Safari isn't protecting the web, it's killing it

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how “Safari is the new IE” ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ). I don’t want to rehash the basics of that, but I have seen some interesting rebuttals, most commonly: Safari is actually protecting the web, by resisting adding unnecessary and experimental features that create security/privacy/bloat problems. That is worth further discussion, because it’s widespread, and wrong.