[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)

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.