[ameyamk]

This was a brilliant strategy. It allowed Google time to build Chrome at the same time slowing down : (1) explorer (2) Got decent data on CAC for browsers and what channels work and what don't.

Its interesting to see new era of browser wars playing out with Chrome firmly in the lead, but Microsoft attacking with Edge where ChatGPT on bing only available on edge browser and no where else. Would be interesting to see how Google would respond.

[Dalewyn]

Chrome vs. Edge is not a browser war, they are both Chrome.

Speaking more broadly, the browser war is all but decided until the Chromes fail of their own accords.

The only non-Chrome browsers still in existence today are Safari and the Firefoxes (Firefox and its various forks). Safari is only relevant in iOS by way of Apple gatekeeping, and Firefox hasn't been relevant for well over the past decade thanks to Mozilla's utter mismanagement and malice.

[gkoberger]

This is incredibly wrong.

They aren't both Chrome; they're both Chromium-based and use Blink and V8 under the hood. And Blink is just a fork of WebKit, which is Safari, so by your logic it's all Safari (it's not).

These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search. The war isn't over how CSS is rendered; it's over how many opportunities they have for surfacing their other products (search, email, identity and payments).

If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.

Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.

(Source: I'm ex Mozilla)

[Dalewyn]

>This is incredibly wrong. They aren't both Chrome; they're both Chromium-based and use Blink and V8 under the hood.

So they're both Chrome. You can't have a war with just one participant.

>These companies don't care about the rendering engine under the hood, they care about literally one thing: the default search.

They absolutely care about the rendering engine, because that's how you secure a monopoly and subsequently get to foist your default search engine and whatever other monetization schemes on more customers. Did you not learn anything from Internet Explorer and its victory over Netscape? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

There are many sites that only function properly in Chrome today, and that is to Google's (and now also Microsoft's) commercial interests. You can't have a browser war with just one participant.

>If anything, Chrome/Firefox are more aligned than Chrome/Edge, because every 3 years Google pulls up with a dump truck of money to stay the default search engine.

As far as Google is concerned, it's cheaper to pay Firefox to stay irrelevant than to compete on the market. Mozilla's flush with cash thanks to Google, but that also means they have no incentives to develop or not mismanage their products.

>Also, not for nothing, but there's not a single iota of malice inside Mozilla. Extreme mismanagement, yes, but it's genuinely guided by good people trying to do good for the world.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

History also shows Mozilla today are more concerned about checking the right political checkboxes than delivering a good product that users want.

>(Source: I'm ex Mozilla)

I'm not surprised that (ex-)Mozilla would play the "Am I out of touch? No, it's the people who are wrong." meme almost to the letter, but that is probably neither here nor there.

[drsnow]

>History also shows Mozilla today are more concerned about checking the right political checkboxes than delivering a good product that users want.

As a trans person, I am happy that my browser developers are on my side and not the side of the people who'd rather see me be harassed or bullied into suicide.

[simondotau]

If I were a trans person, I would be insulted by large corporations draping themselves in such superficial, low effort, utterly incongruous lip service to my cause, using past and present prejudice against me as a marketing opportunity to sell more web browsers. Corporations love to passively attach themselves to causes like this. Social responsibility has become the responsibility of the marketing department, plus whatever minimum corporate change is sufficient to sell the sizzle.

This story has played out countless times, whether it's world hunger in the 1980s, third-wave feminism in the 1990s, global warming in the 2000s, or generic environmentalism (i.e. "greenwashing") in the 2010s. If they wanted to, corporations can be a force for good. The treadmill of causes du jour gives them a convenient excuse to not try.

For the sake of the trans community I'd like to think that this time they're being sincere. This time it's authentic. But I find it hard to believe. Maybe I'm too cynical.

[hitekker]

Observing from the outside, the lip service is successful because it offers the illusion of righteousness to the weak-minded and stupid. The extremely online crowd love feeling being a part of a "cause" and not thinking about what the "cause" actually means. Until they're left out in the cold when the corporation shifts to another newsworthy cause to trumpet.

Some of the rabble go quiet, the rest double-down. They try to convince themselves and everyone else they weren't fooled. They want to believe they're still a voice in a worthy social cause, and not a pawn in a game that they don't even know how to play.

[hnbad]

The question isn't whether a company genuinely supports trans people or just does it for the money. The question is whether they support trans people or oppose them. They're a company. They're driven by profitability and ROI first.

It doesn't matter that they're not sincere. It doesn't matter that they're not authentic. It matters that they help normalize pro-trans messaging, rather than normalizing anti-trans messaging, or doing nothing. Yes, it'd be nice to live in a world where you get to choose between the company that sincerely supports trans people and the company that merely does so for optics but still fires those sincerely opposing them, but that's not the one we live in.

To be honest, I think most of the trans community would be perfectly happy to have companies simply not actively funnel money into politicians who want them to stop existing. Alas.

[Dalewyn]

As a reasonable person, I am not happy that a browser's developers are more concerned about tangential, arguably completely unrelated, issues to their product.

[gkoberger]

You're confusing "more concerned" with "also concerned". I guarantee you that they can care about both at the same time, and I would LOVE to see an example where they prioritize trans rights at the expense of web standards.

[TheHappyOddish]

Are those the only two sides? In public support and signalling, or wanting you dead? I think I'd prefer neither personally, and for companies to just do their jobs.

[bharathyes]

As any person, if we start caring about the political or moral affiliations of the makers of every single product we use there doesn't seem to be an efficient, reliable source of such information. I can barely avoid a single company let alone all those I dont agree with.

Beyond a limited number of companies who go against popular opinion (possibly bcos their target customers are too), most are going to publicly support all the same socially acceptable stands. This doesn't mean there are some vile people employed in those positive companies or some decent, well meaning pepole working in the bad companies just for a paycheck. it's hard to judge with a simple look.

As a consumer you are free to support or boycott a product on any criteria that you like but question is how much of a realworld difference their placit support for your cause makes.

[azangru]

I want browser developers to be on the side of everyone who uses web browsers, and who builds for the web platform.

[silisili]

I get that, as much as a non trans can I suppose. But the product objectively lags behind. If the only reason to use it is because of some social project or issue, and not on technical merits, it won't be around forever (and I firmly believe Firefox will not).

Seems best just to leave politics out of business.

[nyanpasu64]

As a cat, I'd prefer for Firefox to stop integrating a Pocket chumbox and pinning sponsored sites on the new tab page, advertising Firefox VPN in their browser, increasing padding in the Normal tab bar at the same time they hide the option for Compact size, adding time-limited colorways you can't sync onto new computers added after the color scheme expires...

[hnbad]

> Seems best just to leave politics out of business.

You literally can't, though. Business is inherently political. And even if the corporation itself may attempt to remain neutral and refuse to participate in any donations or fundraisers, the C-level executives and the shareholders who derive most of the excess value produced by the company are still people with opinions who have a lot of disposable income they can throw one way or another.

If you truly think business can avoid politics you should ask yourself why all the companies priding themselves in not engaging in politics are run by people who lean right-libertarian. It's hard to see the water when you're a fish.

[bscphil]

OP is presumably talking about stuff like dictating the future of web development, not about who gets money as a result of users having a browser installed. It's a different definition of "sameness" than you're using, but not necessarily a wrong one.

(Whether the companies themselves care about this seems immaterial.)

[lozenge]

Chrome has sign in with Google and Google Passwords, Edge has Microsoft Sync. Both features intended to bring users into respective walled gardens. If Edge gets more popular, they will try to Embrace Extend Extinguish the web platform, but currently that won't work as they don't have enough users, so their devs are working on engine adjacent things like the Developer Tools panel.

[Karunamon]

Literally every browser anybody cares about has a passwords/setting sync function. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi. I don't think spinning a basic feature as a dirty ploy is terribly useful, or honest.

[phendrenad2]

Sure feels like a new-age browser war, where instead of trying to take control of the W3C, browser vendors are just trying to take control of everything ELSE (Windows nags you to use Edge, YouTube and Gmail nag you to use Chrome)

[latexr]

> The only non-Chrome browsers still in existence today are Safari and the Firefoxes

DuckDuckGo’s browser on macOS¹ is WebKit, as is Orion². They may not be very popular but neither are the Firefox forks. They’re both still in beta and under development.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#DuckDuckGo_Private_...

² https://browser.kagi.com

[throwaway128128]

Explorer didn't need "slowing down". It was in maintenance mode and being developed it on a shoestring budget around the days of IE6-IE7. Microsoft apparently decided that the web browser circa 2006 was essentially a finished product because they had "won" - IE had no serious mass market competition on Windows.

[robocat]

Somewhere mid-2000s Microsoft recognised web applications were an existential threat to their Windows Applications monopoly. Presumably after IE5 when they first introduced XMLHttpRequest as an ActiveX control (or was that infighting? It was released for online mail AFAIK). Did that have anything to do with the slow down in development of IE?

[Kerrick]

They weren’t wrong. Electron apps and web apps have made switching to Linux or Mac much more seamless for many people.

[marcosdumay]

Well, the fact that everybody though the same, and this was hyped at the Netscape marketing material surely helped making their mind.

And once they destroyed Netscape, Sun created Java with the same goal.

[ido]

And Sun sued Microsoft when they tried to EEE Java shortly thereafter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#Sun's_litigatio...

[corybrown]

You're basically right, though the IE dev team was effectively disbanded in 2002 so it's even earlier then you mentioned

[phendrenad2]

Reminds me of Teams in 2023.

[andirk]

Is Teams a pile now? The dot going yellow when I was playing golf instead of pretending to work really bothered me.

[amelius]

I want to see a new era of wars where web admins fight for web freedom and start subtly penalizing BigCorp web browsers, e.g. by showing annoying popups or slightly delaying loading times.