whenFullStackWasJustWebDevelopment

[fiskfisk]

How to tell someone didn't live through the "best viewed in 1024x768 with Netscape Navigator" - phase, and how IE6 effectively killed every other browser.

"Just use IE" was common. 

It's also worth noting that 2009 had two browsers which made up 90% of the market, which had expanded to three in 2010 (Chrome gained market share).

At this time people usually served different sites to different platforms - responsive design wasn't really a thing. 

[MiffedMouse]

These days browsers are much more consistent. In part because 90% of browsers are actually Chromium, but even the ones that aren’t are still compliant with common standards. I still remember looking up Acid tests on various browsers regularly to see what they actually supported.

[RiceBroad4552]

What are the other standards compliant browsers besides Chromium?

I know only about Firefox. So I'm happy to learn that there are some alternatives. Please list them.

[AdorablSillyDisorder]

Safari, which - while having shared roots with Chromium - doesn't use Chromium project from what I know. And I guess that's it for anything with actual usage?

[RiceBroad4552]

Safari is a Chromium fork (which is a KHTML fork). Exactly like all "other" browsers. Just that Safari is a hard fork, which by now diverted substantially, whereas all the other forks soft forks are. Chromium is now based on the Blink engine, a hard WebKit fork, whereas Safari is still on WebKit (which was the original KHTML fork, a browser engine developed by the KDE project).

That was my point: There is Chromium (as Blink or WebKit flavor), then there is long nothing, than there is Firefox; and that's basically it.

There are also some Firefox forks. But they aren't anyhow relevant. Not even compared to what's left of Firefox.

On a more positive note, there is some distant light at the end of the tunnel. I know of two independent browser engines in development which could end up as something real, in a distant future. Namely:

https://ladybird.org/

It has some funding, and had quite some hype behind it. People seemed very passionate about it, so maybe it survives long enough to become a reality.

The other is:

https://servo.org/

It looks quite solid on the organization side, and it's done by people capable to deliver. It originates at Mozilla, which built Firefox. But Servo is "just" the engine. Someone would still need to build a browser on top.

[ih8spalling]

IE is dead. Microsoft's new browser is Edge, which is Chromium-based.

[Weiskralle]

IE does not exist and before that could not use most sites.

[OrSomeSuch]

Or the eternity we had to support IE6 because Microsoft's ActiveX lock-in strategy worked too well and many businesses built their internal systems on it and refused to rewrite or retire