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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#211

Post by dmitriid »

wernercd wrote: post #146
jolux wrote: post #22

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…

Apple's opinions are simple: If they have a good browser, then the app store - their cash cow - becomes unneeded.

Google's opinions are just as simple: if the web loses even partly to apps, their cash cow becomes unneeded (80% of Google's revenue is online advertising).

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#212

Post by jerryzh »

It is quite a coincidence that I received the beta test invitation of Safari email right when I see this thread. I stopped using safari when the new kernel of Firefox is released in stable version. (And surprisingly found out Safari is the slowest browser to open iCloud on a MacBook).

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#213

Post by jansan »

vorador wrote: post #19

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…

I work a lot with SVGs and from my perspective it looks like Apple just doesn't care. I have even given up sending bug reports to them, because they never get fixed.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#214

Post by mrtksn »

jeroenhd wrote: post #205
mrtksn wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What website requires installation? The ones I use all work perfectly fine just from the web UI with the option to install them?

All websites(with the exception of HN maybe?). Installation doesn't strictly mean putting the website on your home-screen. Whenever you encounter a new website you are required to go through installation process, you can't simply click a link and consume the content anymore.

For most websites you need to read and accept the tracking terms and if you are not happy with the default options you need to do custom installation.

For the majority of the websites, the next step is to decide if you like to sign up for e-mail marketing or create an account. Many will then ask you to follow them on their social media. On desktop, they will ask you to receive notifications too.

After 2 to 5 clicks you have your website installed and can start looking for the content in between the ads. They don't have much monetisation opportunities so you will get all the ads at once.

The installation is also not very persistent, if you are not using the website daily you will go through the same the next time.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#215

Post by simondotau »

afavour wrote: post #48
halostatue wrote: post #32

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…

You’re talking as if it’s an either/or situation. For a company the size of Apple it definitely isn’t. They could fix long-standing bugs, implement web standards others have had for years and improve security, privacy and battery life. They just don’t.

I don't agree. Microsoft seriously tried with Edge, but the pace of change set by Chrome was too much for them. The only group even close to keeping pace with Google is Mozilla—and their market share numbers are starting to look concerning. Given the current trajectory, we can't place long term hopes in Mozilla.

If neither Microsoft nor Apple can keep up, and the Hacker News crowd thinks that's okay, we might as well give up on the notion of an open web and rename it the Chrome Platform.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#216

Post by kkruglov »

I really like current safari UI but as a user I have to use other browsers because safari has issues with both popular sites or services and internal work sites at times.

Public example: Context menu - copy message link to clipboard - on discord doesn’t work in safari.

I created a bug for their bugzilla, turned out that bug is fixed some time ago. BUT NOONE CAN TELL ME WHEN ILL SEE IT FIXED on my device.

If I open 15-20 Freshdesk tickets in a row each in new tab, safari slows down as hell.

If I use the same page on Confluence for 30 minutes editing it without refreshing, at some point safari will start saying that THIS PAGE eats too much power it might need refreshing.

I as a user do not care.

Ah one more, safari 14 after initial release had a bug with scrolling on Mac and it took them 7 months to push this fix from nightly version to stable. SEVEN.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#217

Post by DonHopkins »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #180
FractalHQ wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

== != === If every analogy was held up to this level of scrutiny, we wouldn’t have analogies. Something can be similar in nature without being an exact equivalence. Like many others have started- it’s common these days for devs to create modern apps that work on modern browsers but break in weird ways on Safari. That’s enough of a similarity for the analogy to convey the idea. Web-P / WebGL support aside- Safari ofte…

Shouldn't that be == !== === if we're talking about our analogies with JavaScript? Though maybe I just proved your point about missing the forest for the trees :-P

Brendan Eich doesn't understand equality.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#218

Post by tehbeard »

tarsinge wrote: post #202
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Safari is not holding back, Safari is just not implementing Google’s PWA (because it doesn’t really make sense on Apple devices where it would be far inferior to native). You can make a beautiful site in Safari and it will work everywhere (I do professionally). Chrome is the new IE (2001 era, when it was cutting edge and pushing proprietary technology) except ActiveX is PWA.

Safari can't even implement a key value store (indexedDB) correctly...

We had whole versions where it was basically stuffed, and even in the recent versions, I'm getting random errors where it just refuses to write to disk.

If they don't want to implement PWA, fine, their walled garden and wall that, claim it's for privacy etc etc. just don't half ass all the APIs around it then! Leave them out!

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#219

Post by JimDabell »

rimliu wrote: post #198
mattmanser wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you missed it by a year or two, but they invented ajax. If thats not cutting edge, I dont know what is.

People complaining about Safari also seem not to know how much it brought when first iPhone was released. Canvas, CSS animations, etc.

No single organisation has done more to advance the mobile web than Apple. Can you think of any?

The first iPhone and “desktop class” Mobile Safari was a watershed moment and everybody started using WebKit for their mobile browsers after that point, including non-Apple devices.

Look at what the mobile web was like before the release of the iPhone. Then take a look at what it was like the year after, when people had started making their websites “iPhone compatible”.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#220

Post by SquareWheel »

coldtea wrote: post #162

Nope, Apple's Safari is the last stand (given it's market share, FF is miniscule) from the web standards becoming whatever Google likes... It's not Safari which is outdated, it's standards that move too fast and come ad-hoc to Google's tastes. And it's not even about the web anymore, it's all kinds of crap to make the browser a slower, duplicate of native functionality, app platform.

Apple is just as likely to test new features in the wild, or introduce new features without going through the standards process. prefers-color-scheme sure came out of nowhere. And I'm sure you remember their original proposal with WebGPU.

Meanwhile Apple are strangling PWAs to hold onto their app store monopoly, and extremely slow to implement features that other vendors adopted long ago. jQueryUI had its life artificially extended by years simply because Apple refused to add a date picker input type. IndexedDB has been nigh-useless without wrappers because of Safari. They've earned their moniker of the new IE.

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