It wasn't dominance that people were referring to, it's the intentional heel dragging to benefit other parts of their corporate family at the expense of the web that makes Safari the new IE.

when people say "Safari is the new IE" they mean that Safari has numerous bugs and missing features that take years to fix or implement. there's probably a ton of CSS stuff that doesn't need -webkit prefixes anymore in any browser (because it has been standardized). except of course in the outdated and widely-used Safari/iOS. For instance, they only now got Intersection Observer (super important to efficiently lazy load on mobile devices) in the latest iOS tech preview. many browsers have had it since 2017: https://caniuse.com/#search=intersectionobserver

Let's not beat around the bush: Intersection Observer can and will be used to detect ad impressions too. Calling it "super important to lazy load images" doesn't show the whole picture.

ummm, did you get the impression that i was beating around the bush? i stated exactly why i've personally needed it and have had to resort to polyfills even for the latest iOS.

> Intersection Observer can and will be used to detect ad impressions too.

yes, and? would you rather it be done using inefficient, non-passive onscroll, onresize and onorientationchange events with a bunch more MutationObserver and getBoundingclientRect() sprinkled in plus a generous helping of setInterval(..., 100) for UI polling? cause that's how things basically work today (and how the polyfill works). replacing all that junk with a normal, optimized API is exactly how it should be.

Isn't that changing the goalpost a little bit? I don't think anyone ever called Safari the new IE because of market dominance.

Personally, I compare it to IE because of how weird it can be. Does anyone else remember the time they broke file upload[1], even though those issues were found in beta[2]? Or about the time they changed meta viewport[3]?

Edit: Oh, the last link also remind me of the window.location change that utterly broke Angular/Ionic[4].

[1] https://blog.fineuploader.com/ios8-presents-serious-issues-t...

[2] https://github.com/FineUploader/fine-uploader/issues/1269 (I can't remember the Apple radar bug number(s))

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/3la04p/psa_safa...

[4] https://blog.ionicframework.com/ios-9-potential-breaking-cha...

> Can we finally stop saying safari is the new ie, and recognize that chrome is now literally the new IE?

I never said that, and chrome is not literally the new IE, no matter how poorly the word literally is misused.

Chromium is a free (a blend of BSD-style, MIT, GPL, and other generally regarded as free licences apply) piece of software that's performant, cross-platform, receives regular feature updates, rarely breaks backwards compatibility, and doesn't try to lock you into one vendor. Compare and contrast the history of IE.

Microsoft's (new) Edge is using Chromium.

> Seriously, this means that chrome has more or less complete market dominance at this point.

No it doesn't. This is hyperbole.

Why is Safari the new IE?

Safari increasingly doesn't follow standards, implements non-standard features, and updates are tied to OS updates so if users do not update their OS (which is free on macOS but not well advertised in the OS itself), they are stuck running an old browser.

This is incorrect. Safari 12 shipped with support for macOS 10.12 and 10.13 [1].

[1] - https://developer.apple.com/safari/whats-new/

Huh. That's changed, then, since previous updates were always tied to the OS. Still not great support, though. Chrome supports back to 10.10, Firefox back to 10.9, Vivaldi back to 10.10, Brave back to 10.10, etc.

There are multiple articles online from people claiming that Safari is the new Internet Explorer (IE) in terms of feature parity with other web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and specially due to the fact that Apple usually delays the release of certain HTML and JavaScript standards, making web development slightly more difficult for today’s web developers.

• https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267

• https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/

• https://www.telerik.com/blogs/safari-is-not-the-new-ie-but

• https://dev.to/nektro/safari-is-the-new-internet-explorer-1d...

• https://www.reddit.com/r/Frontend/comments/6zb73s/safari_is_...

• https://apple.slashdot.org/story/15/06/30/2251253/is-safari-...

• https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed...

• https://medium.com/@matthew.johnson/safari-is-the-new-ie-but...

I am a happy Safari user though :-)

At least on IOS you're stuck with safari/the system webview, so even if you make a web browser app (this includes chrome/firefox) they're using the safari engine.

The issue stems from the slow adoption of certain technologies. That was the issue everyone had with IE 6 - everyone used it but it lacked modern features so it sucked to use, but you had to because of it's market share.

“Being IE” has at least two meanings: a) having a market share so big that others do not care about the other browsers and b) being technically stagnant for years (though this may be looked at just as byproduct of #1).

So Chrome derivarives might fit first criteria but neither them nor Safari fits (yet) the second one. Yes, Safari development may be not as fast but it is still ongoing and the team is not disbanded.

The most evil thing Google is doong with their browser right now may be implementation of non-standard features which only help their business.