Hey, um, so I was in the middle of IE. (Engineer on IE2-4; standards and PM IE5-6; GPM IE7-early 8). And I'm about to hit ten years at Google, 9 of them on Chrome. Chrome is many things - but I'm in a unique position to state, Chrome is *not* the new IE. (cont)
https://twitter.com/namedgraph/status/1298868860242755585
... IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next". Chrome has plenty of ideas of what's "next" for the web - and they're not just about Google. (cont)
... Are they all good ideas? No, probably not, and that's why we have processes (that get revised - hi, that's part of my job now) to make sure we're including lots of external input too. The Web stagnating as a platform for just docs would be bad too. (cont)
Do I personally wish that there were more other separate engines out there as a balance? - absolutely! But I don't think just stopping development is a good idea either. I'd like the Web to continue to be viable as a core platform for digital life. (cont)
There should naturally be concerns about privacy, and security, and maintaining the ability of the web to be a great decentralized platform. Those debates should continue to happen. Google is not doing what IE did to the web, and Chromium-based browsers are not all "Chrome."
FWIW: there are many stories told about IE, why it was successful, why it fell down. Only some of them are true. The main thing that Google is sharing with IE is that we're showing up - we have a lot of investment in Chrome(ium). We are WAY more focused on open development...
...and working in public in standards. Chromies (because it's not all "Google", it's a set of people, that I work with and have grown to know over a decade) actually do honestly want the web platform to grow and be viable, not because we want to chase a browser share number.
(Despite that being a seriously studied metric the entirety of my tenures on IE, browser share is not something I almost ever hear on Chrome.) We have different ideas about what the next best steps for the web are than others sometimes ...
..but mostly, we feel strongly that the web should be TAKING steps, and moving forward as a platform. (end)
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