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A comment on Safari is the new IE. Parent comment

Re:Safari is the new IE by jfoster on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @09:55AM (#9805186)
If it lacks very basic functionality, isn't the effect the same as breaking the web?

I think one unfortunate aspect of the article is that it focuses on some of the less common deficiencies of Safari. I would have called out mobile Safari being unable to download files, or Apple's insistence against video codecs that all other vendors are aligned in agreement on when it comes to video.

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Re:Safari is the new IE by adamlett on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @11:28AM (#9805967)
> If it lacks very basic functionality, isn't the effect the same as breaking the web?

No. If what worked before continues to work, it means it's not broken.

Also: What "very basic functionality" doesn't the latest versions of Safari support?

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Re:Safari is the new IE by magicalist on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @02:20PM (#9807350)
> No. If what worked before continues to work, it means it's not broken

IE6 continues to work fine for what it supported originally as well.

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Re:Safari is the new IE by jfoster on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @09:16PM (#9809458)
Well, I mentioned the two that I am most keenly aware of. I only know what I've come across, so I'm assuming there's lots more.

To my knowledge, file downloads worked in all browsers prior to mobile Safari being initially released. So Apple did release a browser that broke some quite basic web functionality.

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Re:Safari is the new IE by adamlett on Wednesday July 01, 2015 @07:31AM (#9811173)
I don't know how I missed that part of of your post. Sorry about that. Still. I find it quite a stretch to argue that not supporting file downloads "breaks" the web. Users don't perceive websites to be broken just because they can't download files. It would be akin to claiming that a device with no camera breaks the web by not supporting the camera API. Or that the Lynx browser breaks the web by not supporting CSS and JavaScript.

Regarding Apple's insistence on not supporting Ogg (Vorbis|Theora) (I assume that's what you're alluding to), those codecs were briefly recommended by the HTML5 standard, but were later dropped.[1] Again, I think its a stretch to say that Apple broke anything, simply because they resisted a proposed standard. I know a lot of developers were disappointed, but that's how committees work: You don't always get it your way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Ogg_formats_in_HTML5

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