I used to be big into XHTML, but that ship has long sailed.
Also if Web Development is now becoming a synonym to "ChromeOS", Chrome did not reach that state magically, rather thanks to the crowd that kept bashing IE and FF thorough the last decade.
> rather thanks to the crowd that kept bashing IE and FF thorough the last decade.
I like FF, but that's too simplified.
Chrome was preinstalled on a bunch of devices (namely Android) and heavily advertised (through Google). Firefox and even IE is having an uphill battle fighting that kind of power.
What governments need to do is do to Google what they did to Microsoft. Lawsuit, hefty fine and mandatory choose your own browser. Although, I doubt even that would help.
Sure it is simplified, but for example on my current project, the customer does not require FF or Edge compliance, yet I take the effort to also test our application on them.
Ever since the XUL add-ons system was shut down, they've only added new features to webextensions. It's either already dead, or it's not being killed off, depending on your POV.
> Chrome was preinstalled on a bunch of devices (namely Android)
Linux comes with Firefox pre-installed (or some variant of it, depending on distro).
Windows comes with Edge pre-installed.
MacOS comes with Safari pre-installed.
OSX comes with Safari Mobile pre-installed.
Android devices appear to have a decent choice of browsers, and the default is chosen by the manufacturer. For a lot of them that's Chrome, but not all.
I don't think there's actually any large group of devices that has Chrome pre-installed.
Also, pure Android users are free to install any browser and set it as the default.
Chrome is so popular because it has been the best browser for years. Whether that's still true is open for debate. But I remember when it came out, finally an answer to the godawful shite that was IE. We may dislike it now, but it saved us from Microsoft's disaster. It's fascinating that you're now claiming that "even IE is having an uphill battle fighting that kind of power". How the tables have turned.
The problem is not so much with marketing power, but with coding investment. Writing a browser is a mammoth undertaking, with all the strange edge cases and standards. Even Microsoft has decided it doesn't see the point in writing one. We're going to be left with two browser choices not because of corporate power, but because it's just too much effort for not enough reward to write a third.
I see where TFA is coming from: if we could agree that browsers don't need to be this complex, then there would be more of them. But that would mean less flexible web pages, and we'd end up with something Flash-like being an attractive alternative.
> Chrome is so popular because it has been the best browser for years. Whether that's still true is open for debate. But I remember when it came out, finally an answer to the godawful shite that was IE. We may dislike it now, but it saved us from Microsoft's disaster.
That wasn't Chrome at all. It was Firefox. Where is this history re-write coming from.
Firefox lost market-share when they went to Australis and became followers of Chrome instead of leaders (helped in part no doubt by funding from Google).
No, Firefox was off lost in the weeds and being useless at the time. I remember it well. Chrome was necessary to stop IE, utter piece of crap that it was, from dominating the world.
No. That's not it. IE was losing market share, Firefox was gaining market share slowly. Then after success of WebKit in iOS, Chrome was forked and rose exponentially.
>Linux comes with Firefox pre-installed (or some variant of it, depending on distro).
"Linux" has a minuscule market share and the people that use it are already more likely to use Firefox than Chrome since FF is open source.
>Windows comes with Edge pre-installed.
Edge is now Chromium-based as not even Microsoft wants to deal with Google breaking websites for non-Chromium browsers "by mistake" and rushing to fix it.
>MacOS comes with Safari pre-installed.
>OSX comes with Safari Mobile pre-installed.
Which are minuscule portions of the market.
>Android devices appear to have a decent choice of browsers, and the default is chosen by the manufacturer. For a lot of them that's Chrome, but not all.
Irrelevant. All of Android's browsers use a wrapper around WebView which is Chromium. Only Firefox comes to mind as a non-Chromium browser and it's not preinstalled on anything.
>I don't think there's actually any large group of devices that has Chrome pre-installed.
Android phones, Microsoft Windows and every user that installed Flash or Avast! in the past 12 years.
>Also, pure Android users are free to install any browser and set it as the default.
Again, most browsers are a wrapper around Chromium. Again, most users don't change defaults.
>Chrome is so popular because it has been the best browser for years.
And anti-competitive practices like being bundled with popular software and having free advertisement from the most popular website in the world (which also happens to be the most popular email provider and video sharing platform.)
>I see where TFA is coming from: if we could agree that browsers don't need to be this complex, then there would be more of them. But that would mean less flexible web pages, and we'd end up with something Flash-like being an attractive alternative.
Websites are not flexible. They're flexible for ad companies and web designers who like pointless animations, but now they're harder to parse, modify, save and their compatibility with text-to-speech has gone down the drain the past years.
The problem with Flash is that it gave us a bunch of unresponsive, needlessly flashy websites that were harder to use. Web designers are doing the exact same thing with HTML5 and their 50 MB of JS libraries.
Edge is backed by MS, Safari by Apple, so they are out.
Firefox is a backed by a foundation, a not for profit. Brave is on top of chrome, and open source.
I guess the old Opera browser ran ads in the browser and was a commercial browser. And did people pay for netscape navigator?
I only use chrome for sites that don't work in other browsers and for testing. I think it's great that IE is no longer the defacto standard, but I'm not a fan of chrome being it either.
Proposition 8 was an effort to overturn gay marriage, to remove a right that gay people had possessed ever since the California Supreme Court overturned the ban 6 months prior.
If I was a gay Mozilla employee, and I knew that my CEO was not just against equality, but actively working to remove my rights, I'd be livid.
Also if Web Development is now becoming a synonym to "ChromeOS", Chrome did not reach that state magically, rather thanks to the crowd that kept bashing IE and FF thorough the last decade.