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What made IE6 IE6 wasn't the technical choices it made, but the fact that whatever were its views, those were forced on the world by its market dominance.

The browser that is closer to that position now is Chrome, not Safari. The sad fact that Apple does not allow other browsers in their platform in fact may be overall a good thing if it keeps Google from owning the web alone.

Apple may need to do something or risk losing some of the appeal of iOS. But calling Safari the new IE is barking at the wrong tree.

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Depending on which market share data you are reading - Chrome isn't clear cut market leader (http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/01/chrome-passes-25-market-sh...).

I am far from Google fan but calling Chrome is a problem is naive. I use Firefox on my Linux desktop and I can make Firefox default browser on my Android phone too but my wife is stuck with Safari on her iPhone - no matter what she wants. I think that is bit of a problem and should be addressed.

Still, chrome forces us devs to do a lot of stuff that we don’t want to — I personally found about a dozen layout bugs in Chrome that don’t exist in either IE11, Firefox, Opera 12 or Konqueror (which uses KHTML, the predecessor of WebKit).

Chrome just disables a bunch of JavaScript APIs on mobile, unless your site is .google.com or .youtube.com, etc.

If you develop only in chrome, you never notice, but if you develop in Firefox first, and your whole site doesn’t work in Chrome... well, shit.

And, on the other hand, we now have a bunch of sites with "works best in Google® Chrome™". Welcome to the 90s, Chrome is the IE6 of today.

I find the exceptions for Google sites particularly offensive. I wonder if it might bite them in the ass (as anti-competitive behaviour) one day.

Example for anyone unsure what we are referring to: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178297#c...

Same here. I have android and GNU/Linux and Firefox is set up as default on both.

Apple will never let iOS become the janky malware fest that is Android. You can run FF and Chrome on iOS you just have to run executable code in Webkit.

What has to do the browser with malware?

It seems that the post is just a fest of FUD

Except Apple very overtly neglects to fix huge bugs on Mobile Safari, so developers are locked into endless hacks to have anything substantial work correctly on iOS, which is a vital market segment. It may have been incompetence rather than willful neglect on Microsoft's part, but the end result for developers is the same. This is the right tree :)

The fact that Safari would have even less market share if other browsers were allowed onto iOS is not the preservation of healthy competition, it's undoing the distortions of unfair competition that allow an inferior product to gain disproportionately high market share. Browsers should be allowed to compete on their merits alone.

What made IE6 was that it was a good browser when it first came out and the competitors were getting worse.

Some blame that on MS being anti-competitive but Netscape were busily shooting themselves in the foot, and had two distinct codebases for the browser, so having to make bug fixes, new feature implementations in two places and often screwing up.

I think that depends on whether you're talking about IE6's earlier or later years. Earlier on it was probably what you said, but eventually it was a minority browser, except a particularly difficult one to support.