Safari Recreates Proprietary Extensions

I was just reviewing the list of updates made to Safari 2.0.1 and was shocked to see the amount of proprietary extensions that Safari has implemented. I’m a little mixed in my feelings about this. Afterall, if it weren’t for recreating proprietary functionality, we wouldn’t have the wonderful XMLHttp object in every browser. It also seems that copying proprietary Mozilla functionality is much more socially acceptable than copying IE functionality…well, Safari has done both. Check out this list of fixes and additions:

  • Implemented showModalDialog() from IE.
  • Implemented document.elementFromPoint() from IE.
  • Fixed outerHTML to work with <img/> (outerHTML is from IE).
  • Implemented DOMParser from Mozilla.

So what about it? Is it okay to recreate proprietary functionality and create a pseudo-standard in doing so?

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