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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

blog.perrysun.com

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#5

People complain about Google Chrome eating the web, but it really does seem like everyone else either dislikes the web (Apple), is ambivalent (Microsoft), or plain doesn't seem to care much (Mozilla).

So true.

I have this uneasy reliance on Chrome for supporting PWA's properly since Mozilla lost interest.

It's a life/routine manager for people with horrible memories. Chrome stands alone in supporting web push notifications :S

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#6
> Apple dragged their feet in adding support for PWAs in Safari, and when they finally did, limited the capabilities of a PWA so that native-like app functionality wouldn’t be possible, like notifications or a home screen icon shortcut

Websites can get Home Screen shortcuts; this has been a thing since the original iPhone.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#7
post #4

From how they're described here, PWAs sound like a phishing risk...?

A lot of the APIs that Safari doesn't support end up being attack vectors and/or useful tools for user fingerprinting. Personally, I use Safari as my browser on my Mac almost 100% of the time (the small fraction is because, thanks to T-Mobile, my Netflix DVD and streaming accounts have been separated and Netflix insists on sending a notification email if I log out and then log back in to the streaming account). On rare occasions I'll open Chrome for some other task and it kills my laptop battery.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#8
post #5

People complain about Google Chrome eating the web, but it really does seem like everyone else either dislikes the web (Apple), is ambivalent (Microsoft), or plain doesn't seem to care much (Mozilla).

So true. I have this uneasy reliance on Chrome for supporting PWA's properly since Mozilla lost interest. It's a life/routine manager for people with horrible memories. Chrome stands alone in supporting web push notifications :S

Safari supports web push notifications. I have never wanted them.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#9
I'm at the point where, at least on the Desktop, I'd rather support a Chromium webview powered "native" app than bother supporting web browsers directly.

Why should I be excited about Filesystem API and the like when we can already do that on the operating system directly?

It's really easy to understand the rise of Electron in this context. I don't think Electron is the final form, however. There's nothing wrong with web technology - my favorite browser is Firefox.

I love the web but, from an effort perspective, the justification for supporting all these browsers, ESPECIALLY when some of them half ass it, is just not there. It ranges from frustrating to a complete waste of time.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#10
Speaking from personal experience as a developer (although YMMV) - this is totally true.

And I'm not even talking about some newfangled APIs like WebUSB and such (I don't really care about those personally). Safari's handling of regular HTML + CSS is regularly broken compared to other browsers. (At least in my experience.)

Open the site in Chromium. Yep it works. Open the site in Firefox. Yep it works. Open the site in Safari. Ugh... it's broken.

That's something that I encounter on a regular basis.

It's really inexcusable that Apple, being the richest company in the world, has a web browser that's this bad. But they don't really have any incentive to do better. Thanks to their walled garden the only available web browser on iOS is Safari, and since no developer can afford to ignore iOS as a platform they have no choice but to deal with it.

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