Maybe, maybe not. It's getting dangerously close to the modern day IE, where some websites just don't work right and everyone has to do arcane shit to make their websites cross platform.
It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.
> It's getting dangerously close to the modern day I.E.
This line gets thrown around a lot, but if you look at the supported features, Safari is honestly pretty up-to-date on the actual ratified web standards.
What it doesn't tend to do is implement a bunch of the (often ad-tech focused) drafts Google keeps trying to push through the standards committee
The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
You should probably think about that for a bit, in light of why IE was IE back in the day.
> The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
No. Safari is the modern IE in the sense that it's the default browser on a widely used OS, and it's update cycle is tied to the update of the OS itself by the user, and it drags the web behind by many years because you cannot not support its captive user-base.
It's even worse than IE in a sense, because Apple prevents the existence of an alternative browser on that particular OS (every non-safari OSes on iOS are just a UI on top of Safari).
But this can only be by comparison to something. And Apple is very good at keeping Safari up to date on the actual standards. You know—the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
So if it's not Chrome, what is your basis for comparison??
> But this can only be by comparison to something.
The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox. Safari was even behind the latest IE before the switch to Chromium by the way.
> the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
You're misremembering, IE also kept improving its support for modern standards. The two main problems were that it was always behind (like Safari) and that it people were still using old versions because it was tied to Windows, like Safari with iOS. When people don't update their iPhone because they know it will become slow as hell as soon as you use the new iOS version on an old iPhone or just because they don't want their UI to change AGAIN, they're stuck on an old version of Safari.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I am not remotely misremembering, and I'll thank you not to tell me what's happening in my own head.
IE 6 stood stagnant for years, while the W3C moved on without them, and there was no new version.
> The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox.
And can you name a single thing Firefox does right, that Chrome didn't do first, or that came from an actual accepted web standard (not a proposal, not a de-facto standard because Chrome does it), that Safari doesn't do?
The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
> actual accepted web standard
The only thing for which there is an actual standard that matters is JavaScript itself (or rather ECMAScript) and on that front Apple has pretty much always been a laggard.
Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
> The reason why IE 6 kept haunting us all was because later versions were never available on Windows XP.
First of all, according to the IE Wikipedia page, that's not true—7 & 8 were available for XP.
Second of all, this ignores the fact that for five years, there was only IE6. And IE6 was pretty awful.
> Saying “Apple is compliant with all of W3C standards” is a bit ridiculous when this organization was obsolete long before Microsoft ditched IE. And Apple itself acknowledge that, themselves being one of the founding parties of the organization that effectively superseded W3C (WHATWG).
And now you have identified a major component of the problem: in the 2000s, the W3C was the source of web standards. Safari, once it existed, was pretty good at following them; IE (especially IE6) was not.
Now, there effectively are no new standards except for what the big 3 (Safari, Chrome, and Firefox) all implement. And Firefox effectively never adds new web features themselves; they follow what the other two do.
So when you say "Safari is holding the web back," what you are saying is "Safari is not implementing all the things that Google puts into Chrome." Which is true! And there is some reason to be concerned about it! But it is also vital to acknowledge that Google is a competitor of Apple's, and many of the features they implement in Chrome, whether or not Google has published proposed standards for them, are being implemented unilaterally by Google, not based on any larger agreement with a standards body.
So painting it as if Apple is deliberately refusing to implement features that otherwise have the support of an impartial standards body, in order to cripple the web and push people to build native iOS apps, is, at the very best, poorly supported by evidence.
