Admittedly Safari is like IE of old though, always behind on standards and broken. Apple wants you on native apps.

Google is so good at ad domination they have free space in your head. Safari has a different development process which considers privacy, power consumption, and other user-centric ideas instead of just “how do we beat everyone else down in order to have better ad dominion over the internet”. You talk of standards, but in the time of WHATWG there really aren’t any, just ideas that vendors may or may not implement. If something is in Chrome but both Safari and Firefox have rejected it, do you really consider that a standard?

This is a narrative (very heavily supported by google btw) that really needs to die.

Safari is decidedly neither behind nor as broken as the narrative suggests.

Safari ships about as many WebAPIs as Firefox does, and no one blames Firefox to be "behind on standards". More, Firefox is increasingly siding with Safari when deciding not to implement certain Chrome-only "standards".

Also see this nice take over at Quirksmode (and follow the links): https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...

Safari's slow release cadence (typically tied to OS version upgrades) does leave it more broken and for longer than Firefox, Chrome, Opera and other browsers that are updated more frequently and not tied to the OS.

just recently i ran into incompatibilities with Safari < 14 needing a shim due to still having the old-spec MediaQueryList api:

https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlot/issues/538#issuecomment-87...

> browsers that are updated more frequently and not tied to the OS.

This is true. Apple's inane insistence that everything has to be updated only once a year is truly baffling.

These past years Safari gets two releases per year, the big one with the release of MacOS in fall and a .1 spring release, adapting web technologies and sometimes extra releases tied to other Apple events and Apple proprietary APIs

I'm somewhat sceptical about evergreen browser, but that's mostly because I hate having the user interface changed under me without any action on my part. I would have hated to get the Safari 15 Beta just by opening my browser in the morning. A better update strategy seems to me to keep the big UI changes for a yearly update; but update the web engine somewhat more often, bi-monthly or so.

> A better update strategy seems to me to keep the big UI changes for a yearly update; but update the web engine somewhat more often, bi-monthly or so.

I can't emphasize strongly enough how much I agree with this.

>always behind on standards

That's awful!

Why can't we as a society add code to web browsers faster?

ADDED. I use sarcasm very sparingly, but in this case, I can't think of another way to make my point that is not a lot longer.