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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#401

Post by mikl »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #318

Been a Safari user since the original Beta. Getting more and more disappointed every year as their decisions on what web technologies to implement and which to not are just blatantly obvious more about building a moat between the web and the App Store than anything else. In my day job we've been building physical devices and rather than building say an iOS app and an Android app that would have to be updated and cost…

Thanks to all the creepy adtech and malware on the net, webUSB/webBT would be a terrible thing to add to the browser.

I understand that it would enable many good things, but the world’s just too full of assholes to trust random web applications with such power. The amount of security exploits and spyware they would enable is just too great.

Putting them behind additional permission-prompts is not a solution. The amount of such prompts is already too high, and too many users can be tricked into saying yes.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#402

Post by pwdisswordfish8 »

thecupisblue wrote: post #263
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…

Was just fighting Safari few days ago and I completely agree. Noticed that "vw" and "vh" CSS3 units dont work in it like they do in other browsers. Upon digging, found a medium article explaining it - but as I was in safari, the article's code snippets or images wouldn't load properly. As much as I got a bit hyped to try using safari after WWDC - I just can't. It's so discombobulated regarding web standards that I wo…

The problem also is web developers themselves, with the author of this piece and the Redditor they quote included.

Whatever Medium's needs are for putting images and the written word on the screen were satisfied a decade+ ago. The fact that that Medium article doesn't work is a consequence of how web developers have normalized the practice of passing the blame for their failures and lack of competence on to the browsers and browser makers by extension.

We shouldn't even use the term "web developer". The entire industry, bolstered by analogizing themselves to mobile app programmers, have snowed the world and warped expectations that they are or should be anything other than experts in digital content publishing. The entire notion of "full stack" (which embodies a lie in the very term) should have never even happened.

If we really want to pick bones, where the engineers working on web browsers and "web developers" are both fair targets, then the overwhelmingly pressing matter would have to be how the latter are a piss poor substitute for anyone competent the skills they should possess, which would involve library and information sciences and a smattering of practical tech discipline. The industry is a perfect example of the rampant "consultant effect", where people create massively complicated stacks that often don't accomplish anything that their forebears couldn't manage, and then get paid bloated salaries for mastering the tools and workflows that are ostensibly meant to solve the very problems that they are responsible for foisting onto the world in the first place.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#403

Post by masswerk »

Hm, just a few notes:

Progressive Web Apps are a Chrome-only thing by now, since Firefox has practically stripped support. (This was a somewhat experimental thing, anyways, and there are strong arguments, why users should be able to discern installed programs from external websites. You may argue that this makes much sense for Google, but isn't that desirable from an OS point of view.)

WebRTC: While it's true that Safari was lagging significantly regarding WebRTC Data, a basic implementation (for media) isn't exactly new.

Then, there is actually some leeway in the definition of some standards (e.g., storage) and it's not automatically clear that the way, Chrome does it, is the right one. (By the same argument, you may propose that typed arrays must be slower than normal ones, since this is how it had been in Chrome for several years.)

What's rather annoying for developers, on the other hand, is that Safari is following some common trends as propagated by Chrome. E.g., Safari has stripped its comprehensive list view of loaded sources, which had been quite a selling point.

Finally, yes, Safari has a much slower release cycle. However, if you care for compatibility and do not assume that everyone is driving the latest release of an evergreen browser, this shouldn't be much of an issue.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#404

Post by Spivak »

Dah00n wrote: post #369
jw14 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you are missing the point. The reason you don't see broken sites is because developers take extra time making sites work in Safari. They shouldn't have to. >My impression is the desire to have good mobile support keeps Safari support alive. I would very much argue the opposite. A good browser in iOS is directly against what Apple want (people in the app store, not in browsers). Safari is at best the absolute…

I always think this is odd. If Safari is as dire as people say then why not just develop in Safari first? If your site works there then it’ll just work in Chrome/Firefox/Edge right?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#405

Post by fleaaaa »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #396
drdec wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a personal opinion, but I'm actually really glad Apple are dragging their feet on this. >I have my browser set up to wholesale reject all push notifications I am struggling to understand the reasoning here. You don't like feature X but fortunately there is a configuration to turn it off. But you would still like it taken away from everybody else? Perhaps I am misrepresenting your position, could you clarify?

I don't want to normalise endless notification spam, which is what having this feature in Google's advertiser-friendly conception of it available ultimately does. I'm already considered a bit strange my by friends for muting all group chats and disallowing notifications for things, we don't need to entrench this appalling social norm any further. I find the idea that everyone should be instantly available at the clic…

There is a huge difference that you can turn off a feature A which might be very useful feature for many and you can't even enable the feature A because money. This case is about the latter..

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#406

Post by agloeregrets »

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…

Safari isn't that. Old edge, IE, and FF are that. Safari is WAY closer to chrome than IE ever was.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#407

Post by naravara »

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.

> They want a "market of ideas", and only standardize the ideas that win out.

In practice this means Chrome implements an idea and the idea "wins out" because Chrome does it, until Chrome does a new idea.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#408

Post by agloeregrets »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #241
tarsinge wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes zero business sense for small-medium companies to make separate android and IOS apps. That's man hours that will be spent on a specific platform and its app store, instead of on improving the core product. PWAs are here to stay.

Except 0% of customers understand how PWAs work on mobile devices, 10% of webdevs understand how to make actually performant Apps, and 100% of execs think that using a PWA means their desktop site should be their mobile app (without realizing that, often times, your mobile UX likely has a vastly different context.)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#409

Post by adevx »

rikroots wrote: post #267
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…

> Thanks to their walled garden the only available web browser on iOS is Safari, and since no developer can afford to ignore iOS as a platform they have no choice but to deal with it. As the sole developer and maintainer of a Javascript library for working with the element, most of the problems I encounter when working on the code are to do with things which work fine in every other browser, but die in flames on Safa…

If enough developers start removing features for Safari this could actually have an impact. I would consider this even if it would harm the bottom line of my business. Simply because it removes stress and frustration in the development process.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#410

Post by naravara »

pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #402
thecupisblue wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was just fighting Safari few days ago and I completely agree. Noticed that "vw" and "vh" CSS3 units dont work in it like they do in other browsers. Upon digging, found a medium article explaining it - but as I was in safari, the article's code snippets or images wouldn't load properly. As much as I got a bit hyped to try using safari after WWDC - I just can't. It's so discombobulated regarding web standards that I wo…

The problem also is web developers themselves, with the author of this piece and the Redditor they quote included. Whatever Medium's needs are for putting images and the written word on the screen were satisfied a decade+ ago. The fact that that Medium article doesn't work is a consequence of how web developers have normalized the practice of passing the blame for their failures and lack of competence on to the brows…

> The industry is a perfect example of the rampant "consultant effect", where people create massively complicated stacks that often don't accomplish anything that their forebears couldn't manage, and then get paid bloated salaries for mastering the tools and workflows that are ostensibly meant to solve the very problems that they are responsible for foisting onto the world in the first place.

Organizations want to buy a solution to their problem instead of reorganizing themselves to develop the fundamentals required to not have the problem. It's like managing your back-pain with pain killers without actually doing any physical therapy or lifestyle changes to fix your body mechanics. It's a temporary solution that puts you on a ladder to needing ever more intensive interventions.

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