I and every single other webdev I've known from the early aughts would immediately offer to buy this person a beer upon hearing this story in person. Those claiming that safari is the new chrome just don't understand how bad IE was at the time.
I suffered in the IE6 times, understood how bad it is, but still claim otherwise; when we're saying that Safari is the new IE/the new Chrome, it's with good reason. We've recognized that a piece of history is repeating itself, and it's pretty sad that it gets handwaved away or dismissed, just because people happen to have bought into its ecosystem.
I don't think that's a fair take. Plenty of us are developing webapps for safari/chrome/firefox, are barely ever consider browser differences. I think a lot of credit for this also goes to a wealth of high quality css/js frameworks that abstract what minor differences exist these days, rather than apple.
It's worth also considering what specifically was bad about the IE dominance era in order to understand how it maps to our current situation. IMO it wasn't just that IE was bad (of course it was), but that its usage share was _dominant_. That doesn't come close to reflecting the current state of mobile browser usage: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...
Worldwide Safari is a minority player. In the US (probably the best case), safari holds a slight majority at 55%, and the other 45% are likely almost entirely blink. At one point (early NS6/pre-phoenix), IE had something like 95% usage, and closer to 99% for corporate usage.
Just this afternoon, I witnessed one elder tech teaching another elder tech how to enable IE mode on Windows 11 because that is the only way to get a particular hardware-based NVR to be viewable.
The NVR has 2023 firmware.
I haven't had to target a specific browser for any CSS in years. I honestly don't know what people are trying to do that would require this now days. Grids, flexbox, animations, transitions no issues and don't even need browser prefixes. The only thing that I can think of that still requires a browser prefix in safari is -webkit-backdrop-filter. Maybe I'm just not doing super out there stuff I guess.
I've experienced bugs in forms, SVG support, border-radius, z-index and indexDB, none of those are cutting edge.
The compatibility table tells you only half of the story with Safari.
Various CSS and JS shims to get anything close to modern. Ugh. Not as bad as the v4 browser days, but close.
Oh my goodness, yes.
Netscape 4 was especially bad. Trying to do anything interesting with CSS was playing with fire -- sometimes it'd work, sometimes it'd break, sometimes it'd crash the browser entirely, and there was no way to tell which one you'd get.