Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

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.