Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Developers and users are weighing whether Google Chrome’s dominance and tight coupling to Google’s advertising interests make it the modern equivalent of Internet Explorer’s old monopoly. Many argue that Chrome’s market share, its role in steering web standards, and sites that only test against Chromium-based browsers create a de facto monoculture that hurts interoperability, privacy, and ad blocking. Others counter that Chrome is far more standards-compliant and actively developed than IE ever was, pointing instead to Safari’s slow and idiosyncratic standards support and iOS’s engine restrictions as at least as big a problem, while a minority sees Firefox as the underfunded but important alternative.

Chrome as “the new IE” – in what sense?

  • Many see Chrome as the de facto “standard” browser: lots of teams only test on Chrome/Chromium (including Edge), some sites block or break on others.
  • Market share and network effects resemble the IE era, and some government/corporate services effectively require a Chromium browser.
  • Others argue it’s not IE-like because Chrome is updated rapidly, is open-source (Chromium), and largely follows modern standards rather than freezing for years.

Safari and Apple’s role

  • Strong camp claiming Mobile Safari is the new IE: tied to OS versions, slow or buggy implementations, iOS engine lock-in, and many Safari-specific quirks and workarounds.
  • Others say Safari often lags only by months, sometimes leads (e.g., some image formats, CSS/JS features), and deliberately resists user‑hostile APIs (tracking, hardware access).
  • Dispute over whether Safari “lags standards” or merely refuses Chrome-driven, not-yet-standard APIs.

Web standards, “proprietary” features, and privacy

  • Chrome is accused of pushing draft or Chrome-first features (FLoC, Privacy Sandbox, NaCl, various web APIs), then turning them into de facto standards due to dominance.
  • Counterpoint: shipping experimental implementations is part of standards work; IE once did the same with XMLHttpRequest.
  • Several note some unimplemented APIs in Safari/Firefox exist mainly for tracking or invasive capabilities; others stress that monoculture + Chrome’s lax privacy posture enable powerful fingerprinting.

Developer behavior and compatibility pain

  • Many stories of sites or critical flows failing on Firefox or Safari (payments, government portals, WebRTC/Meet, video, IndexedDB, WASM, PWAs), often due to Chrome-only testing or brittle UA sniffing.
  • Others report few or no issues in Firefox, blaming add‑ons, privacy settings, or local conditions (e.g., Cloudflare captchas) rather than the engine.
  • Some devs deliberately develop against Firefox first, then confirm in Chrome; more commonly, Firefox gets minimal attention due to tiny share.

Monoculture and power concerns

  • Broad worry that a Blink/Chromium monoculture hands Google oversized control over what “the web” can do, especially around ads and ad‑blocking (Manifest v3, weak mobile extension story).
  • Countervailing fear that Apple’s iOS restrictions are just as anticompetitive, and that native/app‑store ecosystems are an even tighter choke point.