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Comment by Dahoon | Hacker News Reader

The new IE.

Wouldn’t that be Chrome? The ubiquity leads to lazy developers testing only on it. Maybe some fancy SVGs saying “Best viewed on Chrome!” To really rub it in :)

> SVGs saying “Best viewed on Chrome!”

HA! Chrome absolutely SUCKS at displaying SVGs. I rarely use them and I've already found two stupid bugs.

One super weird one (probably too much caching) where an animated element in a <use> clone didn't inherit colours while its non-animated siblings do. This one is fixed now.

What isn't fixed yet is that `filter: hue-rotate(90deg)` applied to an SVG child element doesn't do anything (in firefox it does), is a pain in the ass because SVG filters, while more powerful, are much harder to set up.

SVG filter support in Chromium is actively being worked on, primarily led by an incredible engineer at Opera (fs@opera.com). This work has been ongoing for almost a year and should complete in Q4. Please star https://crbug.com/109224 for updates (stars also help prioritization).

Safari also has its share of SVG bugs, like this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31150919/svg-background-...

Going to codepen this later and see what’s up. I haven’t used them beyond toy setups since it’s usually a hassle, I always get inspired by the Stripe site.

No, the definition of "the new IE" is to not support the latest features.

Pick some other phrase for "most popular"

The definition of "the new IE" is not not supporting the latest features (IE had plenty of "new" features—see e.g. filters, VML, XMLHttpRequest). The issue with IE was that it supported it's own proprietary features without consultation nor coordination with competitors. Something it was only able to do due to its market monopoly.

Yes, Chrome does this too.

It's slightly better in that it tends to submit them to standards bodies after implementing them, but most of the time that's WHATWG which is a much less democratic body than others, and mostly Google-led. Either way Chrome's market monopoly leave competitors with little choice in the standards process.

Yeah "web standards" my ass - with WHATWG 100% just being Chrome devs, and W3C a pay-as-you-go wannabe "standardization body" financed by Google (and long out of the game of doing anything meaningful except CSS) so-called web standards are more of a monopolization and extortion instrument than anything else. Web heads seriously need to wake up rather than making it ever more complicated.

he is 100% right that IE's ubiquity is what caused the problem to begin with. well, that and microsoft getting arrogant because of it.

You mean the common JS environment that doesn’t support fetch, Node?

Very disingenuous of you. IE was a trashfire because it refused to do anything in a standard way, meaning it had to be specially catered for. Safari is slow to follow the standards but at least its compliant. A engine that isn't Chrome is very essential for keeping the web open, especially since Firefox user share keeps going down.

Safari has absolutely ignored standards when it suits apple. That's why, for example, you can't rely on PWAs on Apple products.

IE actually created many of the standards we take for granted like XMLHttpRequest. [1] It was the innovator for a long time until priorities changed and the IE team was disbanded leading to the stagnation.

Microsoft definitely takes the blame in keeping it poor for so long but this situation is nothing like Safari which has refused to implement standards that already exist, as well as messing with others in unintuitive ways.

1. https://schepp.dev/posts/today-the-trident-era-ends/

A browser engine that's primarily used on platforms where it's mandatory, and cannot be uninstalled or replaced, is "very essential for keeping the web open"?

ie was also a trashfire because of the release/update model, holding the entire web back because it was so far behind standards (ie6 was actually ahead of its time on release, but then didn't get updated for ages). safari, especially on ios where you can't even get any other browser engines, and the safari version is tied to the operating system version, follows that same model with the same consequences. not as painful these days, since the web has come a long way already, but you can definitely see the parallels

unsure what part of this is cause for downvoting-- it is absolutely correct. it's not even invalidating other peoples' observations. people are weird (or ignorant (or both))...

edit: oh and i guess now that i upvoted it it's not grey anymore xD

Safari has a lot of issues outside of just being behind the standards. I've encountered background and z-index jank, form issues, SVG issues and even mouse event issues. If you are a web developer, there's a good chance your codebase has Safari bugfixes.

slow to follow the standards

Safari is not only slow to follow the standards, it is slow to advance the standards. I'd be more likely to believe the spin that Apple just wants to make sure things are done well on the web if it appeared that they were trying as hard to add good, new capabilities to the web platform as they are to add good, new capabilities to iOS.

A engine that isn't Chrome is very essential for keeping the web open

Also essential is for the open web to be competitive with closed alternatives, or the fact that it's open will matter less and less. Apple is quite willing to provide competition for Chrome. It does it with iOS.

Apple is only able to do this because of the monopoly of browser engines for 1.5 billion iOS devices. If they allowed (or were forced to allow) other browser engines then likely a large number of users would switch to another browser, forcing Apple to compete for features.

What's that say about the quality of Safari then?

How quickly people forget who brought canvas, CSS animations, etc.

Firefox and Chrome still don't agree on how tables should work.

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