[Fatnino]

You must not have been around for the ie6 days.

Browsers consolidated down to basically one and then that one just sat and didn't advance anymore. And why should it? It's not like users could go elsewhere. For years the world was subjected to the absolute crap that ie6 ossified on and wouldn't fix.

We need viable competition to keep a fire lit under the leader to stay ahead.

[solar-ice]

Scarier is that Google controls Chrome/Blink and will continue to push "features" that make the web better for Google, not better for users. Mozilla are one of very, very few organisations that are in a position to push back against this at standards bodies - and for all the flak they get, they regularly do.

[zamadatix]

I don't think the problem with IE was necessarily consolidation as much as letting Microsoft be the only ones with the ability to modify or extend the engine. In my mind there would be nothing wrong with Mozilla joining Microsoft in basing their browser on Blink+V8. In fact it might even be a better way to ensure Google can't steer Chrome the same way Microsoft did since no matter how great they make it the competition will always be dragged along with it, there to become the better drop in option should Google decide to stop leading the push.

[binrec]

V8 has such a lax approach to memory management that I sometimes wish I could drop support for everything but Firefox. For example, Promise.race() leaks memory in V8: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/17469#issuecomment-685...

Another issue I ran into recently is that `Symbol.for(str)` will cause the entirety of `str` to be allocated forever in Chromium, but not in Firefox. (It's inevitable that `Symbol.for()` will have some memory impact, as a global allocation, but it's possible to mitigate it somewhat.)

IMO it's too bad that the effort to create a Node-alike driven by Spidermonkey instead of V8 never got anywhere.

[pathartl]

Honestly using Edge has been a great experience for me. When they adopted Chromium over sticking with _another_ browser engine I was happy. MS has contributed a great amount to the Chromium project so far and I really don't think there's an issue with standardizing on an engine as long as innovations can still happen. It seems like being able to have vendor skins on top of Chromium has been a net positive in light of what's happened in the past. I'm a bit of a Microsoft shill as of late so take my experiences with a grain of salt.

[doopy1]

I was there for it, but I don't recall it being THAT bad and I jumped to Chrome as soon as it hit the scene. It was only once there was an alternative to compare it too that it was obvious how bad IE was.

[Fatnino]

I jumped to Firefox 1.5 as soon as it was out and had my entire friend circle in on it within a few months.

When Chrome eventually came out I added it to my arsenal because it was new and there was an expectation that it would be as revolutionary as Firefox had been. And it was pretty good, much faster than ff was by that time. Never did give up ff entirely but Chrome ended up open more and more. Contrast to ie6 that I never opened again as soon as ff was available. I did check out ie7 when it came out but there was no reason to stay with it. Very much a catch up move.