Comment by JimDabell
2 years ago
The biggest threat to the open web is Chrome’s dominance. Firefox is dwindling away and even Mozilla doesn’t seem to care about it, leaving Safari the only thing stopping Chrome from completely taking over. Google are already executing the Embrace & Extend playbook with non-standard functionality.
Everybody who says “Safari is the new IE” seems to be too young to know what IE and front-end web development were really like during the 00s. I’d take WebKit on iOS over a Blink monoculture any day, and so should any web developer.
No argument from me, I disregard anyone who says “Safari is the new IE” as someone who doesn’t know better but claim to do, or someone who is just trolling. I had to work with both IE on Mac and IE6 on Windows, Safari is not even remotely close to the isolated non-conforming nightmare it was back then. It’s also a bit terrifying how many seem to think Chrome gets it right all the time, even when they blatantly ignore standards or leave implementations with bugs for what feels like forever. But they get away with it since they’re so big, just like Microsoft did with IE.
I don’t know what the solution would be, not like you can mandate the existence of a web browser engine into existence and making one gets harder for every new thing added.