We'll have buggy, unsafe, slow browsers with diverging standards and we'll like it.
Maybe you're happy that sites have started to only work properly in Chrome, but I'm not.
Do you know when that last happened? When they only worked in Internet Explorer. I fail to see the difference.
You don't see any difference between Internet Explorer and Chrome?
Did you actually ever try developing anything with IE, or are you just failing to see the difference between something you do see and something you failed to see?
It think it's pretty safe to say that Chrome is objectively better than IE. Even Microsoft saw that.
If you want to talk about what their differences are, or how important it is that they're different, then go right ahead, but if you fail to see the difference, I don't think you have much to contribute to this conversation from your willfully self blindfolded perspective.
If we decide that Web innovation is done in the browser, and it all has to move to Javascript libraries again, the way we did when browser innovation stalled in the 2000s and we got jQuery, so be it, I suppose.
It took years for Android's growth to make it a credible second browser for mobile devs to care about, and to pressure Apple to catch up to web standards faster.
Ftfy.
Safari is the only brake we have in this rush towards complex and unmaintainable web, with Google (the only company which can afford to play this game) at the helm. So no, Safari not supporting some random new feature is not a bad thing.
I can't say for sure whether pressure from Google got all that stuff migrated into real web standards faster or not, but it sure felt at the time like it was having that effect.
While I agree that this is probably true at the BOD level, the people working on the browser itself go in the opposite direction. They spend a lot of effort trying to actually develop a robust standard. Jen Simmons has been kicking ass since she went to work on Safari and I'm here for it. If she leaves or is forced out, I will be much more skeptical about the pushback offered by Apple.
The Interop 20XX projects are a great first start and I'm hopefully that feature parity will continue to increase over the next few years.
I worry about the jobs of all browser devs in fact. The pace of innovation in web and browser technologies will significantly slow down. All browser teams are likely to be downsized.
You write this with a straight face after giving WebMIDI as an example.
At least with less money they'll be able to fuck everything up slower.