I agree that numerous companies inspire occasional weird reflexive defences from their most enthusiastic supporters. Thankfully, bad arguments have no transitive value.
Implying otherwise is itself a bad argument.
It is true that Safari sometimes lagged in ways that are legitimately open to criticism. There are instances where Safari had incomplete or broken feature implementations. But many claims of “broken sites” are really just evidence of lazy developers failing to test beyond Chrome or to implement graceful fallback. Relying on bleeding-edge Chromium features before they've been broadly adopted by browsers is, IMHO, a infatuation with novelty over durability. It's also, IMHO, a callous disregard for the open web platform in favour of The Chrome Platform. Web developers are free to do whatever they like, but it's misleading to blame browsers for the bad choices and/or laziness of some web developers.
> But many claims of “broken sites” are really just evidence of lazy developers failing to test beyond Chrome or to implement graceful fallback.
Correct. People test Chrome first and often only. That'll never change because people are lazy and you have a humongously long tail of websites with varying levels of giving a shit and no central authority that can enforce any standards. Even if another browser takes other, they'll only test that one.
The solution is formal tests and the wpt.fyi project. It gives a path to perfectly compatible implementations of agreed-upon standards, and a future where *the only* differences between browsers will be deliberate (e.g. WebMIDI). Brilliant.
That's why I wish the gap between Safari TP's wpt.fyi score and Safari stable's score was shorter. Simple!
Why do you keep conflating bug fixes with new platform features?
Because such bugs were predominantly associated with then-new platform features.
As a web developer myself, I appreciate the frustration with Safari's flexbox bugs of a decade ago and viewport bugs more recently. I also remember being endlessly frustrated by Chrome bugs too, like maddening scroll anchoring behaviours, subpixel rounding inconsistencies, and position:fixed bugs which were broken for so long than the bugs became the de-facto standard which other browsers had to implement. All browsers have bugs. To suggest that Safari was uniquely bad is to view history with Chrome-tinted glasses.
I'm not saying that other browsers don't have bugs. This thread is about how Safari doesn't fix them for a long time because it ships slowly.
You are assuming that Safari didn’t fix bugs for a long time because it “ships slowly.” Maybe some bugs are just complicated and take time to fix. It took Google years to fix the bugs I mentioned earlier (and many others) despite having the largest budget of any browser project and a VERY rapid release cadence.