When people start claiming that Safari is the new IE, dragging its feet, etc, I just point them to the WebKit blog. Apple just has different priorities and visions for the Web than Google.
It isn't like IE was completely lacking of innovation. To wit, div/span/XMLHttpRequest/BorderBox. Lots of things did come from there. I remember they used fieldset and legend in a much cleaner way, too.
The problem with IE was that they basically stopped after IE 6. The innovation was from before. After the release of IE 6, the IE team was basically disbanded, because MS thought they had won the browser wars (which at the time, they had). That was in 2001. IE 7 was only released in 2006, over five years later. And in 2008 Google released the first version of Chrome.
Well, that and it was Microsoft. They had an earned reputation for extend/extinguish. They have mostly shed it with VSCode, but I honestly can't see how. Seems to be in a very similar runbook to how they used to be?
They aren't led by exactly the same people as 20-30 years ago, so things do change a bit. Microsoft also isn't homogenous. They certainly haven't become Samaritans, however.
I was taking a quick check to see if I was correct on the div/span claim. I am actually not finding anything to corroborate that.
I also want to add that I have little love for IE. Same for some of the other things that Microsoft have done. I just find it odd the juxtaposition of why some of that behavior is fine today, as long as it is someone else doing it.
The defining characteristics of IE in the dark ages were that 1) it was ubiquitous 2) web sites developed to it and, instead of fixing sites in other browsers, they recommended its use over other browsers. You often couldn’t even log into your $WHATEVER from Mozilla on Linux, for example.
The modern analog to that is certainly not Safari.
Apple's vision is for the web to remain page-centric so it can't intrude on their walled garden.
But really, diverting this discussion to their technical progress (spotty as it is, they do have some there), misses the larger point: by banning non-webkit browsers from their platform, they're engaging in precisely the sort of anti-competitive behavior that Microsoft demonstrated.
Microsoft faced an antitrust lawsuit (United States v. Microsoft Corp) for embedding IE with Windows, which was seen as an abuse of their position in the OS/PC market to further their own stake in the web browser space.
Apple, in this case, is similarly seen as abusing its position in the US mobile market by not merely bundling Safari with iOS, but going a step further, and preventing any competition to its own browser by banning competing browser engines.
> Microsoft faced an antitrust lawsuit (United States v. Microsoft Corp) for embedding IE with Windows
For a whole range of processes leveraging and protecting the existing Windows monopoly against the threat posed by browsers, Java, and other applications, not just (or even primarily) for “embedding IE with Windows.”
The findings of fact regarding the MS antitrust violations are here availabld [0], bundling IE with Windows is part of bullet E (of A-I) under “Microsoft’s Response to the Browser Threat”.
So, your defense against it being accused of being like IE is to say its exactly like IE, but in the period of Netscape dominance, not the period of IE dominance?
