IE was far more dominant, and browsers actually had meaningful differences back then. Porting CSS written for IE to Firefox could easily take 50% of the initial implementation time, if not 100%. Today, it's not completely uncommon to have something developed on Chrome working in Firefox and Safari without any changes.
And the most significant problem with IE was obviously that it wasn't FOSS, and was only available for Windows. Neither applies to Chrome.
They are now a major user of chromium, and may contribute, but they do not have any say in what goes into chromium. That is still controlled by google employees. If said google employees do not like microsoft patches, they will reject the proposed changes, and microsoft can then at best push them into their own fork.
Google rejecting Microsoft changes has not yet been observed, it could happen.
Most people think that Google agenda could conflict with Microsoft agendas.
I have read a LOT of chromium issues.
I can tell you that the higher management at Google does not dictate chromium changes as they are too technical for them.
The truth is, except for maybe a few exceptions, chromium evolve through the decisions of engineers that want to create the best possible product.
They are not different to Firefox or edge engineers.
Thus they should collaborate pretty well and a Google and Microsoft team should not have more "conflicts" than between two Google internal teams.
As you said for the exceptions, Microsoft can maintain a fork, it's still order of magnitude more economic and smart than to constantly duplicate work in a redundant browser (firefox)
>I can tell you that the higher management at Google does not dictate chromium changes as they are too technical for them.
Tell that to the webRequest API that ablockers use.
>As you said for the exceptions, Microsoft can maintain a fork, it's still order of magnitude more economic and smart than to constantly duplicate work in a redundant browser (firefox)
Chrome is the redundant browser. Firefox was here first.
I seriously can't wrap my head around why anyone decided it would somehow be 'okay' to use googles web browser. Because unless you are a Pollyanna coolaid drinker you know where that's going to lead us.
Except Chrome is still far below the user-base of IE in its heyday. And the most "valuable" users are all on mobile Safari. So it still makes sense to at least test with that.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Choice of which browsers to develop for. You had to support IE6 back in the day. Now you have to support Chrome. When they do weird shit you can't say "well that browser is broken", you have to work around it.
Surely most people here are old enough to remember the days of IE6? It wasn't that long ago.
IE was far more dominant, and browsers actually had meaningful differences back then. Porting CSS written for IE to Firefox could easily take 50% of the initial implementation time, if not 100%. Today, it's not completely uncommon to have something developed on Chrome working in Firefox and Safari without any changes.
And the most significant problem with IE was obviously that it wasn't FOSS, and was only available for Windows. Neither applies to Chrome.