I started with Netscape because in 98, fuck Microsoft.
Then Netscape Navigator was unstable. So, some IE, which was just a bit less unstable. The web itself wasn’t really stable at that time.
Then AvantBrowser. It’s 2000-ish. TABS. POP-UP BLOCKER. TYPE IN THE ADDRESS BAR TO SEARCH. That was the shit. The biggest browser innovation jump ever.
Then a bit of Opera. Cute. Then all geeks and nerds couldn’t STFU about Firefox. So I tried it. It was alright, except that there were barely any extensions that I was using quite heavily at that time. Then I super-customized my Firefox and it was pretty cool.
Then it auto-updated to Firefox 2, destroying all my settings and preferences. Uncool. Uninstall. I don’t play.
So I switched to Maxthon. Holy shit that was dope. I know, it ran on IE engine but I’ve never cared about Acid3 tests and all that useless shit. Does the browser work with the websites I use? If yes, it’s enough for me and a vast majority of users.
Around the same time, I started to use RSS heavily, unloading my browser’s needs. Maxthon was perfect with the flat theme I applied to it. I used it for years. Stable as hell.
Then it updated to Maxthon 2 and it was unstable as fuck. Extensions were def a problem so I stopped using them all together.
Time for Chrome! I was mad in love with it. I still remember it was September 2008. Reading the comic about javascript on my netbook, grabbing my dick. “Google is really listening and smart!” I said to myself, fapping. The trade-off of giving them my browsing history and behavior wasn’t so bad because I was RSSing a lot.
But it grew on me. While everyone was selling the browser to their grandma, I couldn’t let Google spy on me like that. So I started to use the Chromium forks. One was called ChromePlus and it was pretty dope.
Then it updated to ChromePlus 2 and it was terrible.
By that time it’s 2012 and I’m sick of all that browser bullshit. Win8 comes out. I start using IE11 without excitement and pretty much never looked back. I still use IE11 most of the time. I don’t care. The funniest thing is that sometimes –once a year- a website doesn’t work and I suppose that it’s because of IE. It’s not. It just does the same thing in Vivaldi or Chrome or whatever. I read this year that Safari still had issues displaying favicons and I wanted to let y’all know that this shit has been solved on most Windows browsers circa 2002-2003.
The amount of energy spent on those stupid ass browser battles is staggering. It’s hard to take software developers seriously sometimes. Web developers failed at making HTML5 a true, clean standard. Google took over and made everything not chrome-compliant, “bad”. You guys completely failed the public by letting one company do the thing that you didn’t want the other company to do. And now you’re crying about monoculture and shit. But here’s a truth: there’s pretty much no need for browser innovation anymore! They’re all fast. They’re all stable. They’re all able to handle forms, payment systems. That’s what we mostly do with browsers and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel again. I don’t need my browser to access some VR rig, run some sophisticated synth or stream 8K videos. Jesus. Code for other stuff that might help people, think native and offline. Leave the browser alone. We’re good. Browsers have achieved the Fridge status: they just work, everyone uses one, they all behave the same and no one cares about brands and “mind share” and all that high school shit. Working IT in a public space demonstrated that to me.
Browsers are everything and nothing at the same time. They’re incredibly complex pieces of software that are doing far too many things, like tracking every single thing we do (mouse cursor and all) or accessing your microphone. I just love me some vanilla HTML that renders instantly with today’s available bandwidth and any 2010 and above browser. Straight. To. The. Point. I’m never over a dozen tabs. The whole 70+ tabs nerdcore absurdity was my daily life back in 2005. It’s pretty clear that it’s not healthy for either brain or computer system.
I guess that sells multi-core CPUs though. Sigh.