Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

blog.perrysun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 623 posts

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#491

Post by etripe »

tarsinge wrote: post #319
LAC-Tech wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It's also worth mentioning that Apple is a hardware company and that you need a Mac to even compile native apps for their platform.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#492

Post by dmitriid »

admax88q wrote: post #465
dmitriid wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Google's are aligned with the web being useful to Google . This is not the same as "the web being useful". And these days more often than not Mozilla (which has no stakes in either apps or online advertisement) sides with Apple: https://webapicontroversy.com

I don't buy Mozilla's/Apple's concerns for those APIs. Sure if seems sketch to access USB from the web, but as a user if I'm trying to achieve something and I can't do it on the web, I'll end up installing a native app which has way more access to my system. As a developer I would much rather be able to just deploy cool things on the web instead of having to package up native apps for every platform just to do things…

> if I'm trying to achieve something and I can't do it on the web, I'll end up installing a native app which has way more access to my system.

This is not an argument to just go ahead and implement WebUSB/Bleutooth/Serial/whatever.

> As a developer I would much rather be able to just deploy cool things

Ah yes. It would so very nice if we could just trust all developers to not be malicious actors.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#493

Post by poletopole »

The day my ex-boss said to me we didn’t need to test releases in safari anymore, I added some metrics to determine how many safari users would be affected.

As it turns out, not only were safari users not using our product, practically no one was. At the time I had no choice but to carry on, but now that Flutter supports desktop, I don’t see my self doing web apps, progressive or not, in the future.

I’ve been a web dev for well over a decade, but let’s face the writing on the wall—the web was never intended for apps. But HTTP will live on and that’s what matters.

Open protocols is and always was and will always be what makes the web, and I feel it’s time we as developers should be able to and focus on developing protocols once we are provided the tools to do so—but using open web standards like SPARQL and WASM to name two I have in mind—but still semantically HTTP. The best analogy I can think of was what docket did for dev ops.

I honestly feel like the web as we know it today is a lost cause. Not even Google can make sense of all the SEO collusion. It’s all so inhospitable and seedy now and just another marketing channel. But I’m confident something better is on the horizon and I bet many of us here are working on it.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#494

Post by dmitriid »

admax88q wrote: post #475
admax88q wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy Mozilla's/Apple's concerns for those APIs. Sure if seems sketch to access USB from the web, but as a user if I'm trying to achieve something and I can't do it on the web, I'll end up installing a native app which has way more access to my system. As a developer I would much rather be able to just deploy cool things on the web instead of having to package up native apps for every platform just to do things…

Take Background Sync for example. Mozilla considers the periodic sync API "harmful" because you could use it to track users IP and consumer resources when it's not clear they're interacting with the site Their stated position: > We're concerned that this feature would allow users to be tracked across networks (leaking private information about location and IP address and how they change over time), and that it would…

> But you could achieve very similar behaviour by using Web Push

The fact that something was implemented, shipped, and has security/privacy hole is not an argument to implement and ship something else with a similar hole.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#495

Post by chalst »

amelius wrote: post #466
cmsj wrote: post #463

I say this every time a post like this comes up... Google is the web. Chrome is the web. It shouldn't be true, but it is.... almost. Safari, or more specifically Apple's requirement that all web rendering on iOS be done using WebKit, is THE ONLY thing standing in the way of Chrome's market share being functionally 100%. If you care about the web, and one would presume that web developers would care deeply about the w…

Firefox is my best friend ... If Apple cared as much as they say about privacy, they should install Firefox as a default not because Safari has privacy issues but because then Firefox's market share can grow, which is good for privacy.

Google has Mozilla on a leash.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#496

Post by Jcowell »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #381
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.

But from your own example, why on earth would you need a "state of the art app" for something like banking ? You're displaying transactions, maybe getting push notifications about transactions, etc. Even the feature that you may argue requires a native app, mobile deposit where you take a picture of a check, can definitely be done with a browser. Stripe's new identity service where you take a picture of an ID does on…

I would hate it if I had to unlock safari every-time with my face instead of having a single bank app that’s locked via Face ID. I also want the Bank app to only know of it’s self in it’s little sandbox instead of knowing what I’m browsing through cookies and other web fingerprinting methods. Bank apps should absolutely be apps and not web apps.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#497

Post by Jcowell »

agloeregrets wrote: post #415
candiddevmike wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Users care about 'Native experience' when they actually want to use the app. There's good reason why companies like Starbucks or IG or your Email app are not PWAs. The word users tend to have for non-native apps isn't about performance or such, it's about UX. That word is 'shit'. Nearly every single PWA developer thinks about how brilliant it is that they can write for two platforms at once but forgets that it means…

Note IG does have a PWA but it’s ass since the native app is better and support more features than the web client.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#498

Post by cesarb »

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…

> IE wasn't difficult because it was behind the times; it was difficult because it was deliberately different.

That's not what I recall. As I recall, IE wasn't difficult just because it was behind the times, or because it was deliberately different; it was difficult because it had lots of bugs and inconsistencies. There were plenty of subtle incantations one had to use to make it behave consistently, and to avoid its worst bugs. We dealt with it because unfortunately MSIE still had lots of users, but once the number of users became low enough, all that bug-avoidance code was dropped by web developers.

Adding to that, MSIE's Javascript error messages were extremely cryptic. In my workplace at that time, we made a MSIE-only site (it required an ActiveX control for media streaming) run as much as possible on Mozilla/Firefox (of course the media player didn't work), just to be able to get better Javascript error messages when debugging errors on our Javascript code.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#499

Post by lionkor »

dubya wrote: post #430
lionkor wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow, I could not agree more. I've always struggled to put it into words, but > web devs are among the least educated, least sophisticated, most entitled and most whiny bunch there is This is exactly what I see. I'm a C/C++ developer, and recently started to re-make my website[0] (very WIP) together with my partner, and I've had a few web-devs and other devs tell me that it's really fast (i didn't notice because I'…

The link to your generic-c github project is broken.

Oh wow, it's really broken. Thanks for the notice! We're still iterating fast and hard, so stuff breaks :)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#500

Post by Jcowell »

leppr wrote: post #459
blacktriangle wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where Apple's paternalistic view takes over. I think Apple's design view is that you the user shouldn't have to take action to protect yourself from sties abusing this feature, the Google view is that it's a free for all. There are merits to both approach and I wish users of both platforms would understand that.

Notifications on all Android browsers I've tried are opt-in . On the subject of notifications in general, Apple lets their users be spammed more by not adding granular notification categories like on Android. Your comment doesn't reflect reality. If Apple took notification curation seriously like you imply, I would seriously consider switching to their smartphones, but they don't.

I think you need to take a look at iOS15 features. Not on par but a great start.
Post reply on HN