That role belongs to Chrome, half of their stuff isn't even a Web standard.

Chrome is not the the weakest / furthest behind major browser

On release, IE6 was so ahead on CSS standards conformance it broke websites. The old (long-forgotten) incantation for accessing XMLHttpRequest is the way you create a COM IDispatchEx object by ProgID from inside Active Scripting, because that was the way it worked in the original IE implementation. Before there were PWAs or Electron, there was the HTA, introduced with IE5. (Admittedly XUL came even earlier.) And so on—those are not exceptions.

It’s just that once Microsoft won the web, it turned out what they wanted to do with it as the main competitor to their fat-client business was nothing, so the IE team was effectively dissolved and IE stagnated, leaving an opportunity for Firefox to displace it. But before that happened, they innovated like crazy, up to and including (by some accounts) a right to demand features they needed from the Windows team—and, on the other hand, writing the original implementations for others: multilingual UI, a Unicode layer for 9x, windowless ActiveX controls, new revisions of the common controls, etc.

So you’re right that Chrome is not the new IE of 2009: Chrome is the new IE of 1999. And unlike Microsoft back then, Google now seem perfectly happy to fund the hamster wheel if it means every other prospective browser is also forced to run inside it or lose users.

Google won the web years ago and it's still "innovating." By "is the new IE" people generally mean the 2007 IE, not the 1999 IE. I don’t think many complained about those shiny new ActiveX APIs in IE 3 and Chrome doesn't really have anything like that (even though they push features out with few signals from the rest of the platform)

That only reveals a lack understanding how IE 5 took over the Web world.

It slowed down when it won, same will happen to Chrome after Google is done turning it into ChromeOS.

Safari is the only relevant browser preventing Google to achieve that goal.

Chrome already won, non-Apple users basically don't have a choice.

Please tell me how Chrome has "slowed down" after reaching the current market share years ago. It's not like Safari is the one making on-spec progress like Firefox did in 2005. Sounds like you're the one not understanding the early browser wars.

Except the data linked in the article proves the exact opposite?

Sssh, the world is filled with people who just think that if chrome does it, it’s correct, and that if chrome doesn’t do it, it doesn’t matter, and that if a site works in chrome then every other browser is wrong. Completely unlike the old IE developers.

The data shows that it’s a recent and fast change from being the worst to being the best.

It will probably take a few years for Safari to lose the “new IE” reputation it got.

Anyone who disagrees hasn't tried to develop a website on Chrome and Firefox only to find out Safari still doesn't support regex lookbehind (which means zero javascript will now run). It's only been available in Chrome for 5 years after all, no rush.

None of your Jacascript code will run? That sounds overly dramatic. 1. this only concerns regex 2. there’s an alternative regex syntax doing the same thing as part of the ecma standard 3. it can be implemented very easily without regex in almost all cases 3. It seems like you’re only considering chrome for desktop, not other browsers or mobile

> That sounds overly dramatic

Try appending this piece of code to your `index.js` and let me know how it goes in Safari:

    const r = /(<!foo)/

The parser will encounter a syntax error and no code is executed.