[eitland]

No. This is a small but important detail: Chrome is the new IE.

IE wasn't mainly a problem because it didn't support things, rather because it was - in the beginning - superior, but also had all sorts of non standard behaviour that Microsoft pushed and that made competition crazy hard.

Oh, and also because they pushed it relentlessly in all ways including - as was later confirmed in court - illegal ways.

Exactly like Chrome today except the multi billion fine and forced changes to Chrome is still only barely visible in the horizon.

But we will keep pushing, won't we? For the record: I think I have contacted local authorities twice officialy over the last 18 months and maybe once over twitter. If two more people do the same here in Norway that is starting to make a difference.

Same if ten people in France or Germany do it. Or if someone makes a story that goes viral or reaches the headlines somehow.

Don't give up everyone! Chrome is an excellent browser but don't think for a moment that Google won't close it down the very moment it has finally crushed competition.

[thomasfortes]

Both are the new IE, one push features without caring about the rest of the ecosystem and the other refuses to implement standards without caring about the rest of the ecosystem.

The end result is that the web right now has stuff that works only on Chrome and stuff that works everywhere besides Safari.

And the fact that iOS users can't change their browser forces developers that want their projects to reach the maximum amount of users to have Safari as a baseline instead of the current standard, making Safari a de facto standard.

So yeah, I think that both are the new IE, just in different stages of the life of IE.

[tarsinge]

> the other refuses to implement standards without caring about the rest of the ecosystem

There is standard, and standard as previously Chrome only feature that Firefox felt pressured to implement and was then a posteriori made into a standard.

[mannerheim]

Pretty much every browser except Safari supports WebGL2

[thamer]

The WebKit commit is over 8 months old already: "Enable WebGL2 by default", Sep 14, 2020 – from https://trac.webkit.org/changeset/267027/webkit

CanIUse reports that it's only available in Safari Technology Preview for now, which is a macOS program: https://www.caniuse.com/webgl2

With WWDC 2021 only ~9 days away, one can hope that they'll announce its support on all platforms in the next major release. If it was already "good enough" last September…

[mannerheim]

I was aware it was in Safari Technology Preview, but I wouldn't really count a feature in a beta release as being available. And who knows when it will be available on iOS.

[jpttsn]

Honest question: Do we have any scroll vs. marquee type situations today?

Because (Unpopular): I believe the standard should primarily cover how the overlapping functionality works, and refrain from limiting or prescribing the extent of functionality.

Comparing: If I build a HTTP API, I don’t have to support the DELETE verb for any endpoints. I can support ENCHANT if I want magic that other servers don’t have. But if I use GET, the endpoint handler should be idempotent. That’s the kind of standard I appreciate.

I don’t see any realistic win-win otherwise. Either you hold Chrome back from implementing new crap, or you force Safari to implement stuff they don’t want to. The efficient number of browser vendors seems to be small, so I think the standard body has just overplayed it’s hand.

[jefftk]

> Because (Unpopular): I believe the standard should primarily cover how the overlapping functionality works, and refrain from limiting or prescribing the extent of functionality ... the standard body has just overplayed it’s hand.

But that is how web standards work already? Vendors are not prohibited from adding additional functionality.

[jpttsn]

A lot of comments say Safari is not implementing web standards, by virtue of not implementing e.g. push notifications.

[jefftk]

Those comments are correct: there are many web standards that Safari has either decided not to implement, or has not gotten around to yet. A browser doesn't have to implement a new feature just because it has been standardized.

[realusername]

> No. This is a small but important detail: Chrome is the new IE.

In terms of market share and market power yes it's comparable, in term of tech issues, not really no, it's not even close. Chrome has a very good rendering engine, there's a few quirks here and there, I might have encountered some strange logic once or twice but that's about it.

Safari on the other hand is really comparable in terms of tech issues and the main problem is that you can't even tell people to upgrade on iOS since they are stuck with it.

[matsemann]

> in term of tech issues, not really no, it's not even close

It's not about tech issues. It's about pushing non-standard behavior. There are so many things Chrome implement and people start using, that other browsers have then to call them "standard" and make a similar implementation.

But even worse, since Google also is controlling some of the biggest websites, they can use this functionality and cripple other browsers for not supporting their "standards". Like YT has been horrendously slow on Fx for years. Not based on Fx being slow, but YT having implementation details that happen to work well on their own browser..

[eitland]

> in term of tech issues, not really no, it's not even close.

Like with IE that is the next step.

Once competition is utterly crushed, do you think Google "can defend" using tens of millions a year on this?

Microsoft "could not" and they have a much stronger history of maintaining stuff.

Why then would I think that a company that cannot even properly maintain their main public facing property, the search engine?

You know it used to be superior, today it is utterly meh, and no it isn't search spam sites, it is failing to acknowledge doublequotes and the verbatim setting. A billion spam sites cannot break that. Lack of competition can though.

[schnable]

I dunno, Safari uses a ton less memory and CPU on my MacBook Pro.