks of chromium into IE tomorrow. That was not the case with activex.
Like others have said, this article is trolling us.
Yes, it is kind of amazing. I almost submitted it with the title "Does PCMag Know What Open Means?" but I decided that there was enough linkbait/troll in the material already. If nothing else, it does highlight that the concept of "open" is still poorly grasped even within technical circles.
Go ahead and ignore the elephant in the room: Chrome is open source, IE6 is proprietary software. IE was a means to an end for Microsoft, and that end was extinguishing the uprising that is the internet. They almost succeeded, but ultimately failed.
Chrome may have feature and marketshare parallels to IE6, but it will never be IE6. IE6 was weilded in anger. Chrome is open source, which significantly limits Google's ability to use it in a similar fashion. Not to mention, Google isn't out to kill the web in the way that Microsoft was.
"Great stuff, faster Web interactions, but let's not forget that that universal access using any software is why the Web took off in the first place." Has he any had experiences where a site served only SPDY clients?
There is nothing stopping other browsers from implementing the same features, most of them are probably fully documented standards anyway, even if there was no documentation people could just look at Chromium's source code, which was certainly not the case with IE.
This article is immensely ignorant, it basically states that no browser should have capabilities that other browsers lack, if that would be the case than we would end up in a deadlock, because everyone would wait for everyone.
Emerging standards need to be tried in the open, Google is doing the right thing, they are trying SPDY with real world web apps and real world customers so that it will mature by the time other browsers implement it and we won't be stuck with implementations that suck.
Re: that angry birds thing, it sounds to me like Google was marketing the levels as "Chrome exclusive", but not that it specifically took advantage of functionality that was only available on Chrome. I'm thinking something like user-agent detection...? I'm info-poor, here, I admit.
I didn't read the article because it's crap. Did they mention that it auto-updates? That alone makes the whole argument invalid because as long as there is auto-update there is no lingering in the past.
In addition to what other commenters have said, IE6 got huge market share then stagnated. Even worse, when IE7 came out, people didn't upgrade. Chrome continues to improve and auto-update.
There is absolutely nothing stopping MS from copy and pasting huge chunks of chromium into IE tomorrow. That was not the case with activex.
Like others have said, this article is trolling us.