> The idea that Safari is anywhere near what IE was is ludicrous.

People forget that Microsoft disbanded the IE dev team from 2001 for at least 5 years - IE6 remained unchanged from 2001 to 2006 and received absolutely no feature updates, HTML rendering or JavaScript engine changes during that time (though there were security patches). The next version of IE wasn't until IE7 was released to coincide with Windows Vista in early 2007.

5 years between major versions! No browser since then, developed by Google or Apple (and even now, Microsoft) has had a gap that long without feature updates.