[mananaysiempre]

On release, IE6 was so ahead on CSS standards conformance it broke websites. The old (long-forgotten) incantation for accessing XMLHttpRequest is the way you create a COM IDispatchEx object by ProgID from inside Active Scripting, because that was the way it worked in the original IE implementation. Before there were PWAs or Electron, there was the HTA, introduced with IE5. (Admittedly XUL came even earlier.) And so on—those are not exceptions.

It’s just that once Microsoft won the web, it turned out what they wanted to do with it as the main competitor to their fat-client business was nothing, so the IE team was effectively dissolved and IE stagnated, leaving an opportunity for Firefox to displace it. But before that happened, they innovated like crazy, up to and including (by some accounts) a right to demand features they needed from the Windows team—and, on the other hand, writing the original implementations for others: multilingual UI, a Unicode layer for 9x, windowless ActiveX controls, new revisions of the common controls, etc.

So you’re right that Chrome is not the new IE of 2009: Chrome is the new IE of 1999. And unlike Microsoft back then, Google now seem perfectly happy to fund the hamster wheel if it means every other prospective browser is also forced to run inside it or lose users.

[pontilanda]

Google won the web years ago and it's still "innovating." By "is the new IE" people generally mean the 2007 IE, not the 1999 IE. I don’t think many complained about those shiny new ActiveX APIs in IE 3 and Chrome doesn't really have anything like that (even though they push features out with few signals from the rest of the platform)