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> The idea of IE being purely an "outdated" browser seems to be one perpetuated by young devs reading & misunderstanding old blogposts. That’s certainly not tr

> The idea of IE being purely an "outdated" browser seems to be one perpetuated by young devs reading & misunderstanding old blogposts. That’s certainly not true: it was indeed outdated for much of its life. Yes, through IE6, it did things differently; beyond that point, though, it simply fell behind. It stopped evolving in any meaningful way—with the possible exception of tabs being introduced in IE7–while other browsers continued innovating. From IE6 through IE11, Internet Explorer wasn’t just doing things differently; it was truly behind. Tasks that could be achieved without JavaScript in other browsers requires JavaScript (or worse) in IE. Eye candy like gradients? Maybe you could get away with some of IE’s custom CSS extensions, but you had to get lucky or change your design. I may be young by your standards, but I vividly remember developing for IE5 and IE6. I even remember changing my plans for a project when Chrome was announced. IE really isn’t that old.

Silhouette 5y ago
I have been building websites since some time last century. I was there during the first browser wars. I was there for the first versions of those browsers! And I agree almost entirely with the complaints throughout this discussion about how outdated IE became and how lacking Safari now is. It's true that IE6 took more flak than it really deserved because people forget how good it was for the time when it first became available. But you can't seriously claim that IE didn't fall far behind as newer browsers developed and eventually took over. You just can't. And you can't seriously claim that Safari isn't falling far behind in the same way today.
- lucideer 5y ago
  > It's true that IE6 took more flak than it really deserved because people forget how good it was for the time when it first became available. This makes the same mistake as many sibling commenters here in that it equates "new features" with "good". You're making out that IE6 didn't deserve flak in the early days because it had innovative new (non-standard, incompatible) features. You're making out that this was somehow a good thing. It wasn't. This was the cause of IE6 problems. The general argument in comments is that IE5.5 / IE6 ~circa 2000-2004 was not problematic; that it only became problematic later due to the lack of updates or new features. In fact, the problems were present from the start: in 2004 developers were developing exclusively for IE6, putting "works in IE" badges at the bottom of their pages and excluding all Opera & Firebird users. This was then exacerbated by the lack of updates to IE, but again–the reason this became more problematic wasn't because IE wasn't updated, it's because IE was different in the first place. In ways that are unlike Safari today. > you can't seriously claim that Safari isn't falling far behind in the same way today I can seriously claim it because it's fundamentally different: Safari is falling behind in a standards-compliant, consistent, detectable and progressively-enhanceable way. IE6 differed radically from specifications when released, and then proceeded to fall behind in fixing this divergence. What I'm pointing out is that IE6 falling behind would not have been a massive problem if it hadn't first diverged radically from agreed compatibility with other browsers. The box-model is the biggest example: specifying any padding AT ALL in CSS in 2005 meant you were making a choice between showing the specified padding correctly in IE, or in every other browser. Without brittle hacks discovered by tireless volunteers, there was no way around this: the same property did radically different things in IE vs others. In 2021, if Safari doesn't support a feature, it doesn't support it: the property simply does nothing (neither useful nor harmful). Yes, maybe there are exceptions for edge-case bugs but these are fixed in patch releases, since (unlike IE6's different "features"), they're actually considered bugs by Apple.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    This makes the same mistake as many sibling commenters here in that it equates "new features" with "good". No. You seem to be reading that into something I wrote but it's not what I actually said. New features are certainly important. There is no progress in the capabilities of the Web platform without them and our requirements for web sites and applications today are far more demanding than they were a decade or two ago. However adding new features is not the only thing that matters in a browser. The quality of implementation also matters. For years Chrome was pushing support for new CSS3 features that we take for granted today like rounded corners and gradients. Unfortunately the rendering in Chrome when you used those features often looked like some kind of poorly blended, poorly aliased, low-res bitmap from the 1980s so if you wanted a professional-looking site you still had to use images anyway. Safari is falling behind in a standards-compliant, consistent, detectable and progressively-enhanceable way. No, it isn't. It has had numerous problems where it didn't even follow standard behaviour or have a good quality of implementation for features that it did claim to support. Maybe you've been lucky enough to avoid them, although I don't see how you could have worked on more than the simplest of web sites and interactive features on iOS devices without running into some of the more common problems. The box-model is the biggest example: specifying any padding AT ALL in CSS in 2005 meant you were making a choice between showing the specified padding correctly in IE, or in every other browser. Without brittle hacks discovered by tireless volunteers, there was no way around this: the same property did radically different things in IE vs others. Maybe not the most convincing example. IE's behaviour on this one was much more logical and useful than the standard definition. Web developers today typically use CSS features that were added later to use IE's box model by choice. But also not the most convincing example because you're talking about several years after IE6 came out. As many of us have said throughout this discussion, the problem with IE wasn't so much what it did at the time IE6 was released, at which point IE was completely dominant in browser market share, but that afterwards it didn't keep up with other browsers as they gained share as well and didn't improve its standards compliance as those standards started to matter more. In 2021, if Safari doesn't support a feature, it doesn't support it: the property simply does nothing (neither useful nor harmful). I wish that were so. It would be preferable to what we have today, which includes both missing features and present features with poor quality of implementation. Let us know when rotating an iPhone between portrait and landscape reliably handles basic responsive design properly instead of doing its own strange scaling that often leaves some parts of a page wildly out of proportion with others. I've lost count of how many days I've wasted working around iOS Safari issues in just that one area alone.
lucideer 5y ago
> That’s certainly not true: it was indeed outdated for much of its life. I left a more substantive comment deeper in this thread, but just want to correct this small point: we're not disagreeing, you've misread the line you quoted. Note the qualifier "purely". I'm not saying it wasn't outdated, I'm just saying the fact it was outdated wasn't the sole cause of problems. (i.e. I'm saying that being outdated doesn't cause problems: being both outdated AND deliberately incompatible does. Safari is only outdated)
the_other 5y ago
You’re holding on too tight to an argument for the sake of analogy. It’s cute and evocative but it’s blinding you to the bigger picture. The issues with Google monopolising the direction of standards development are the major issue facing browsers, users and developers on the web, today. I get that you’re disappointed Safari doesn’t support the same stuff, the same way as Chrome. Tough. You’re attempting to develop and deploy to a platform with backwards comparability baked into its design and development process. If you want to use the new shiny, do so, but accept what you’re doing carries the risks it has and work that into your strategy. You can hope Safari will implement what you want, but unless you’re contributing to Webkit, or on a W3C committee, you don’t have much skin in that game. As a web developer you should be considering the needs of your users first. Some of your users could be on Lynx, on that browser which comes with Haiku, on a shitty phone from 8 years ago. THAT’s the web.
- admax88q 5y ago
  That's absurd. I'm not targetting Lynx, Haiku, or 8 year old shitty phones. Nor are most web developers. And the attitude that you must support those things is detrimental to the web. It makes people feel like they're doing it wrong of they don't spend all their time chasing those rare edge cases. Which if you're trying to start something new, can kill your productivity. I'd rather have web developers target the common platforms only, than have those developers give up and switch to native apps.
  - csydas 5y ago
    I don't think it's about such things, it's about pushing features that are developer convenient but not really user convenient. I'm on an older MacOS version with Safari 12 (too lazy to update, but that's on me), and there are sites that work just fine one day and then break the next because they changed how they want to load random content for their forever scrolling. I'm sure there's a business case for the development team, but as a user, all I see is that what worked just fine for users before is now broken. The same happens with Firefox too because of Chrome-focused optimizations that a lot of sites seem to make don't always work with Firefox. For me as a user, I don't see it as Safari/FF holding developers back, I see that because of some unknown benefit, I'm being corralled into using Chrome. I make my peace and just don't visit sites that decide on such changes, but the benefit for me as a user for these changes is completely non-apparent. It's very tempting to write it off as "it's convenient for the devs" due to lack of any relevant information on why such changes are made.

Silhouette 5y ago

I have been building websites since some time last century. I was there during the first browser wars. I was there for the first versions of those browsers! And I agree almost entirely with the complaints throughout this discussion about how outdated IE became and how lacking Safari now is. It's true that IE6 took more flak than it really deserved because people forget how good it was for the time when it first became available. But you can't seriously claim that IE didn't fall far behind as newer browsers developed and eventually took over. You just can't. And you can't seriously claim that Safari isn't falling far behind in the same way today.

lucideer 5y ago
> It's true that IE6 took more flak than it really deserved because people forget how good it was for the time when it first became available. This makes the same mistake as many sibling commenters here in that it equates "new features" with "good". You're making out that IE6 didn't deserve flak in the early days because it had innovative new (non-standard, incompatible) features. You're making out that this was somehow a good thing. It wasn't. This was the cause of IE6 problems. The general argument in comments is that IE5.5 / IE6 ~circa 2000-2004 was not problematic; that it only became problematic later due to the lack of updates or new features. In fact, the problems were present from the start: in 2004 developers were developing exclusively for IE6, putting "works in IE" badges at the bottom of their pages and excluding all Opera & Firebird users. This was then exacerbated by the lack of updates to IE, but again–the reason this became more problematic wasn't because IE wasn't updated, it's because IE was different in the first place. In ways that are unlike Safari today. > you can't seriously claim that Safari isn't falling far behind in the same way today I can seriously claim it because it's fundamentally different: Safari is falling behind in a standards-compliant, consistent, detectable and progressively-enhanceable way. IE6 differed radically from specifications when released, and then proceeded to fall behind in fixing this divergence. What I'm pointing out is that IE6 falling behind would not have been a massive problem if it hadn't first diverged radically from agreed compatibility with other browsers. The box-model is the biggest example: specifying any padding AT ALL in CSS in 2005 meant you were making a choice between showing the specified padding correctly in IE, or in every other browser. Without brittle hacks discovered by tireless volunteers, there was no way around this: the same property did radically different things in IE vs others. In 2021, if Safari doesn't support a feature, it doesn't support it: the property simply does nothing (neither useful nor harmful). Yes, maybe there are exceptions for edge-case bugs but these are fixed in patch releases, since (unlike IE6's different "features"), they're actually considered bugs by Apple.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  This makes the same mistake as many sibling commenters here in that it equates "new features" with "good". No. You seem to be reading that into something I wrote but it's not what I actually said. New features are certainly important. There is no progress in the capabilities of the Web platform without them and our requirements for web sites and applications today are far more demanding than they were a decade or two ago. However adding new features is not the only thing that matters in a browser. The quality of implementation also matters. For years Chrome was pushing support for new CSS3 features that we take for granted today like rounded corners and gradients. Unfortunately the rendering in Chrome when you used those features often looked like some kind of poorly blended, poorly aliased, low-res bitmap from the 1980s so if you wanted a professional-looking site you still had to use images anyway. Safari is falling behind in a standards-compliant, consistent, detectable and progressively-enhanceable way. No, it isn't. It has had numerous problems where it didn't even follow standard behaviour or have a good quality of implementation for features that it did claim to support. Maybe you've been lucky enough to avoid them, although I don't see how you could have worked on more than the simplest of web sites and interactive features on iOS devices without running into some of the more common problems. The box-model is the biggest example: specifying any padding AT ALL in CSS in 2005 meant you were making a choice between showing the specified padding correctly in IE, or in every other browser. Without brittle hacks discovered by tireless volunteers, there was no way around this: the same property did radically different things in IE vs others. Maybe not the most convincing example. IE's behaviour on this one was much more logical and useful than the standard definition. Web developers today typically use CSS features that were added later to use IE's box model by choice. But also not the most convincing example because you're talking about several years after IE6 came out. As many of us have said throughout this discussion, the problem with IE wasn't so much what it did at the time IE6 was released, at which point IE was completely dominant in browser market share, but that afterwards it didn't keep up with other browsers as they gained share as well and didn't improve its standards compliance as those standards started to matter more. In 2021, if Safari doesn't support a feature, it doesn't support it: the property simply does nothing (neither useful nor harmful). I wish that were so. It would be preferable to what we have today, which includes both missing features and present features with poor quality of implementation. Let us know when rotating an iPhone between portrait and landscape reliably handles basic responsive design properly instead of doing its own strange scaling that often leaves some parts of a page wildly out of proportion with others. I've lost count of how many days I've wasted working around iOS Safari issues in just that one area alone.

lucideer 5y ago

> That’s certainly not true: it was indeed outdated for much of its life. I left a more substantive comment deeper in this thread, but just want to correct this small point: we're not disagreeing, you've misread the line you quoted. Note the qualifier "purely". I'm not saying it wasn't outdated, I'm just saying the fact it was outdated wasn't the sole cause of problems. (i.e. I'm saying that being outdated doesn't cause problems: being both outdated AND deliberately incompatible does. Safari is only outdated)

the_other 5y ago

You’re holding on too tight to an argument for the sake of analogy. It’s cute and evocative but it’s blinding you to the bigger picture. The issues with Google monopolising the direction of standards development are the major issue facing browsers, users and developers on the web, today. I get that you’re disappointed Safari doesn’t support the same stuff, the same way as Chrome. Tough. You’re attempting to develop and deploy to a platform with backwards comparability baked into its design and development process. If you want to use the new shiny, do so, but accept what you’re doing carries the risks it has and work that into your strategy. You can hope Safari will implement what you want, but unless you’re contributing to Webkit, or on a W3C committee, you don’t have much skin in that game. As a web developer you should be considering the needs of your users first. Some of your users could be on Lynx, on that browser which comes with Haiku, on a shitty phone from 8 years ago. THAT’s the web.

admax88q 5y ago
That's absurd. I'm not targetting Lynx, Haiku, or 8 year old shitty phones. Nor are most web developers. And the attitude that you must support those things is detrimental to the web. It makes people feel like they're doing it wrong of they don't spend all their time chasing those rare edge cases. Which if you're trying to start something new, can kill your productivity. I'd rather have web developers target the common platforms only, than have those developers give up and switch to native apps.
- csydas 5y ago
  I don't think it's about such things, it's about pushing features that are developer convenient but not really user convenient. I'm on an older MacOS version with Safari 12 (too lazy to update, but that's on me), and there are sites that work just fine one day and then break the next because they changed how they want to load random content for their forever scrolling. I'm sure there's a business case for the development team, but as a user, all I see is that what worked just fine for users before is now broken. The same happens with Firefox too because of Chrome-focused optimizations that a lot of sites seem to make don't always work with Firefox. For me as a user, I don't see it as Safari/FF holding developers back, I see that because of some unknown benefit, I'm being corralled into using Chrome. I make my peace and just don't visit sites that decide on such changes, but the benefit for me as a user for these changes is completely non-apparent. It's very tempting to write it off as "it's convenient for the devs" due to lack of any relevant information on why such changes are made.