> IE9 was a fantastic, best-of-its-time browser, and I’ll forever be proud of it. But as IE9 wound down and the Windows 8 adventure began, it was already clear that its lead would not last against the Chrome juggernaut.
This is tangential, but I wonder how Chrome got so far ahead, not in market share but in features and quality, even with IE's 10+ year head start. Did Google just throw more programmers at the problem, or was there more to it? I suspect this has already been discussed to death, so pointers to previous discussions would be good.
They used WebKit for rendering and that cut down some of IE's 10+ year lead.
Also, I think they had a fairly good test infrastructure from the beginning ( I think they tested new versions of Chrome against Google's index of top million websites ). Good test infrastructure can give you compounded returns as the project goes on.
> I wonder how Chrome got so far ahead, not in market share but in features and quality
"features" and "quality" are subjective metrics. Win the marketshare and you win the mindshare. It's a big part of why the browsers wars have always been monopolistic. The best browser is always just the one "everyone uses". Even its bugs/quirks/oddities become "features" that other browsers need to support, have to "catch up" on, get encoded into standards eventually as "the way it has always been".
This is tangential, but I wonder how Chrome got so far ahead, not in market share but in features and quality, even with IE's 10+ year head start. Did Google just throw more programmers at the problem, or was there more to it? I suspect this has already been discussed to death, so pointers to previous discussions would be good.