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Comment by grishka | Hacker News Reader

As someone who hasn't done web development for a long time and then tried it again recently — no, the one close to being IE6 is Safari. It took them 5 whole years to add support for webp. It's the reason why I still have to serve jpegs from my website. They take some nonsense amount of time to implement APIs that Chromium and Firefox had for years, too, like WAAPI. And you don't have the option to not support Safari either, because that's the only browser on iOS.

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...Except, isn't that exactly the point of having competing browsers? WebP was pushed heavily by Google and because google has such a massive market share, it became a 'standard.' Google has been leveraging its position as the dominant market leader in the browser market to push its technologies and forcing competing browsers to support it or receive reduced functionality. It's the same story for 4k video on youtube.

WebP simply offers more effective compression than the ages-old jpeg. That's it. Apple has its own HEIC as a competing format, but that didn't really take off.

...which one might attribute to the fact that it's not supported on chrome, the vastly more popular web browser. I really don't see how you can argue that Safari is the new IE6 when it is slow to adopt standards that Google just decided are now web standards.

A healthy ecosystem should allow for innovations to take place from Apple, Google, and Mozilla and look at what sticks. As it stands now, Mozilla and Apple occasionally make new contributions to web standards but anything that chrome pushes effectively becomes one without any input from another company and that's kind of problematic.

WebP is Google, but HEIC is not Apple, it's an actual standard: ISO/IEC 23008-12 (MPEG-H). Apple just adopted it.

So it's Chrome that doesn't implement a standard, and Safari that doesn't implement an ad-hoc competitor technology.

Isn't HEVC, and by extension HEIC, a patent minefield, like everything that comes out of MPEG? And also webp came out before HEVC was finalized iirc.

I share your opinion of Safari, but I think something better than webp is coming next year, and Google is one of its backers: JPEG XL: https://cloudinary.com/blog/how_jpeg_xl_compares_to_other_im...

>It took them 5 whole years to add support for webp

Why should they? It was a thing pushed and created by Google.

We might as well just have Chronium then it Google's whims become de facto/jure web standards implemented by all...

> no, the one close to being IE6 is Safari.

Google Chrome was compared to IE6 as being close to having 'the monopoly position as a browser'.

Indeed, Internet Explorer peaked at ~95% global browser market share in 2003-4 (when IE6 was the dominant version). Safari currently has <10% of the browser market share on desktop, <20% including mobile [1].

Sorry, Safari is nowhere close to being IE6 from this perspective.

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

And thank God for that. I hope Apple keeps web devs in check for many years to come.

Btw, I’m a web dev myself.

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