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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#331

Post by BoxOfRain »

the_gipsy wrote: post #295
tshaddox wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That notifications are annoying is a myth.

Speak for yourself, sharing an open office with a person whose phone resembles a casino with all the pinging and flashing is profoundly irritating, as is having to sort through a Sisyphean list of pointless alerts to the point actually important things get missed.

I disable all notifications for everything by default, I'll look at your software on my schedule and nobody else's.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#333

Post by jalfresi »

bmn__ wrote: post #200
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 Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today.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…

> IE was cutting edge until Firefox. I was there. I call bullshit. Competitors like Opera and IE for Mac (a completely different codebase and product) could do alpha-transparent images in the background, CSS sibling selectors, display:table-* and dozens more. For a few fortunate Web developers who were strong willed enough to heed the call from Alistapart to standards compliant code, we were able to circumvent the la…

I recall having an orange iMac on my desk specifically for testing because IE5.5 on the Mac was the most standards compliant browser on the market. Cant remember the exact year, but it was pre-millenium I think.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#334

Post by diebeforei485 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #224
diebeforei485 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of apps are in the intersection of being performant enough to be written in JavaScript and also generate lots of in-app purchase revenue (which is typically recurring revenue)? Certainly not most games, which are the biggest money-spinners, and also not pro camera apps or video editing apps. Video streaming apps (eg. Netflix / YouTube Premium) come to mind, but they don't rely too much on in app purchase I…

I use a Home Assistant PWA that I'm quite happy with. No need to install native code that has access to everything on my device when I can interface with it from a browser sandbox. I also regularly use a local weather app that has an app version, stuffed with tracking, and a PWA version that gets protected against by my browsers privacy settings. There is also a very interesting project for programming certain ESP32…

The ones you mentioned don't typically generate much revenue if any, so this is not about app store profits.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#335

Post by carlosrg »

mrtksn wrote: post #312
carlosrg wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile Google is moving the goalposts of "modern" web development so fast that it's nearly impossible for anyone to keep up. For a second I thought you were talking about Apple’s UI frameworks and languages, with all the different Swift versions over the last couple of years and different UI frameworks like Cocoa, Catalyst, and SwiftUI, deprecation of OpenGL and introduction of their own graphics API, etc.

That's a stretch. If anything, Apple is too conservative. The UIKit was the only UI framework from 2007-2019. Then SwiftUI came and they both work very well together. As other frameworks come for stuff like graphics or device features, they don't really replace each other but stack up. On desktop, it's a similar situation. How is the situation with the web technologies? What was the hip tech in 2007? AJAX? JQuery? Wh…

You can still use jQuery or plain vanilla HTML+CSS+JavaScript, and you still have access to any web technology out there. Websites written in 1999 will continue to render perfectly. Nobody will deprecate WebGL for example. Nobody forces you to learn a new framework, although the documentation for most of those is actually good unlike Apple’s.

Meanwhile for example you can’t use the latest iOS 15 API (SharePlay) without using Swift, and you need to learn a new half-baked declarative UI API called SwiftUI to write your own widgets. And let’s not talk about trying to run a 1999 executable today.

They all arrange pixels on the screen but it’s a different framework each month.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#336

Post by leppr »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #325
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…

This is a personal opinion, but I'm actually really glad Apple are dragging their feet on this. I absolutely despise presumptious software that feels entitled to my attention as and when it chooses. I have my browser set up to wholesale reject all push notifications, I don't let the vast majority of my apps send me push notifications, and any application that feels entitled to pollute my inbox (email already has an a…

Push notifications allow me to spend less time on my phone/PC.

Without them, I would have to regularly check the app of interest for any important updates, losing both time and mental space with another thing to keep in the back of my mind.

Thanks to push notifications, I can defer interacting with the app to when it's actually relevant.

Also as I argued in another comment [1], web notifications are simply better than native app ones. Push notifications are here to stay, the choice is in the implementation, not whether they'll become culturally accepted or not (they already are, iOS users simple are nagged to install native apps to have them).

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#337

Post by pfarrell »

moron4hire wrote: post #277
lucideer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that isn't the case. At all. IE wasn't difficult because it was behind the times; it was difficult because it was deliberately different. The 2nd pillar of Microsoft's infamous Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy ensured incompatibility, which doubled developer efforts. The idea of IE being purely an "outdated" browser seems to be one perpetuated by young devs reading & misunderstanding old blogposts. The narrat…

Pushing forward on spec implementation before submitting to standards bodies is how the standards bodies want developers to make things. They want a "market of ideas", and only standardize the ideas that win out.

I concur. I was just thinking about XMLHttpRequest [0] which was developed to support Outlook Web Access (years before Gmail). As developers discovered and played with it, it became the X in AJAX and eventually became a standard. That standardization happened after it had proved its usefulness and been applied in many different contexts by many different people.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#338

Post by mannerheim »

mrtksn wrote: post #96
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…

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…

It wouldn't be nearly as bad if it were possible to debug Safari issues on other platforms. Instead, you either have to own a Mac, or use something like Browser Stack. At least Chrome is cross-platform.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#339

Post by diebeforei485 »

collaborative wrote: post #290
diebeforei485 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of apps are in the intersection of being performant enough to be written in JavaScript and also generate lots of in-app purchase revenue (which is typically recurring revenue)? Certainly not most games, which are the biggest money-spinners, and also not pro camera apps or video editing apps. Video streaming apps (eg. Netflix / YouTube Premium) come to mind, but they don't rely too much on in app purchase I…

Web apps can now be written in WASM, which is just as performant as any "native" app. I for one am porting my native app to the web using this technology and find it is some times even faster than native java/objective c (ironic)

See, this is hype. I don't find Figma (running in Chrome) to be as responsive as Illustrator or Pixelmator.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#340

Post by InfiniteRand »

lucasyvas wrote: post #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…

The funny thing is Firefox used to be beautiful for embedding, but then they decided the future of embedding was Servo, and unfortunately they ran out of money to build that future
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