For developers, Safari is crap and outdated • Hacker News Board

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#181

Post by alserio » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

Normille wrote: post #20

>Why did developers and software engineers hate IE so much? Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today. Nonsense. The almost universal contempt for Internet Exploder amongst web developers had nothing to do with lack of support for cutting edgw APIs. It was because Internet Exploder refused to follow basic web st…

I still have to support IE11 and the fact that it doesn't support modern API its one of the reasons I hate it with passion. Something like not supporting css variables is seriously limiting. As second place I'll put the unusable dev tools. Spec compliance is more of a problem for css than js. I concede that with previous IE iteration the problem was much more worse.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#182

Post by mrtksn » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:46 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #169

mrtksn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and from users perspective I don't care. I find in eerie having the browser being an App platform. Chrome and Android are very dominant platforms, if it is something groundbreaking that can be done in that model it would be done in Android and Chrome and Apple will adopt it. Google is not an underdog.

I have the exact opposite view. I have tons of apps on my phone that really have no business being apps, they should just be websites but with push notifications. For example, I'm not a huge traveler (obviously not in the past year), but even before the pandemic I'd use AirBnB like once a year maybe. I don't want to download an app for something I use once a year. But before and during my trip push notifications are…

I agree that many Apps don't have business being apps and they are just low effort attempts, however I still don't want to have websites asking me if I want to receive notifications on mobile.

Website installation process is very annoying already. I don't want more. Do I want you to track me? No. Do I want to sign up to your newsletter? No. Do I want to create account to see the links? Please no. Do I want to receive notifications? No.

I need to go through all that just to view a page on a website. Apps are much better, I don't have to install it before seeing what is it all about thanks to the App Store page that includes a description, screenshots and reviews.

If there's something that I need to be notified, websites will send me an e-mail and the mail client will show me a notification about that e-mail which will result in me being notified.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#183

Post by ayoisaiah » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

I've always despised the fact that there's no simple way to test on Safari without owning Apple Hardware. It doesn't make any sense. Thankfully, I don't do much front end work anymore, so it's less of a concern for me now.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#184

Post by streptomycin » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

dwaite wrote: post #105

streptomycin wrote: post #42

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/16/apple_safari_indexedd... this bug is still not fixed, which is kind of nuts. Well, they said they fixed it in dev but have not actually deployed the fix yet and won't comment on when that might happen.

Was this not fixed in the release a few days ago?

My bad if that's true, I may have missed it! I don't actually have any Apple devices, just get bug reports from my users lol

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#185

Post by BigJono » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:53 AM UTC

kickscondor wrote: post #45

kouteiheika wrote: post #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…

This has been my experience over the past several years as well. My particular issues have been with the Canvas element and with SVG support (which is insanely buggy - even the dev tools are bugged) but there are also occasional layout issues. I definitely feel like comparisons to IE are apt.

> and with SVG support (which is insanely buggy - even the dev tools are bugged)

I ran into this on a project a year ago, where our app was completely and critically fucked on Safari with no obvious path to fixing it, short of tearing out a ton of custom data visualisation stuff based on SVG and rewriting it from scratch to use a whole different approach like canvas.

It's one thing to have a rendering bug like Chrome had with flex box a while back where it would stretch elements vertically in certain situations against the spec, there's enough ways to do things in CSS that that can be worked around with a bit of tinkering. But when you've got a rendering bug and the dev tools doesn't accurately represent what's being rendered, it leaves the developer in a terrible situation where they're stuck with a black box with a broken interface so they can't even tell what the true result is, let alone see the inner workings.

I was lucky we only had 5-10 people trying to use it on Safari and I could just say sorry and recommend Chrome. But I can't imagine how frustrating a similar situation would be with a large number of users.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#186

Post by veeti » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:55 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #161

rubyn00bie wrote: post #18

> Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today. This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. The biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features. It would “fix” missing tags, that would then be broken on ev…

The analogy is simple: back in the day devs got sick of IE because it was the one thing holding them back. You can make a site, easily, that looked beautiful on all the other major browsers, but because IE was outdated when it came to standards support, you had to basically spent all your time fighting with it. Safari serves that role today. There are tons of things I'd love to do but can't because they're not suppor…

It's always fun when some bog standard 2010 flexbox layout works perfectly in every modern browser until someone on an old iPhone tries it. Android has its own update woes to say the least, but at least Chrome receives evergreen updates through the Play Store. Why can't Apple do the same?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#187

Post by realusername » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:57 AM UTC

jw14 wrote: post #52

kouteiheika wrote: post #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…

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…

There's the scroll background jank due to their scroll snapping model (you can scroll below a full screen div which should be impossible), the various zIndex jank, round corners for video, the SVG background issues (and SVG in general are buggy), the input autocomplete issues with their half-broken password manager... And that's all present on the latest iOS.

Recently they also broke localStorage & indexDB which are core features of the web (sill broken on the latest stable)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#188

Post by leppr » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:59 AM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #172

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect that developers are simply angry with Apple for not letting them to fiddle with the latest stuff that Google is experimenting with. That is absolute bullshit. Browser push notifications have been out for years on other browsers (INCLUDING desktop Safari), and they are the one thing that Apple is dragging their feet on the most because they know it's the most important thing that prevents a dev from just d…

I hope they never implement them on mobile Safari, those things are a pain in the backside on the desktop.

In what way?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#189

Post by mrtksn » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:00 AM UTC

Leherenn wrote: post #167

mrtksn wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and from users perspective I don't care. I find in eerie having the browser being an App platform. Chrome and Android are very dominant platforms, if it is something groundbreaking that can be done in that model it would be done in Android and Chrome and Apple will adopt it. Google is not an underdog.

And as another user I care. I don't want to install yet another app to clutter my phone just to access something once that could be a webapp. The browser is an awesome delivery mechanism for stuff I'm going to use once/rarely: no install or uninstall needed.

I haven't seen a single website that doesn't require installation.

The website installation process is much more painful than apps because first you need to install it to see it.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#190

Post by tshaddox » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #153

mrtksn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that developers are simply angry with Apple for not letting them to fiddle with the latest stuff that Google is experimenting with. Chrome is the new IE but with better manners if you consider the non standard Chrome specific stuff that makes websites to work only in Chrome. Developers hated IE for not being standart, you had to write two versions of your CSS, you had to make your code accommodate the Box m…

> I suspect that developers are simply angry with Apple for not letting them to fiddle with the latest stuff that Google is experimenting with. That is absolute bullshit. Browser push notifications have been out for years on other browsers (INCLUDING desktop Safari), and they are the one thing that Apple is dragging their feet on the most because they know it's the most important thing that prevents a dev from just d…

Push notifications are also a terrible feature that I don’t want on any of my browsers including desktop Safari. I don’t want developers to even have the option to show me a prompt to enable them.