71–80 of 623 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's still no background sync or access to APIs that aren't purely cosmetic. That's why native implementations of an app always "feel" better.
I hope the lack of background sync stays as a #wontfix, because I view it as a feature.
Apple has its own opinions about what web standards it should implement. It’s as simple as that. Google has been extremely successful in convincing developers that browsers that don’t behave like Chrome are behaving wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I wish Safari had more features, fewer bugs, and an evergreen release cycle. It’s clear Apple do not see themselves as competing with Chrome, largely because of iOS, and I do wa…
> Chrome explicitly do not care about other browsers, and think that the world would be a better place if Chrome were the only one. They are gunning for monopoly. No shame in that. The chrome app is the biggest gateway to the internet globally and winning that war means complete dominance as the world moves towards web applications. Using the carrot rather than the stick. But therein lies the rub. Safari is betting o…
It is pretty shameful if you’re simultaneously claiming to be the biggest defender of the open web.
> Why put in the effort
It’s pretty clear why at this point: developers hate them and antitrust regulators are looking for the right opportunity to go for the throat. Apple screwed up when they killed Safari on Windows, they could have had a solid shot at being the #2 browser in the world on the merits ten years ago and they totally blew it. Eddie Cue even wrote about this in some of the emails from the Epic discovery: https://twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1389632382244847623...
If you look at the features that Apple lags on adding support for, usually it's either because: 1. they can be abused (PWAs) 2. are complex to implement (WebRTC – for the longest time the recommendation in the WebRTC community if you wanted to build a C++ app was to bundle a good chunk of Chrome's libraries) 3. or could be bad for battery (web workers) So yeah, it makes some developers' jobs harder but generally ther…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple _does_ put effort into Safari. It’s just not on the parts that you and other developers want it to be on. It’s definitely on the parts that I (as a user) want it to be on (security, privacy, and battery life in roughly that order). It is unlikely that a court will be able to force Apple to expose OS APIs that would allow for the insecurity of WebUSB or WebMIDI on iOS, even if they do force other engines. And th…
Sure, let's have competition in the browsers on apple platforms then? Let the User choose what they want?
Even if a court does something like “you must allow alternative browsing engines”, it’s going to be a very difficult thing for a court to rule _successfully_ that “you must allow unrestricted USB access to alternative browsing engines”, as that will completely destroy security.
It’s also what would be required to make people who hate Apple for not implementing the same privacy-busting and security-nullifying APIs that Chrome has done.
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…
Broken HTML+CSS in Safari? Examples? I started using Safari as my daily driver because I use all apple devices and I like extending my battery life. Before deciding that, I did stints with Firefox and Brave, both of whom had poor sync'ing. I can't remember the last time a site had broken HTML/CSS with Safari. My impression is the desire to have good mobile support keeps Safari support alive. I think I encountered mor…
I didn't mean that as "broken in the wild". I meant as "broken when I'm actually developing a website".
> I can't remember the last time a site had broken HTML/CSS with Safari. My impression is the desire to have good mobile support keeps Safari support alive. I think I encountered more broken CSS when I was using Firefox.
You're not seeing broken websites on Safari because everyone's forced to test (and fix!) their websites for Safari due to its market share.
On the other hand Firefox's market share is relatively low, and dwindling day-by-day, so there's less incentive for everyone to actually test and fix Firefox-only issues.
That said, I use Firefox as my main web browser, and personally I find it very rare for something to be broken under it, even when it's not officially supported. It probably highly depends on which exact sites you visit though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's still no background sync or access to APIs that aren't purely cosmetic. That's why native implementations of an app always "feel" better.
And my phone's battery life appreciates that.
Here's a thought, Mozilla does a lot of political campaigning, how about campaigning for open app stores and death to no other browser engine? Why not do this which seems like a do or die situation for them?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit is a pretty low bar. I don't think they care much about the site except to make it objectively worse than the app at every convenient opportunity.
> Reddit is a pretty low bar Reddit is a multi billion dollar product and one of the most trafficked sites on the internet.
> Further contributing to the frustration is the fact that unlike Chrome or Firefox, Safari updates are not automatic on regular basis. They’re only shipped together with the infrequent updates to the entire OS. I wouldn’t say twice a year is infrequent.
Apple has its own opinions about what web standards it should implement. It’s as simple as that. Google has been extremely successful in convincing developers that browsers that don’t behave like Chrome are behaving wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I wish Safari had more features, fewer bugs, and an evergreen release cycle. It’s clear Apple do not see themselves as competing with Chrome, largely because of iOS, and I do wa…
For Google, the browser is closely associated with their revenue streams. If you profit by showing ads across web properties, you’d naturally prefer to have more control over how those properties are viewed.
The motivation can be benevolent in some aspects (to show more ads, we want people to want to browse the Web more—so we want to support fancier tech enabling fancier websites to be developed more easily) and less so in others (we want to control the viewing mechanism to ensure people keep seeing ads; we want to become the de-facto standard of browsing so that we don’t have to worry some newcomer eating at our revenue stream; the more complex the spec, the bigger our moat).
To Apple, the browser means relatively little on desktop; on the more sandboxed mobile OS it matters more due to being responsible for a lot of the attack surface.