Magic Lasso’s blog: Is Chrome the New IE?

So Chrome becomes dominant – much like IE was back in its day – and web developers start focusing on building for Chrome and not open web standards.

So let me just say at the jump that corporate blogs should typically be taken very un-seriously. They’re marketing for the company writing them, and they’ve never found a problem that can’t be solved by buying more of that company’s product. Frankly, it would be irresponsible for them to post anything else.

With that in mind, let’s remember that Magic Lasso is a Safari-only extension that benefits when more people use Safari. But you can’t invoke the “is the new IE” line without getting some attention.

I didn’t find the post very compelling because it attempts to rewrite what made the IE years so bad. The browser market is much different today than it was 20 years ago, and the big browsers all adhere much more closely to web standards than they did back in the IE days. IE was bad because it used its massive market share to push proprietary tech like ActiveX, which not only required IE, it also required Windows. It must also be said that Microsoft seemed to not care about web standards, and IE consistently performed years behind the upstarts like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. In fact, there were websites like the Acid test you could visit to find out how complaint your browser was. IE consistently made an absolute mess of things on that page.

What’s interesting in this post is that Magic Lasso mentions the modern equivalent of this sort of standards test to indicate that just like IE, Chrome is behind and Safari is actually leading on web standards compliance.

Despite being the market share leader, there is significant evidence that Chrome is trailing in speed, efficiency and standards interoperability.

To their credit, they do cite their sources, which are the 2022 experimental builds test, which does have Safari scoring higher than Chrome. Of course, in every other year measured, Safari is behind Chrome, including today as I write this:

It’s a bit sneaky to cite the 2022 numbers in a post you wrote in 2024, but I digress…

I do personally think that WebKit, as implemented by Safari is harder to work with than Chromium. This comes from my experience working for nearly a decade in development teams that work in the web, I have bugs in my own software that’s coded to the generic web standards, and generally observing WebKit gaining features quite a while after Chromium and Gecko get them (especially if those features would make building web apps more compelling).

But all that said, I don’t think Safari is the new IE either. Yes, they adopt web standards slower than the rest, but they’re still remarkably good compared to the IE days. Also, it’s worth noting that iOS is the only platform where WebKit is dominant, and that’s because it’s the only platform that mandates its use in the browser. Smartphones barely existed in the IE dark days, 90%+ of people used Windows computers, and most of those Windows users were using IE. They were able to force people to do things the IE way rather than the standard way much more than Safari or Chrome are able to today.

What I actually think

I think it’s silly to call anything “the new IE” in 2024. I simply can’t look at the current crop of browsers and feel like any of them are remotely like IE was back in the day. I think Safari is frustrating because it’s got some weird bugs and WebKit is consistently (except for a specific time in 2022!) behind the other rendering engines in standards adoption, but it’s a very good browser overall that works great for many people. Meanwhile, I think Chrome enjoys significant market power and could wield that power to force people to adopt IE-like customizations, but they simply haven’t seemed to do that and they are consistently on the bleeding edge of adopting new standards.

I do think it is an issue that so many people use Chrome that many developers don’t always test if their websites work correctly in Safari. That’s absolutely a problem and it’s a frustration for Safari users.

The bottom line is that I don’t think any of the modern browser engines is “the new IE” and anyone who tells you otherwise has revisionist history or is trying to sell you something.

The most compelling argument for a web browser forcing web developers to code a certain way is actually on iOS, which, as I’ve written numerous times on this blog, is a platform too large to ignore. Again, Safari is way better than Internet Explorer ever was, but Internet Explorer could only dream of the 100% platform market share that Safari has on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.