Community Discussions: Is Safari the New IE?

The "Safari is the new IE" article by Nolan Lawson has set the Web development community ablaze last week, with pro and counter arguments to a problem that's been slowly becoming more visible, and that's the lack of support for newer technologies in Apple's Safari browser.

While Nolan's article discussed about the problematic support of newer APIs like IndexedDB and Service Workers within Safari, the community has responded in various ways.

First off, Nolan's accusations that Apple does not care about the Web anymore because it never showed up to any developers' conference outside its own WWDC are both true and false at the same time.

He is right because Apple developers are known not to engage with the Web-dev community in the same way Mozilla and Google engineers do, but commenters on Ars Technica (where Nolan's article also appeared as an op-ed) also pointed out that Apple devs have been a constant on W3C's discussion lists, where they have contributed significantly to many Web standards.

Apple's lagging behind other browser manufactures when implementing new standards

An article by Rene Ritchie also points out that compared to Microsoft and its IE browser, Apple is not in the same position at all.

Whilst Microsoft fell in a slumber caused by the complacency of winning the browser wars at the start of the 2000s and has only recently woken up with its new Edge browser, the Safari team has always been probing the Web's borderlines for new technologies, while implementing standards when they reach a final, stable version.

While Nolan's original article took a jab at Apple for not supporting newer standards like Web Components, Shadow DOM, Web Manifest files, and Service Workers, this should not surprise anyone that followed Apple on a regular basis, because they rarely implement W3C standards which are still at "draft" states, always waiting for a final version before they commit to putting the effort in adding them to Safari's core. Here comes an opinion by Jason Snell to say the same thing.

And while Safari can be compared to the old IEs as being a closed browser, even if it runs on the open source WebKit engine, the same thing can be said of Google as well.

Not everything that makes it into WebKit makes its way into Chrome, and the things Google commits to WebKit are committed because of their philosophy, being developed in-house for Chrome, and then put into WebKit's core just because Google likes open source.

Google's Chrome is as closed as Safari, and only Google decides what, how, and at what level of the W3C development stage they start implementing it. So it's only a difference of philosophy that sometimes made Apple look as if it was falling behind, but in essence, most of the times they have been actually on par with recent "stable" Web technologies.

And let’s not forget the issue with WebAssembly as well, where Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft officially supported the project, while only one WebKit engineer (Apple employee) pledged support for the new Web binary format, without a formal announcement from the company.

Could Apple face an EU investigation into its Safari stranglehold on iOS?

To Nolan's help came an article from Kenneth Auchenberg, which took the discussion a bit further, by comparing Apple's stance on only allowing Safari as a "true" browser in iOS to the EU vs. Microsoft antitrust case a few years back, and drawing a parallel between the two.

Even if there's Opera for iOS, and recently Mozilla previewed Firefox for iOS, they are not native implementations, both working with severe limitations and with lots of workarounds.

While Firefox for iOs is still being developed, we know that Opera, Puffin, and iSwifter aren't actually browsers on Apple's iOS devices, working using proxy servers, compiling a page's code in the cloud, and then sending it to the user's device.

The limitations which Apple put on other browsers while on iOS are truly something to ponder about and in this case Mr. Auchenberg may have a case.

Of course, the debate is not new, Jake Archibald calling it out on Twitter even before the whole "Safari is the new IE" article hit, so you can see this whole issue with Apple's approach to its Web browser as a latent problem that was bound to explode at one point or another.

If Apple are throttling back on web platform work in Safari, I wish they'd allow other browsers on iOS so someone else can have a go — Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) June 22, 2015

So what do you think? Is Safari just stagnating or is it falling behind in implementing new standards and is in danger of becoming the new IE, now that Microsoft has picked up the pace with Edge.