So we’re doing this? Instead of acknowledging your statement was incorrect, now it’s about how supposedly late Apple was in supporting the formats you said they didn’t support.

And no disrespect to Firefox, but them having WebP support 8 years ago (and AV1 support 3 years ago) in the big picture doesn’t matter that much outside of the web developer/HN/geek echo chamber and the single digit percent of market share Firefox represents. Nothing got held up; a properly designed site would fall back to JPEG or PNG if WebP wasn’t supported by a particular browser. Not the end of the world.

But when your device is in a “billion pockets y’all” it matters. That was true a few years ago when Oprah said it; it’s closer to two billion pockets (and desks and backpacks).

It’s pretty common on HN to trash Safari when it doesn't support web standards and then find another way to trash Safari when it does support those standards and then ignore Safari when it ships a feature first and pretend it didn’t happen or doesn’t matter.

A quick list of web features shipped first:

• first browser engine to implement the new color syntax defined in CSS Color Module Level 4

• first browser to support drawing shapes, text, gradients, and shadows with wide gamut CSS colors on Display P3 canvases

• first browser to ship a proposed web standard for measuring advertising in a privacy-preserving way – Private Click Measurement

• the only browser that supports lch() and lab() color functions (and probably the only browser to support these predefined color spaces: a98-rgb, prophoto-rgb, rec2020, xyz)

• first browser to ship large, small and dynamic viewport units

• first browser to ship :has() parent selector (March vs August 2022 and later for Google and Mozilla)

There are more but these are the most current ones after a few minutes of Googling. Depending on the use case, some of these may be critical to some web developers.

I get it—Safari being current and in some cases, ahead with their support of web standards that they, Google/Microsoft and Mozilla have agreed to—I’m discounting the proposals from Google when they ship stuff only they want/care about—doesn’t fit the prevailing HN narrative that “Safari is the new IE” and is holding the web back. Just objectively examining the state of the web back then would show how laughably ahistorical [1] this view is, but that’s where we are.

[1]: ahistorical—lacking historical perspective or context