They picked up the slack only after they were shamed multiple times, including by websites like https://issafarithenewie.com/ (which now reflects their progress, very honestly). A brief look at items from the last several years will return lots of pretty bad press.
> They aren’t ten times slower than everybody else.
Just to mention one, WebRTC took 7 years to go from the first Firefox implementation to Safari. Chrome had it less than 2 years after FF, so I guess not 10x but 3x-4x - still a very significant lag, which is definitely not explainable by lack of resources.
But that’s just it – you are just mentioning one. No mention of the many, many improvements that were made. Safari has been advancing steadily every single year since it was first released. Which makes it an entirely different situation to Internet Explorer, which held the web at an absolute standstill for five straight years.
Sorry, no, not an absolute standstill. Windows XP Service Pack 2 tweaked how an HTTP header was handled. That was the most significant movement in the front-end development world in a five year period. Because of Internet Explorer.
Compare Safari 12 to Safari 17. Now imagine we were still stuck with Safari 12. That’s what it would be like if Safari “dragged their feet” like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer. They aren’t the same thing, not even remotely close. Anybody saying that “Safari is the new IE” clearly does not remember what Internet Explorer did to the industry, especially if they are saying it because of things like Safari won’t let websites vibrate your phone.
The difference is simply a function of smarter leadership and experience.
Of course nobody, today, would act exactly like MS did - that would make it trivial for people to see their game. Instead, Apple gives you something to show they're trying, "honest, guv" - but in ebbs and flows, only when pushed, and slower than everyone else despite being the most profitable company on the block.
To be honest, nobody would really care how many releases they push or how many features they push, if only they let other browsers compete on iOS. But they don't; so they carry a responsibility to be at the forefront of standards and look absolutely beyond reproach - which, at the moment, is not the case.
> The difference is simply a function of smarter leadership and experience.
Look, the difference is glaringly obvious: Microsoft brought front-end development to a standstill for five long years. Apple has not. Apple has continued to add features, standards support, and interoperability bug fixes year after year like clockwork.
This isn’t a matter of nuance. This isn’t Apple being “smarter”. Apple fundamentally has not done what Microsoft did in any way, shape, or form. The two situations are extremely dissimilar.
> They aren’t ten times slower than everybody else.
Just to mention one, WebRTC took 7 years to go from the first Firefox implementation to Safari. Chrome had it less than 2 years after FF, so I guess not 10x but 3x-4x - still a very significant lag, which is definitely not explainable by lack of resources.