A browser for a single OS? Talk about monoculture.
https://www.browserling.com/browse/win/7/ie/11/https%3A%2F%2...
Standard VirtualBox is either bridged or NAT, never had a problem there.
> and then trying to update itself with another multi-gigabyte windows update
Now THAT one is a real problem. MS to this day didn't bother to release a Service Pack 2 for W7.
I appreciate that they have these, but it's a real annoying hoop to jump through, and I've long suspected the hope is you'll just have your company buy a cheap windows box for testing.
I can test the other browsers without doing this dance.
Microsoft could change the game by open sourcing Edge, but I guess the key goal is getting all that user data, not having the best browser. (But, Google manages to get all the user data and have a mostly open source browser that people unbelievably have a lot of positive feelings about.)
Then I stopped and none of my customers ever complained. Either nobody uses IE/Edge or the web applications I work on are too simple and render well in every browser on every OS.
Actually I remember a few complaints: somebody using IE7 (?) on Windows XP when it was already EOL (my customer decided not to support it), a bug of Safari we investigated and worked around (can't remember the details), something not working on Chrome because I tested on Firefox (my bad, one such a bug in 10 years.)
Am I sorry about the death of Edge? Not really. Safari next, but being Apple what it is, this is not going to happen. I wish we have only browsers that work across operating systems.
With Chrome/Firefox, I can test in any version, as well as the development versions. And I don't have to jump through any hoops to do it.
As long as that's the case, support for Edge/IE is always going to be a second-class citizen for me. Safari, too, since that's only on Mac OS, and God help you if you need to debug web apps for iPads. There is no good way, and the only tool you have is a shotgun (dev tools don't always work with BrowserStack & mobile Safari, and we currently have an iPad, but no Mac to debug it with.)
Why invoke God, a Mac is a few hundred $s?
Honestly I think second class citizen is acceptable, even preferable. Chrome is always available if the site is just too compelling to ignore. But most of the web is user-hostile, and directs its barrels at Chrome.
The same can't be said about Windows Phones
If you look at the global marketshare, Android dominates iOS.
The point is that I can test on Windows without a Microsoft device or giving money to Microsoft to install Windows somewhere. I have no way to test anything on iOS or even Safari.
Working across different OS and devices has pretty much been Google's go-to strategy, and it's worked pretty well for: Web Browser, Office Suite, and Cloud Storage (not naming them all). In retrospect, I would say an F-up by Microsoft and Apple was fighting interoperability. It worked for years in a PC world, but as the world became more mobile-centric that strategy faltered.
The timing was right to deliver a browser that "works everywhere" for most people, while IE and Safari wanted to maintain the walled garden experience in their own domains. For a lot of people (and also generalizing in the non-technical population), being able to stick with a single browser _feels_ like a win because of the consolidation. Someone who owns a Windows laptop and an iPhone could now have their bookmarks and account synced across devices with the (nearly) same browser.
My main gripe with Chrome is that there isn't mobile adblocking built in, and there is no mobile extension support. (This is where mobile Safari + Firefox Focus for adblocking actually outpaces Chrome). If Google can address this, then that would be a game changer for Chrome on iOS.
Microsoft knows IE is a sinking ship, and their best bet in the browser market is to take a page out of Google's playbook. I'm not sure if Apple actually cares or if they have too much of an exclusive (maybe a better word?) mindset to want to open Safari up to Windows and Android.
From a business perspective, there's a lot to be gained by being a leader in the browser market. Chrome is a great way to lead people into Gmail, Drive, Docs, etc. (more Google services). If Microsoft is going to make a play, now is the time to do it to attempt to pull users. They are already losing the cloud fight to AWS and the browser fight to Chrome (and the mobile OS fight to iOS and Android). If we start to see more cloud-based desktops, such as an improved Chrome OS, then Microsoft is in trouble since Windows is their last bastion left. I am all for hopping on the dissing-Microsoft train, but there's actually some respectable forethought here.
Now the pressure is on Google to keep innovating Chrome, as they would love to have people signing up for Google accounts and using Chrome prior to pushing out a better Chrome OS (which I think will be the cross-platform Android successor). If desktops head in that direction, then I would expect a sizable amount of people to migrate away from Windows to Chrome OS (if it works on desktop/tablet/mobile).
Then, I honestly wonder what Apple will do. They are clinging to the iPhone and iOS for dear life. It makes up a ton of their business. Apple nailed it with creating the top UIs on mobile and desktop (my biasedly-objective assessment), and having cross-device syncing with Messages, Calendar, Notes, iCloud, etc. (Also, having a UNIX-based desktop is niceee). Now I wonder if they will do anything with their device prices. They really have a lot of potential to acquire Windows converts, but Apple is so tied to hardware manufacturing revenue it's a pseudo-Catch-22. At ~$1k for a phone, ~$500-$1k for a tablet, and ~$1k-$2k for a laptop, that's inherently not something a mass-adoption level of people could comfortably afford. There's a question of how price sensitive consumers are, and what Apple stands to gain/lose by changing from more products -> more services (revenue from digital/ads/data/subscriptions). I don't know these answers, but this is something Apple will need to address in the near future.
What things are approaching: AWS runs the internet, Chrome is the door to the internet, and iPhone is the foundation that provides utility to reach the internet (while Android phones do the same for more people). It equal parts interesting and unnerving.
I doubt this can/will ever happen, considering Google's (Alphabet's) main revenue stream is still advertising, they would be chopping their own legs off by including adblocking.
In practice Chrome is not that cross platform. WebGL is an example: Chrome renders differently due to its use of ANGLE, has bad performance due to its GPU blacklist, etc. If you want to support Windows you have to test on Windows, period, regardless of browser.
More generally this take was good back when IE was dominant. Now it's just terrible: Edge is resisting the monoculture, not propagating it. Chrome is working hard to make the OS irrelevant by defeating platform conventions. Standard Mac UI idioms like Quit and Hide don't even work properly in the latest Chrome. Eventually the platforms will become an undifferentiated soup with GMail key equivalents and innovation in OSes will end; why even bother to have more than one OS if it's just to run Chrome?
Unless you have SR-IOV setup this doesn’t tell you if the website is slow because of lack of GPU acceleration or something you could fix.
Still at least you can see if it actually works, unlike Safari.
The broader point is that applications may perform or behave radically differently even under a Chrome monoculture. So you're still on the hook for platform-specific testing, if you actually care.
