Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6

Chrome is now the most popular browser across all devices, thanks to Android’s popularity and the rise of Chrome on Windows PCs and Mac computers. As Google continues to dominate our access to the web, information through its search engine, and services like Gmail or YouTube, Chrome is a powerful entry point in the company’s vast toolbox. While Google championed web standards that worked across many different browsers back in the early days of Chrome, more recently its own services often ignore standards and force people to use Chrome.

Chrome, in other words, is being used in the same way that Internet Explorer 6 was back in the day — with web developers primarily optimizing for Chrome and tweaking for rivals later. To understand how we even got to this stage, here’s a little (a lot) of browser history. If you want to know why saying “Chrome is the new Internet Explorer 6” is so damning, you have to know why IE6 was a damnable problem in the early ‘00s.

Microsoft’s PC dominance with Windows peaked 16 years ago. Alongside Intel, Microsoft spent at least $1 billion promoting the release of Windows XP, with a TV commercial featuring Madonna’s Ray of Light. It was an era before the iPod, Gmail, or YouTube, and Microsoft didn’t even have competition from Google at the time. Microsoft acted like a company that could do what it wanted, and it pretty much did. After crushing its Netscape competition, the era of Internet Explorer 6 was born.

Internet Explorer 6 debuted with Windows XP, and was tied closely to many of its features.