[twsted]

This is a story that you can often hear on HN but I don't think it's correct. There were three correlated reasons for the bad reputation of IE some years ago:

1. it was largely dominant, so people thought they could develop just taking that browser in consideration

2. for the previous point, MS started to develop proprietary features (like ActiveX)

3. at a certain point its development was stopped for a long time

Safari certainly cannot match the first two reasons. But it cannot match the third either, because the development of standard web features is going on at good pace (see <https://webkit.org/status/>).

[Ajedi32]

Those might be the reasons why users disliked IE, but the reason developers dislike IE were/are somewhat different:

1. It doesn't support many of the latest web standards

2. A large enough percentage of users use it that it can't be simply ignored

Both of those points apply to modern Safari. Less so to IE these days as #2 becomes less and less applicable; hence "Safari is the new IE".

[reader_mode]

Developers hated having to work around missing features for IE even when FF and Chrome took over the market, Safari is the exact same, except you can't even update the rendering engine on iOS, Apple doesn't want webapps to eat away at app store profit (notice how shitty and slow moving the webgl/webgpu thing has been mostly due to iOS Safari)

[spartanatreyu]

Counterpoints:

> Safari certainly cannot match the first two reasons.

1. Most users view websites on their phones. Safari is the only browser on iPhone (there are other browser skins, but they're all forced to run on top of Safari). The market share of iOS devices is usually about at least 50% in developed nations.

2. iOS has proprietary features, it is known as the App Store. If you want to develop certain things, you must use the app store, the browser is locked out of those features (even if all other browser vendors have them).

> But it cannot match the third either, because the development of standard web features is going on at good pace (see <https://webkit.org/status/>).

3. I probably don't need to go into this point since it's common knowledge that Safari has always been the least compliant browser in terms of web standards. Their history of holding back features or implementing features with critical flaws that make them useless has been a recurring trend for the last decade. Just because they have checked a box on a table, doesn't mean the feature is anything close to useable.

[no_way]

Right now but you can reasonably develop a website which will work in Chrome and Firefox even without testing (not talking about any supper modern features), but Safari is riddled with bugs you wouldn't expect. Recently I have encountered multiple bugs regarding svg clipping in safari. Safari 14 also broke localstorage and indexeddb it's almost funny how bad safari is at actually just working.

[iggldiggl]

My homepage is tiny and absolutely nothing fancy, but I've still managed to immediately run into at least two Chrome bugs.

[no_way]

Well I found some chrome bugs, but here is the thing after I reported them, they have been immediately responded to and fixed and released in nearest version. Safari though you have to wait a year for bug fixes to be released, if they even acknowledge you at all inside their bug tracker the only way to get Webkit people attention is tag them on twitter.