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0 pointsghurtado5mo ago0 comments

> Part of what made chrome succeed is it came out with a pretty robust set of webdev tools right from the get-go.

I think this factor isn't given enough weight in the shift to Firefox.

At that time, the largest pain point in web development was (by a long shot) browser compatibility.

When developers fell in love with Firefox, they started pushing business requirements away from IE and towards the browser that didn't feel like it was their enemy. Alongside with this there was also massive shift to start taking web standards seriously, which is another area where IE dropped the ball spectacularly

It took a few years, but eventually pointy haired managers got sick of our whining and gave in.

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cogman105mo ago

We, no joke, ultimately were able to drop our support for IE6->8 because of the youtube "we are dropping support for IE" banner. We spun it to our bosses as "If google is doing this, we should be able to."

FridayoLeary5mo ago

Some time ago there was a post here about it. The guy claimed he and a few other fed up devs made that banner on their own initiative. The whole thing was a huge bluff because at the time google had no such plan but it gained so much momentum that they went ahead with it eventually.

ghurtadoOP5mo ago

That's awesome.

Having lived through the browser wars, this is my new favorite fact about the whole thing.

It really was a very different time, and you couldn't have convinced me back then that I would miss it one day.

fragmede5mo ago

Which, if you haven't read it before, the story of how they did that is worth the read.

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

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