Maybe, maybe not. It's getting dangerously close to the modern day IE, where some websites just don't work right and everyone has to do arcane shit to make their websites cross platform.
It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.
> It's getting dangerously close to the modern day I.E.
This line gets thrown around a lot, but if you look at the supported features, Safari is honestly pretty up-to-date on the actual ratified web standards.
What it doesn't tend to do is implement a bunch of the (often ad-tech focused) drafts Google keeps trying to push through the standards committee
The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
You should probably think about that for a bit, in light of why IE was IE back in the day.
> The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.
No. Safari is the modern IE in the sense that it's the default browser on a widely used OS, and it's update cycle is tied to the update of the OS itself by the user, and it drags the web behind by many years because you cannot not support its captive user-base.
It's even worse than IE in a sense, because Apple prevents the existence of an alternative browser on that particular OS (every non-safari OSes on iOS are just a UI on top of Safari).
But this can only be by comparison to something. And Apple is very good at keeping Safari up to date on the actual standards. You know—the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
So if it's not Chrome, what is your basis for comparison??
> But this can only be by comparison to something.
The something being the other browsers. Chrome and Firefox. Safari was even behind the latest IE before the switch to Chromium by the way.
> the thing that IE was absolutely not doing, that made it a scourge of the web.
You're misremembering, IE also kept improving its support for modern standards. The two main problems were that it was always behind (like Safari) and that it people were still using old versions because it was tied to Windows, like Safari with iOS. When people don't update their iPhone because they know it will become slow as hell as soon as you use the new iOS version on an old iPhone or just because they don't want their UI to change AGAIN, they're stuck on an old version of Safari.