You realize that custom, new, cutting-edge APIs (can you imagine the web without xhr?) was what made IE into the IE we talk about. Some they got right, some they got wrong, some were way too tied into IE’s parent’s ecosystem (sound familiar, AMP?). It’s once it stopped getting updated that it became a problem, as no one else had or planned to have some of its stuff, resulting in it being an oddball. Chrome fits the first half of that profile far more than any other browser these days, it’s just that WHATWG being a “living standard” has enabled it to “standardize” any new idea that comes along (other browsers do this too, but not nearly as much as Chrome).
The point is that slowness to adopt new standards wasn’t exactly what made IE into the the IE we all hated; it was going off on tangents without consulting anybody too often that left it out on an island with custom versions of so many things. Fortunately it doesn’t seem like Google is going to lose interest on Chrome anytime soon.
It's not only custom cutting-edge APIs, there's a lot of common stuff which is broken in Safari, that's also why it's referred as the new IE. I personally had issues with forms, clicks, svgs, selects... It's really broken in many ways.
Chrome is the new IE in the embrace-and-extend sense (the early IE that won the browser war).
Safari is the new IE in the stagnating, not supporting new functionality, not fixing long-standing bugs sense (that same early IE several years later).
Neither of these is a good thing or to be encouraged.
Please don't get me started on the oxymoron that is "living standards". I think that idea is responsible for a great deal of what has gone wrong with the web ecosystem in recent years.
The point is that slowness to adopt new standards wasn’t exactly what made IE into the the IE we all hated; it was going off on tangents without consulting anybody too often that left it out on an island with custom versions of so many things. Fortunately it doesn’t seem like Google is going to lose interest on Chrome anytime soon.