I’ve been saying this for years (on HN and elsewhere).
In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.
Additionally, Safari at least has the fundamentals in place — IE couldn’t even render transparent PNGs properly without Windows-specific filter trickery until around version 9 or so which was released in 2011, around a decade after Gecko based browsers, WebKit-based browsers, and even Microsoft’s own Tasman-based IE for Mac did.
People are quick to forget the pain of things like table-based-layout.
I’ll never forget in 2006-2008-ish I developed a website for my computer repair business (I was in High School) and was very proud of it. Then I opened it in IE (I had developed it in Firefox) and it all fell apart (I was using floats IIRC). I then rewrote the whole thing using tables because I knew my target audience would not be running Firefox.
In Safari sometimes things aren’t aligned correctly but nothing to the degree of hacks I’ve done over the years for IE. Gradients, transparent pngs, rounded corners, the list goes on.
Yeah, people just mean different things when they put the label on chrome and safari. It gets a little tiring to have this pointless discussion about what is in essence a metaphor that is being interpreted differently over and over again.
In my mind, there are two types of “IEs”. There is the IE that didn’t follow standards and did whatever they wanted and there is the IE that was slow to adopt new standards. Chrome is the former and Safari is the latter. Also, Safari is no where near as slow as IE was to adopt standards so I don’t find it great comparison.