Because at the time IE6 was a terrible browser with poor standards support, while Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support. It is a gilded cage.

▲ Calavar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support.

Google learned it can be "standards compliant" if it submits a draft spec to WHATWG/W3C, and while the comment and revision process is still ongoing, roll out those features in Chrome and start using them in YouTube, Gmail, Google docs, and AMP. Now Firefox and Safari are forced to implement those draft specs as well or users will leave in droves because Google websites are broken. Soon enough, Google's draft spec is standardized with minimal revisions because it's already out there in the wild.

The debate, revision, and multistakeholder aspects of the standards process have been effectively bypassed, a la IE6 and ActiveX, but Chrome can claim to be on the cutting edge of standards compliance. This is a case of Goodharts's law.

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anang 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't mean this to doubt you, it is a sincere question. Do you have any examples of that happening? It sounds very believable, but it would be great to have actual sources for future reference.

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dijit 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

push notifications, webgpu and webusb are examples of chrome being a reference implementation and using things for their services while simultaneously pushing the standard.

Push for mail, webgpu for maps (iirc) and I believe WebUSB is used for Android flash/debug.

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mistercow 2 hours ago | parent [-]

WebGPU is the only one of those I’ve really followed, but hasn’t that had a huge amount of input and changes due to other voices in the working group? That seems to contradict the simplistic picture painted above of Google just dictating standards to the industry.

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dijit 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Would webgpu exist at all if Chrome hadn’t just pushed through with an implementation?

Who knows.

Not us, we’ll never know.

	▲	pjmlp an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To add insult to injury, we probably would have gotten WebGL 2.0 Compute, which was initially done by Intel, if Chrome had not refused to ship it on Chrome, arguing that WebGPU was right around the corner, and it would take too much space, this was about 5 years ago. And to those rushing out to point out the excuse part about OpenGL on Mac not having support for compute, WebGL already back then wasn't backed up by OpenGL on all platforms, see Windows (DirectX), PlayStation (LibGNM). Also eventually Safari also moved their WebGL implementation from OpenGL to Metal, and Chrome did as well, replace their WebGL to run on top of Metal on Mac. So not really that much of a problem regarding the state of OpenGL on Mac as "required" implemenatation layer for WebGL.

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rdsubhas an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

QUIC. HTTP/3. WebP. And more in this comment thread.

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troupo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anytime you see someone on HN lamenting that Safari is the new IE because it doesn't implement something, 99.9% of the time it's Chrome-only non-standards.

- All of hardware standards. WebHID's timeline is especially egregious https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459#is...

- Most of standards advertised on web.dev as "new exciting opportunities you can try now". E.g. WebTransport https://developer.chrome.com/docs/capabilities/web-apis/webt.... The status of that spec is "scribbled on a napkin", but somehow already released in Chrome.

- Other "standards" and "specs" here and there like web share target https://w3c.github.io/web-share-target/

Can I Use had to create a special UNOFF tag for all the web APIs that Chrome (mostly Chrome) ships. If you go to MDN and look at all APIs marked as "experimental", you'll find that most of them are already shipped in Chrome: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API

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krageon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It happens every single time. This isn't some well kept industry secret

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neves an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Any serious antitrust process would break it in a separate company.

▲ pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That is revisionism, IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition, like Chrome is today, and Microsoft withdraw most of the development resources from the team.

WPF XAML was originally designed by ex IE team members, and they were the same that a few years later proposed XAML Grid concept as CSS Grid initial design.

Many JavaScript devs have to thank their abuse of JavaScript in the browser to XMLHttpRequest introduced by IE.

	▲	matwood 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition Yeah, people forget that IE was a great browser. It was easily the most performant, I think driven by the Outlook web (I believe the first web app to make use of XMLHttpRequest) team demanding IE team make it so. The issue, like you said, is they won and then stopped updating.

▲ supermatt 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> leading standards support

"Leading" being the operative word. Ship a new feature, submit it as a standard and encourage its adoption so things only work on chrome and further increase market share when people find other browsers "broken".

MS did exactly the same shit with IE - the only really difference was that the standards body (w3c) was independent, so they couldn't self declare it as a standard. Now the "standards" body (whatwg) is mostly google...

	▲	shaky-carrousel an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That was quite a move from Google, replacing the independent W3C with the Google lapdog whatwg...

▲ lenkite 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is nice when you have replaced the original standard committee with your own committee. You can always have "leading standards support".

MS was not smart enough to do this. Google was smarter.

▲ meindnoch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Chrome is an excellent browser with leading standards support

Yes, Chrome has leading standards™ [1] support!

_________

[1] A so-called standard™ is a piece of source code that sits on the main branch of the Chromium repository. Not to be confused with actual standards!

▲ modo_mario 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't part of the issue that they have a big hand in defining the standards?

▲ reaperducer 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

leading standards support

Except no support for:

  CSS Canvas Drawings
  CSS filter() function
  Video Tracks
  Audio Tracks
  FIDO U2F API
  SPDY protocol
  JPEG XL image format
  HTTP Live Streaming
  HEIF/HEIC image format
  SVG fonts
  CSS hanging-punctuation

And broken support for:

  CSS font-smooth
  CSS Initial Letter
  Speech Recognition API
  CSS -webkit-user-drag property
  CSS3 Multiple column layout
  CSS text-indent
  Synchronous Clipboard API
  HEVC/H.265 video format
  TLS 1.1
  text-decoration styling
  CSS display: contents
  CSS Container Style Queries
  CSS clip-path property for HTML
  CSS Counter Styles
  Ruby annotation
  WAI-ARIA Accessibility features
  Media Fragments
  autocomplete attribute: on & off values
  DOMMatrix
  SVG effects for HTML
  X-Frame-Options HTTP header
  DNSSEC and DANE
  WebXR Device API
  DeviceOrientation & DeviceMotion events
  Permissions Policy
  asm.js
  Network Information API
  theme-color Meta Tag
  Document Policy

Source: https://caniuse.com

The whole "Chrome is the leader in standards" meme is a lie.