It seems the criticism on Safari hasn't evolved alongside WebKit's efforts. It's true that WebKit is no longer lagging behind web standards (with the notable exceptions of PWAs and prefetch). Though I'll note that much of the criticism (see: IndexedDB) wasn't Apple lacking standards support, but having buggy implementations. I can't speak to Safari's dev tools because I just use Chrome's.

But if critics keep focusing on webcompat, they might comfort the WebKit team into thinking that all the criticism is unwarranted, and that Safari has caugh up. That's not the case when it comes to the user experience, where Safari still lags far behind.

Just weeks ago, Safari lost me a few tabs, twice. The tabs kept the favicon, but became "Untitled", and when you clicked on them, they were just blank, and the "back" button was disabled. Does this version fix it? No clue, because they never acknowledged that bug publicly. Never had a bug like that on Chrome, in the decade I've used it.

Safari still doesn't allow users to select multiple tabs to move them to other windows or move them to tab groups. Firefox and Chrome both can.

The "back" button is still finicky. The button bizzarely feels more reliable than the trackpad gesture. The full-page animation makes it feel much slower than Chrome, which doesn't have a page-back animation except a small left arrow no the side. There's a huge bug, that's survived for many years and which I encounter very frequently: when you Google something, click on a result, then go back, you end up at the Start Page rather than the Google search, which isn't even in the History. How?

Extension support on iOS is far better than competitors, but on the Mac, Apple's clearly saying "fuck you" to extension developers. Forcing devs to pay, making basic APIs unavailable without good reason (webRequest blocking; they really should just implement whatever gorhill tells them to; I thought they disliked ads and tracking?), and cluttering users' Applications folders with browser extensions unlike every other browser. Why can't I use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension with Safari? uBlock Origin? SingleFile? There's a long-tail of extensions that Safari will never support, due to the Safari team's practices.

And why lack support for profiles? I don't want to switch user accounts; I just want to be able to segregate work and personal, so my URL autocomplete doesn't show personal stuff at work. That's a basic requirement in the era of screen sharing and streaming.

Tab groups are an encouraging feature, that shows Apple cares about power users, but Safari still feels too "restricted" and rigid. There's a strong feeling that "Apple knows best" and feel they can dictate the user experience, which just doesn't work for something as personal as a browser. No, it wouldn't be "un-Apple-like" to roll out Profiles, or proper extension support that don't clutter the apps folder. Worried about malware extensions? Then improve your analytics, and rely on Apple's ability to remote-uninstall bad extensions, like Firefox and Chrome have done. They're just hurting power users, with little benefit for average users who mostly don't install extensions anyway.