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So TL:DR, chrome is like internet explorer was before firefox. It does some things outside the standard, and because it’s the modern day “default”. sites sloppily code to work with it, and other browsers are left carrying the bag because if tiktok doesn’t work on firefox, people will view that as a firefox problem. Even if firefox is the one actually following the standards when tiktok and chrome aren’t.
Shit like this will continue to happen until governments start enforcing interoperable open standards and resume enforcing antitrust laws, which were, in practice, suspended for a long time, for whatever reason.
Same issue with AMD’s drivers sometimes. Not to say that their drivers are perfect but as a graphics engineer, I’ve had stuff my colleagues wrote and tested on Nvidia work fine but break on AMD because AMD was implementing the OpenGL spec exactly but Nvidia decided to be “lenient” and add hacks that make incomplete code work.
I think similar how the EU adopted the USB-C as mandatory standard for charging, it should force other industries, including software vendors, to follow commonly defined standards.
In case of browsers that is Chrome using it’s de facto monopoly to force other browser to rush to catch up with their custom crap. Yes, as a side effect that would also break a lot of existing webpages because they rely heavily on browser bending over backwards to accommodate sites serving effectively broken HTML i.e. but in the long term this would improve the internet as a whole.
The industry needs to shift to identifying html, css, and JavaScript versions in browser headers instead of which rendering engine. Saying “I support these versions of these standards” instead of “I’m chromium”.
It’s been a problem since day one. Maybe have some sort of independent certification for each browser to pass before being able to declare that it supports a particular version.
deeeep tech analysis from lemmings as usual
actually no. IE dominated because MS owned the desktop and still do. IE was fucking awful and did not care about standards
chrome dominated because it was fucking great. chrome now defines standards because the other browsers lag behind and standards themselves lag behind
if anything safari is the new IE in apples fucking awful walled garden
Google is also abusing its monopoly to push Chrome. They are sabotaging other browsers on their sites while showing Chrome ads.
I can give you they had different ways to get to that position. As much as I hate IE, I do have to admit it was ahead of netscape for quite a significant time. But yes google used less monopolistic practices to get in there, beyond like spamming you whenever you went to google. I will admit even now edge does worse in the monopolistic practices "I see you went all out of your way to download another browser, are you sure you really want to switch to it, have you at least given edge a fair shot? Please try it out for a bit longer. (and of cousre it’s worth noting now edge is basically a skin of chrome),
But how they got there wasn’t what I was talking about anyway, The point is web pages now cater to chrome, as that’s what makes up over 60% of the total usage, with about 20% being safari (of which you can pretty much assume almost all of that is mobile), and almost everything at the top is running chromes engine.
So in short, if you are designing a page.
Does it work on blink engine, that covers 76% of users, then does the mobile site work on safari, that covers another 20%,
Point is a monopoly is a monopoly, even IF the reason they are there is purely good. The point of the article is just noting that to not use chrome’s engine, browsers have to take the time to make things work, because the websites themselves have little incentive to do so. for such a small percent of their userbase.
