Interesting synopsis and confirms something I've always felt: There was never really a plurality of web browsers, there was always one that held an outsized majority vs the rest and drove web development practice. The closest, perhaps, was a brief period before Chrome became dominate and IE was waning fast, where I believe Safari, Firefox, and Chrome held approximately the same market share vs IE, which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer, it was also before Chrome forked Webkit fully IIRC.
FWIW, I know having Chrome / Chromium as the overwhelming majority browser is not great, if for the sheer fact competition keeps everyone "honest" in a way, but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective. IE was truly both stagnant and terrible.
EDIT: that's not to say I approve the Chromium dominance, as a daily Firefox user especially, but I would be lying if I said, from a developer perspective, that Chromium hasn't been pretty good so far on balance. They do innovate. They do push new features. They do usually support the latest specs. Though again, I don't approve of it being so dominate, I'd prefer a plurality. Its a shame that Microsoft didn't use Firefox as its base for new Edge
> which would be in the 2010-2013 era (peak Webkit was 2012), which I personally regard as one of the most interest times to be both on the web and be a web developer
Oh man, it depends on your definition of interesting. That was the time we had 3-5 engineers at reddit, and let me tell you, making reddit work for all the browsers was awful (and I barely had anything to do with it, it mostly fell on the other guys). It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html, because a bunch of people were still using it and it didn't support a lot of the stuff the other browsers did.
While the consolidation of browsers isn't great from a market perspective, it's been great for developers sanity. :)
Yes, dealing with IE (even IE 11, up until the last 2-3 years for me) was a pain back then, as it was circa 2020.
That said, it saw a lot of innovations broadly, web development was taken alot more seriously as a profession, and saw some interesting frameworks come out (Ember, Angular, and later React) and jQuery sure made life easier by that time.
I even have some fond memories of KnockoutJS. My most favorite, and probably most underrated framework in the history of web development, was SproutCore, which had legs at this time.
From a culture side (user?) it was the heyday of things like Delicious, Foursquare, Good Twitter (IMO) and blog rolls. Mobile web was rolling out in earnest. Alot of innovation was happening in this space.
Haha, I was interviewing for an internship in those years, and I remember asking the only webdev guy there if he thought he had the coolest job in the company (I sure thought that the web was better than Windows). The guy just looked at me like I was crazy.
Saying 'Chrome / Chromium [...] are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective' is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think.
I mean, on balance, compared with the IE reigning years, Chromium is better than that, and its been mostly (again, from a developer perspective) a net positive in day to day developers lives that Chrome has not stagnated and new features ship.
That however, is not to say that its okay. There's other, broader issues than just developer experience to care about here, like what a Google dominated web means, because via Chrome, they can push a great deal around how the web actually works, which is a net loss to society. It can stifle other innovations. Things of that nature.
> is painting a bit of a target on your back here, I think.
Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, and how much work it took to overcome the inertia of a crappy browser[1] shipped by a monopolist that did not want you to use the web.
There are many legitimate reasons to grouse about Chrome, Google, Google owning Chrome, etc, but the problems surrounding it are, I feel, an order of magnitude smaller than what we had in the 00s.
[1] The delta between IE6 and Firefox 1.0 was incredible, and everyone working on the web despised the work required to make websites work on the former.
>> Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it,
As a web dev I hate ie6 as much as the next guy. I was in the fortunate position to simply drop ie6 support early (the phrase "use a modern browser" springs to mind.)
But it's worth pointing out that ie6 itself was great when it came out. It wasn't that ie6 was bad, it became bad because it got _old_.
IE brought us AJAX which transformed the web from being a read-only system (with a few forms) to an interactive platform, which is the root from which today's Web grows.
In its time IE6 was great. But a lack of competition caused it to stagnate. MS rested on their laurels.
MS themselves rallied hard against it after IE7 and later came out, but end-users refused to upgrade. They rebranded as Edge to get away from IE. The Trident engine was hard to work on though, and switching to the Blink engine has made Edge completely acceptable.
The problem isn't that one has big market share over the others, its that viable others exist. Basically, if a feature is implemented, it works pretty much the same in all browsers. These days the issue is not different behaviour [1] as much as the speed that new features spread at.
Safari has been the slowest here, although recent improvements there are welcome.
[1] yeah, yeah, there are some differences. But it's nothing like the work necessary to make a site work under IE6 and Firefox 1.
But... Firefox came out before Chrome. It's not like we had to use IE6 until Chrome came out. I started using Firefox as soon as it came out and have used it continuously ever since.
For an end user, Firefox was great. But the wide prevalence of IE meant that
* Sometimes sites worked only in IE or broke subtly in other browsers. The subtle breaking could be layout differences or functionality not available/working because the developers used IE specific technology/javascript
* Developers had to code for the lowest common denominator - IE. It really held back web applications
> but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective
Can you clarify what you mean by this? I've been using Firefox continuously since version 1 for both personal and development purposes. I've never felt like Firefox was not benevolent.
Over IE and its dominance. IE 6 and onward was genuinely not great. IE 11 being maybe the least worst of them all, but still really bad.
Chrome has managed, despite its dominance, not to become complacent, from a developer perspective. They add new features, propose new features, listen to developers and their feed back etc.
The chrome teams overwhelming influence on the web as a whole and other factors are very concerning, but from a pure developer experience perspective, Chrome is n't really all that bad. I'm talking about supporting standard APIs etc.
Microsoft was always of two minds about the Web, in a similar way to Apple's stance recently.
It's the universal runtime environment, so it stands the chance of commoditizing their platforms. There's no reason that you can't access the next killer web-app on a smart-fridge running HarmonyOS.
But they do recognize that they have to supply a servicable browser, because if they don't, people will pick up one from somewhere else.
So look where Edge (and Safari) focus their efforts-- begrudgingly matching the things they HAVE to match on Chrome, and adding on stuff like search and shopping tools or privacy gimmicks-- nothing that would make the web environment as a more free-standing platform that could displace native software.
Common story with platforms, isn't it? It's like a huge magnet drawing everyone to Windows or Intel.
I wonder how much is end user driven, and how much is intermediary driven though. Is it that the customers are only comfortable with one item in each category, or is it the middle men who prefer to sell things that are all connected by the same platform?
Psychology plays a big part, change and differences. Folk don't like change nor difference. You have to be willing to embrace it.
You can do this yourself. Watch your mind freakout and give yourself a panic attack if you were to drag an frequented used app; icon from your phone in to an obscure new location or app folder. Frequent bookmark to another folder or off the bookmark bar.
You get used to it but change is scary because its unknown and so unless you can adjust the user quickly and promptly they will reject whats given to them. Or innovate something whole and new thats never been done before.
Add the fact that major brands have user friendly in hand, trying to convince someone to install Linux with its clunky installer as an example; really throws them off edge.
Nowadays trying to get anyone to change really causes them to melt and its only going to get worse as we go on further through the rabbit hole of social media.
So why change when you already have something that just works, that your used to and friends with. Even if it backstabs you with updates, missing icons and leaks your data to the world. It's still feels like your old friend, cosy and comforting.
The vast, vast bulk of computer users are more interested in the destination than the journey. They don't really want to have to care what browser or OS or app they're using... They want to manage their finances, or make art, or surf the web, etc.
When the destination is the point, small amounts of asymmetry tends to accrue more asymmetry because it's easier to solve problems if the help ecosystem is larger to address when the tool doesn't work the way the user wants it to.
I use Firefox for M365 access, since it assumes nothing from Windows, and doesn't try to suck everything in like Chrome. Edge for 365 can't figure out which of the 11 accounts it finds should be the one I'd like to use.
FWIW, I know having Chrome / Chromium as the overwhelming majority browser is not great, if for the sheer fact competition keeps everyone "honest" in a way, but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective. IE was truly both stagnant and terrible.
EDIT: that's not to say I approve the Chromium dominance, as a daily Firefox user especially, but I would be lying if I said, from a developer perspective, that Chromium hasn't been pretty good so far on balance. They do innovate. They do push new features. They do usually support the latest specs. Though again, I don't approve of it being so dominate, I'd prefer a plurality. Its a shame that Microsoft didn't use Firefox as its base for new Edge