Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

sixcolors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 224 posts

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#161

Post by GeekyBear »

coldtea wrote: post #74
chmod775 wrote: post #71

As someone who has (re-)implemented and shipped quite a few native applications across ecosystems (Apple, Android, Windows, Linux) all I can say about this is: Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague . I will do it if I'm paid for it - I generally charge twice my hourly rate for anything Apple - but I cert…

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

>they hook in to new platform-only capabilities

Contrast the situation to Microsoft, where not even their own in-house teams are willing to add support for new platform capabilities.

There was no touch native version of Office for the Surface RT, despite it being sold as a tablet.

There are several of their own products that still don't have native ARM versions for the Surface Pro X.

Xcode works natively on an M1 Mac. Where's the native version of Visual Studio for the Surface Pro X?

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#162

Post by calpaterson »

franga2000 wrote: post #126
simplecto wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it does sound right. Do you ship untested software?

You mean like web devs ship websites only tasted in latest Google Chrome? How Microsoft ships Windows tested only on a handful of hardware configs? How game devs ship games only tested on the latest graphics card? The whole point of having standards, conventions and stable interfaces is that developers do not have to test their code on every "platform" (in this case browser). If there are platform-specific difference…

I think the point of standards is portability. You still have to do testing on different platforms, especially when porting the first time.

I maintain a cross browser webextension (chrome and Firefox) and I would not release it on a new platform without testing. I have already found bugs in the API implementstions on Firefox and confident I'll find more. There are also differences in implemention between just those two browsers that I have to work around.

YMMV, of course

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#163

Post by 6510 »

AaronFriel wrote: post #123
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

What does any of that have to do with supporting the WebExtension open specification? It sounds like, to me, I can't ship a WebExtension for Safari because I don't own a Mac. Is that right? Does that sound right to you?

Docking a sailboat with a space station.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#164

Post by simplecto »

6510 wrote: post #163
AaronFriel wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does any of that have to do with supporting the WebExtension open specification? It sounds like, to me, I can't ship a WebExtension for Safari because I don't own a Mac. Is that right? Does that sound right to you?

Docking a sailboat with a space station.

Hah. I use “building a rocket ship just to cross the street”

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#165

Post by deergomoo »

flohofwoe wrote: post #156
saagarjha wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used Xcode for many thousands of hours at this point and I have to say I actually think it’s pretty good now that I understand how it is supposed to work. But for a web developer who just shipped some JavaScript for Firefox and Chrome…just no, this is stupid however you look at it. The fact that you have to download a dozen gigabytes just to get access to what’s a glorified shell script, then packaging some web…

IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things. Why is it such a hassle to install a vim extension, requiring code-signing shenanigans? In other IDEs and text editors this is at most a few button clicks to install an extension. The "Scheme" system to manage per-target options is a joke even when being used to it. The debugger variable-view-pa…

> IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things

It's the text editing portion of it that's really lacking IMO. It's only has multi-cursor support and tabs (tabs!!) for a couple of years.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#166

Post by coldtea »

panic wrote: post #125
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

All three of those developers started writing Mac software (or NeXT software, in Omni's case) in the 80's and 90's, before Xcode or the Apple Developer Program. The wider Mac developer community was hollowed out by the iPhone in the late 2000's-early 2010's and never really recovered. Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021?

>Who is starting a Mac-only software shop in 2021?

A lot of people?

There are more Mac users (and thus app buyers) today than ever were, several times more than in the 80s and 90s.

If people don't do it it's because they can make a quicker buck elsewhere (e.g. web SaaS and such), not because it's a worse market in absolute terms.

It sure beats being an indie game dev, that's for sure...

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#167

Post by frou_dh »

vbezhenar wrote: post #145
sneak wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To top it off, if you put a donation link in your about box when you release your totally free software in their App Store, they will reject it in review. Free apps are not allowed to include a donation link to their own website. It's to the point where they won't even let people enrich their ecosystem for free unless you dance to their tune. It's very, very hard to take anything other than a dim view of such despica…

Donations is just another model of making money from software. So you're going to use App Store for free and make money without Apple getting their cut. It's understandable why Apple does not accept it.

> So you're going to use App Store for free

It's not free. There's a $99 membership fee every year, even for an altruistic person offering nothing but a single useful extension/app that makes zero income.

---

Let's imagine a feature request on GitHub:

USER: Safari supports the WebExtension API now. Please port your cool extension to Safari.

DEVELOPER: Cool. I'll maybe try doing that this weekend!

USER: Oh, by the way, you'll need to be on the hook for $99/yr for the rest of your life, so that Safari users can install the extension.

DEVELOPER:

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#168

Post by coldtea »

franga2000 wrote: post #160
coldtea wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of having standards, conventions and stable interfaces is that developers do not have to test their code on every "platform" (in this case browser). Well, we don't have standards for native apps, only partial standards for different APIs and protocols, so there's that. And the change Apple made, to allow for Chrome-like extensions, is already more "standard" than before (where it was Safari-only ext…

That is my whole point though: the WebExtensions API is a standard, so it's not like you can't test your extension without owning a Mac. If your extension works on both Firefox and Chrome, it really should work on Safari too. If it doesn't, that's Apple's fault for violating the standard, not yours for not testing on their broken platform. If you want to specifically test it you can, but if you don't see a reason to,…

>If your extension works on both Firefox and Chrome, it really should work on Safari too. If it doesn't, that's Apple's fault for violating the standard, not yours for not testing on their broken platform.

Chrome is notorious for building this that are not standards and forcing them into standards bodies later. That's part of "but it works on Chrome" web issue.

So not working on Safari doensn't necessarily mean it's the fault of Safari for "violating the standard". Could very well be for upholding the standards over Chrome ad-hoc/de-facto "standard" additions...

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#169

Post by user-the-name »

deergomoo wrote: post #165
flohofwoe wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things. Why is it such a hassle to install a vim extension, requiring code-signing shenanigans? In other IDEs and text editors this is at most a few button clicks to install an extension. The "Scheme" system to manage per-target options is a joke even when being used to it. The debugger variable-view-pa…

> IMHO Xcode is at most "barely acceptable" when compared to most other IDEs, there's a lot more bad things than good things It's the text editing portion of it that's really lacking IMO. It's only has multi-cursor support and tabs (tabs!!) for a couple of years.

Multi-cursor support is something I want maybe once every few months? Certainly nowhere near a crucial feature, and barely one that makes a list of nice-to-have things.

Re: Safari 14 added WebExtensions support, so where are the extensions?

#170

Post by coldtea »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #153
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xcode development, the Apple Developer Program, and the whole experience of trying to ship your application on the Apple ecosystem is the fucking plague. That's because you're a developer that works in different platforms ("Apple, Android, Windows, Linux"). So you probably spend most of the time working in some other platform, and doing macOS work for you is just an annoyance, having to context switch to another pr…

The barrier for entry to the Apple ecosystem is extremely high though. Xcode is extremely hard to use. I've been programming for over 20 years, and used lots of different editors and IDEs and languages. But Xcode is just TOO HARD. Swift was nice and easy to understand. But just editing (or even typing) code on the editor is a huge pain. Even things like selecting text, or moving the cursor around are super non-standa…

>Even things like selecting text, or moving the cursor around are super non-standard and complicated

This doesn't even make sense. Those things in XCode are as bog standard as it gets, and I've also used vim, Eclipse, Idea, ST and nowadays VSCode.

I'd buy the UI setup (with connections between actions etc) being confusing in XCode (especially things like Storyboards), but text editing? Cant even understand what you could mean. Any concrete example?

Post reply on HN