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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#351

Post by candiddevmike »

tinus_hn wrote: post #323
tarsinge wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely make sense to make a state of the art app on a platform if it's key to the business. Also resources is not the problem, even big companies (like banks) make low cost web apps instead of native ones if they can. I don't see why Apple should facilitate compromised user experiences instead of setting the bar higher.

Also a PWA can’t compete in quality with a proper native app, should a competitor ever build one you’re toast. The question just revolves around how integral an app is to the business. Online banking probably requires an app. A restaurant that offers online ordering probably does not. A video game requires an app. An online encyclopedia does not.

I think this is wild conjecture. Users don't care as much as you think about "native performance", they care about features and price. PWAs can be iterated faster than native apps, and they circumvent the app store tax. They also let the business control the onboarding and sales funnel vs text only app storefronts filled with garbage.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#352

Post by Dah00n »

lucideer wrote: post #255
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…

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…

I was writing, copy&pasting, linking, etc. but in the end I gave up. There's simply too much that is wrong and it would take a long list to refute every single thing and I just does not have the time or energy to waste (Safari have taken enough already, as IE used to).

In short, it isn't about "IE vs Safari". Both have multiple versions. What was awful was that IE was behind the times. Everything else was basically fixed by pasting a few lines of code from awesome people. Safari is way more work today than IE was back in the day and doing any modern web development is a breeze today - until you need to make it work in Safari.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#353

Post by afavour »

fmajid wrote: post #158
afavour wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way can PWAs be abused?

The Web Workers API allows your JS code to keep running in the background even when your site is not loaded in any tab. Sucking up battery life, tracking your IP, doing who knows what else. That does not excuse Apple’s cavalier attitude towards bugs, but many of the APIs they refuse to implement deserve to die, like WebUSB or Bluetooth access, because of the privacy or security risks of weakening the browser sandbox.…

> The Web Workers API allows your JS code to keep running in the background even when your site is not loaded in any tab.

How? Because last I checked Web Workers are only active when there is an active tab. Service Workers live a little longer than that but only around 30 seconds or so last time I looked in Chrome (and that’s an implementation detail, not something in the spec), unless the user has enabled push events and you send one.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#354

Post by lyaa »

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…

What has the choice of a framework got to do with browsers?

No one is forcing you to use them. HTML and CSS still work perfectly fine, let the people with curiosity and energy experiment. Nothing is stopping you from using browser APIs with any code you want.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#356

Post by afavour »

simondotau wrote: post #288
jsnell wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple chooses not to keep up. They obviously would have the resources and technical competence to do it if they wanted to. But cui bono? Apple benefits directly from crippling the web since it protects their App Store monopoly, they happen to have the perfect means of crippling the web by ensuring there will be no browser competition on iOS, and it is the area where theyre shipping their worst software. It is hard to…

> Apple chooses not to keep up. Is that an opinion or do you have insider knowledge?

The level of profit Apple achieves every year is public, not insider knowledge. They could very obviously hire some more engineers to work on WebKit without bankrupting themselves.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#357

Post by mrtksn »

mannerheim wrote: post #338
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…

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.

Actually, Safari integrates nicely with the desktop Safari. You can access the mobile Safari through the developer tools in the desktop Safari and debug as if it is the desktop one. It a shame that Safari is not OSS.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#359

Post by afavour »

alwillis wrote: post #125
afavour wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking as if the W3C or even Mozilla don’t exist. This isn’t an Apple vs Google thing. This is an Apple vs web standards thing. That’s why Safari is outdated for developers.

This isn’t an Apple vs Google thing. This is an Apple vs web standards thing. It’s actually and Apple vs. APIs and technologies that allow fingerprinting on the web thing. Nobody mentions that Mozilla has sided with Apple much of the time to not implement some of these same APIs and technologies.

> It’s actually and Apple vs. APIs and technologies that allow fingerprinting on the web thing.

Of course it isn’t. Apple had longstanding (years long) bugs with IndexedDB. Their PWA implementation has been buggy from day one. They don’t implement push because it threatens their native app ecosystem, not because of privacy concerns.

Yes, there are some APIs with privacy concerns. But that’s a small part of the story of Apple’s neglect.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#360

Post by mannerheim »

mrtksn wrote: post #357
mannerheim wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, Safari integrates nicely with the desktop Safari. You can access the mobile Safari through the developer tools in the desktop Safari and debug as if it is the desktop one. It a shame that Safari is not OSS.

Did you mean to reply to the other comment? Desktop Safari still requires a Mac as far as I'm aware...
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