That comparison has always been nonsense. People can't keep pretending like ActiveX was the same thing as, say, WebMIDI, or that stuff like WebMIDI is Chrome's "moat". Chrome simply has superior, less buggy support for basic, uncontroversial web APIs, the kind that every browser maker agrees on. Look at the massive gap in Interop 2025, possibly the most conservative Interop yet (due to Apple's constant behind-the-scenes vetoing). It's not magic. Google invests more in their browser, and the Chromium codebase attract more contributions from a wider variety of companies. And Firefox has exponentially fewer issues than Safari anyway (which is deliberate, Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store monopoly).
> Apple wants to cripple the web and favor its App Store monopoly
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 like the work and advocacy of Jen Simmons too, but without the large infusion of cash (on the order of $20B) from Google, why wouldn't Apple downsize the Safari team and force her out?
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.
It last happened with Safari when it was the overwhelming majority of mobile traffic market share. That was even a meme for a while in the web developer community around 2010-2015 or so: "Safari is the new IE."
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.
> ...pressure Apple to catch up to Google's 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.
During the "Safari is the new IE" era though, Apple had created all sorts of proprietary extensions to make websites more mobile-friendly... a whole slew of nonstandard `-webkit-*` prefixed CSS properties and DOM events.
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.
Firefox has been my goto browser for years but recently I've noticed it screwing things up, most notable when viewing source code in github. The text highlighting gets broken somehow.
Then it’s GitHub fault, because hihglighting works everywhere else. When has it becomes the default to blame the platform because some program have bad code?
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.
Obviously they are not talking about the difference between the two browsers, but between the two situations. Your post looks like you chose the least charitable interpretation in order to pick a fight.
The two situations are also totally different: Chrome has been far better for the Web than IE ever was, and the reason Firefox is still keeping up is that it got that money from Google.
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.
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.