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This “the new IE” meme is getting sillier by the WebKit Technology Preview release cycle and has been silly for two whole Safari release cycles now. The WebKit

This “the new IE” meme is getting sillier by the WebKit Technology Preview release cycle and has been silly for two whole Safari release cycles now. The WebKit team has significantly expanded and isn’t only bringing compatibility up to date at a rapid clip but shipping some highly anticipated APIs first. I objectively would prefer other browser engines were available on iOS, but at the moment that would just mean further entrenchment of Chrome/Blink, which I don’t think would be better. I’m happy to see WebKit continue to improve and embrace the open standards that benefit the web. It’s gonna take some time but given the options I think patience is a better option than ushering in Google’s total dominance of browser technology.

kevincox 4y ago
This sounds very much like IE. 1. Microsoft stopped development. 2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies. 3. Eventually they caved and started catching up. vs 1. Apple was relying on Google's developers which forked and stopped developing WebKit. 2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies. 3. Eventually they caved and started catching up. Even before IE was discontinued I had a much better experience with them than Safari (about 8y ago now). Not only did it support more recent APIs but I could download a VM with IE and Edge installed to test. Now almost a decade after the Blink fork they are committing to adding new features that people have been asking for for years. We'll see if they actually manage to catch up like Microsoft did. (Even before they switched to Chromium they were much more compatible than Safari).
- alwillis 4y ago
  1. Apple was relying on Google's developers which forked and stopped developing WebKit. 2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies. 3. Eventually they caved and started catching up. 1. Google was at some point the leading committer on WebKit, but there were other companies and organizations who contributed code as well [3]: Nokia, RIM, Igalia. They weren’t dependent on Google; but in hindsight, they knew at some point they were going to fork WebKit to create Blink, so they had incentive to put in a lot of effort. 2. Apple had different priorities than Google; many of the early CSS and other web features came from Apple/WebKit. Google had no problem just implementing things whether other browser vendors agreed or not. If you look at the Interop 2022 dashboard [1], you’ll see that WebKit is either at parity or ahead on the focus areas. Apple shipped :has(), the most anticipated CSS feature in a long long time before anyone else. They’re shipping in iOS 16 all of the cutting edge features; I documented them earlier in this thread [2]. [1]: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33284773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33284773 [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/09/apple-and-google-still-lead-webkit-development-but-more-smaller-companies-contributing https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/09/apple-and-google-still-lea...

kevincox 4y ago

This sounds very much like IE. 1. Microsoft stopped development. 2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies. 3. Eventually they caved and started catching up. vs 1. Apple was relying on Google's developers which forked and stopped developing WebKit. 2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies. 3. Eventually they caved and started catching up. Even before IE was discontinued I had a much better experience with them than Safari (about 8y ago now). Not only did it support more recent APIs but I could download a VM with IE and Edge installed to test. Now almost a decade after the Blink fork they are committing to adding new features that people have been asking for for years. We'll see if they actually manage to catch up like Microsoft did. (Even before they switched to Chromium they were much more compatible than Safari).

alwillis 4y ago
1. Apple was relying on Google's developers which forked and stopped developing WebKit. 2. The product stagnated and became behind on all of the web technologies. 3. Eventually they caved and started catching up. 1. Google was at some point the leading committer on WebKit, but there were other companies and organizations who contributed code as well [3]: Nokia, RIM, Igalia. They weren’t dependent on Google; but in hindsight, they knew at some point they were going to fork WebKit to create Blink, so they had incentive to put in a lot of effort. 2. Apple had different priorities than Google; many of the early CSS and other web features came from Apple/WebKit. Google had no problem just implementing things whether other browser vendors agreed or not. If you look at the Interop 2022 dashboard [1], you’ll see that WebKit is either at parity or ahead on the focus areas. Apple shipped :has(), the most anticipated CSS feature in a long long time before anyone else. They’re shipping in iOS 16 all of the cutting edge features; I documented them earlier in this thread [2]. [1]: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33284773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33284773 [3]: https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/09/apple-and-google-still-lead-webkit-development-but-more-smaller-companies-contributing https://techcrunch.com/2013/02/09/apple-and-google-still-lea...