> unreliable standards

I presume you mean that Safari doesn’t support experimental standards that Chrome is pushing because they align with Google’s businesses strategy.

This is exactly the problem with a browser monoculture. If we’re not lucky Google will be the new Microsoft.

“Will be”?

Google owns Android, which is the Windows of the mobile world. They push a development monoculture based on their platform. They leverage their de-facto monopoly in some sectors to penetrate other sectors. They hoover up young developers and keep them in gilded cages that encompass as much of their lives as possible. The only difference is that their cash-cow is advertising rather than an office suite.

Google IS the new Microsoft. They are MS just before the Halloween Papers and the antitrust trial: rich, dominant, and mostly well-liked by the dev community at large.

Nah, wrong comparison. Microsoft mostly stayed in their corner (Software) while the others (Google, Amazon) are branching out to everything else. Things like Waymo will probably even take over the revenue of pure digital services (though it's tied into). Transportation is a big business.

Better analog would be Wayland-Yutani I guess. The corporations that are manifesting currently are nothing that the world has ever seen before in size and interconnections.

Not that I'm against it, it's just my observation. I'm an avid customer of both.

Microsoft went into hardware, mobile, services, ISP, games and even TV (remember MSNBC?), before they stalled because of antitrust action.

The comparison is precise, Google is the MS of the new millennium.

No, it doesn't even support basic features well, like SVG. The Mask implementation just wrong, you can crash Safari in iOS with a single SVG filter, only one color interpolation is implemented.

But worst of all, it seems like Apple just doesn't care. Bug reports don't seem to be read at all, while when reporting an issue for Chrome you usually get a reply within 24 hours.

So true! No apple fan but google has only its own interests in mind. Google is no saint as they like to portray

I hear this a lot, but I find Safari to be an entirely usable browser day-to-day - the reduction in power usage is very noticeable vs Firefox or Chrome.

More than usable. For the majority of users I'd say it is a better option, not as resource-hungry as Chrome or chromium based browsers.

And, while I'm not a hard-core JS programmer, I've found Safari's dev tools to be just as good as Firefox's or Chrome's.

Same! I prefer Safari dev tools for inspecting the DOM, CSS prototyping, debugging, seeing request/response headers, local storage info. I use it every day, and find its interface much more intuitive and way less bloated. However Chrome devtools are better when it comes to performance profiling, and having extensions like React devtools make me wish that was a capability of Safari.

Meanwhile Chrome is a bloated resource hog that, despite its resource usage, still scrolls like early Android phones. It's embarrassingly bad compared to Safari's buttery smooth scrolling.

Is it? I find a lot of these performance views are very subjective depending on multitasking, hardware, gpu, extensions, etc. Chrome has always served me well, and the built-in sync and consistency on mac + windows is what I like best. I would rather compete on features and general standards compliance, and then let people choose their own experience on top.

When everything else runs silky smooth, using vanilla Chrome on vanilla macOS feels like a giant slug. For something so fundamental, I find it baffling Google is unable to do it properly.

You're talking about Google's own product. Chromium is open source and all that "bloatedness" can be taken out. There are already many companies out there that use the Chromium rendering engine have already taken the unneeded bits out and customised the browser with their own features.

>Safari is leaving itself in the dirt. It's the new IE with the slow and unreliable standards.

You mean the actual reliable standards -- and not just rushing to add shiny stuff before it's standardized?

Yes, I'm talking about finished standards, not proposals or experiments. Safari has the tech preview version for that stuff, which is fine.

I don’t think it’s really a reasonable comparison.

Safari does tend to release features a bit later than Firefox or Chrome, but it’s also an open-source, standards-compliant browser that includes almost all modern web tech that the others support. In daily use, I rarely find anything that isn’t supported, with the one exception of issues around WebRTC that have been fixed for some time.

The comparison with IE is flawed.

Sorry safari isn’t great but it’s nothing like IE. It’s got an open rendering engine maintained by multiple corporations as well as contributions from others. WebKit the core of safari works on many different operating systems unlike IE that is basically a web view into activex controls for native windows only applications. Not at all comparable