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Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

I hope not. Apple has had substandard support for modern web technologies in Safari for a long time, to the point where it is often referred to in the industry as the new IE. We've had enough of browsers breaking things that used to work in the name of false progress. Time for the grown-ups to take a careful look and see this for what it is.

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You realize that custom, new, cutting-edge APIs (can you imagine the web without xhr?) was what made IE into the IE we talk about. Some they got right, some they got wrong, some were way too tied into IE’s parent’s ecosystem (sound familiar, AMP?). It’s once it stopped getting updated that it became a problem, as no one else had or planned to have some of its stuff, resulting in it being an oddball. Chrome fits the first half of that profile far more than any other browser these days, it’s just that WHATWG being a “living standard” has enabled it to “standardize” any new idea that comes along (other browsers do this too, but not nearly as much as Chrome).

The point is that slowness to adopt new standards wasn’t exactly what made IE into the the IE we all hated; it was going off on tangents without consulting anybody too often that left it out on an island with custom versions of so many things. Fortunately it doesn’t seem like Google is going to lose interest on Chrome anytime soon.

It's not only custom cutting-edge APIs, there's a lot of common stuff which is broken in Safari, that's also why it's referred as the new IE. I personally had issues with forms, clicks, svgs, selects... It's really broken in many ways.

Chrome is the new IE in the embrace-and-extend sense (the early IE that won the browser war).

Safari is the new IE in the stagnating, not supporting new functionality, not fixing long-standing bugs sense (that same early IE several years later).

Neither of these is a good thing or to be encouraged.

Please don't get me started on the oxymoron that is "living standards". I think that idea is responsible for a great deal of what has gone wrong with the web ecosystem in recent years.

Here’s my take on what it is: the most battery-efficient browser. I’ll take 30 more minutes on my laptop before some nebulous modern web standard.

How does something like allowing data to be stored by a web app that isn't even being used for more than a week cause your laptop to lose 30 minutes of battery life?

It doesn't as the two have no connections whatsoever. The point was that Safari is the most battery efficient browser overall on MacOS, so they're willing to put up with sub-standard support for web standards if their battery lasts longer.

I'm sure it will be a great comfort of them to not be able to use their computer for useful things for a bit longer before they have to plug it in. :-)

Would you also take gradually losing access to other modern web standards apps rely on as time goes on until the only realistic option we have for building, deploying, and consuming apps are the walled gardens controlled by 2 corporations who have arbitrary rules on who can and can't participate, freely stifling innovation/competition as their interests dictate, and taking a more and more outrageous cut of all economic activity on the platform?

That's where this is going.

> "first they came for localStorage and I did nothing"

As an end user, I love it. I regret that it's making some things harder for legitimate developers, but love that it's making it harder for the assholes who keep trying to ruin the web.

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