Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 That’s certainly not true: it was indeed outdated for much of its life.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 bro…
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 And I agree almost entirely with the complaints throughout this discussion about how outdated IE became and how lacking Safari now is.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 becam…
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.