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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#521

Post by admax88q »

dmitriid wrote: post #518
admax88q wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the hole exists and is not going to be closed, why refuse to add other useful features that use the same hole? It's like taking a room, and refusing to add a back door for "security" when the front door already exists.

Why expand the surface are of the hole? Besides, it's quite possible that the hole in WebPush does not allow for some/many scenarios that a background sync would.

Because if the hole exists at all, malicious actors will find a way to abuse it. But if non malicious developers have to jump through too many hoops to provide useful functionality to users they will just give up and users lose out.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#522

Post by onemoresoop »

yourad_io wrote: post #511
tartoran wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and am of the same opinion, i’m glad Safari is playing by a slower tune and it definitely it isn’t google’s tune.

You don't want to be given the choice? Nobody is saying notifications should be silently accepted.

If google could move as fast as they could they'd serve their own interest at the expense of others and we know where that leads us. I'm glad that they can't move as fast and it takes a while for things to get accepted.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#523

Post by bromuro »

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 Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today.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

The amount of pain we had with IE is not even comparable to the sweet issues we may have with Safari.

Who survived those times, with the evil F12 debugger, can confirm.

Safari is a joy to develop with and it sucks I have to switch to chrome for its extensions.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#524

Post by admax88q »

cesarb wrote: post #508
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…

> 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. There's a third possibility: that you give up achieving that something. The "activation energy" of installing an app is higher than loading a website, so if th…

How is giving up on achieving something a win for users?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#525

Post by Silhouette »

lucideer wrote: post #439
Silhouette wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is compliant. It's behind but compliant. Well, kind of. There are all sorts of minor glitches that only happen on Apple devices. A common complaint is iOS Safari's interpretation of vh units. It might be technically correct (because the spec is sufficiently ambiguous to argue that Apple's choice meets it) but it's still obviously broken for common practical applications that work everywhere else such as attach…

> There are all sorts of minor glitches This is true but it's true of all software. And they tend to get fixed in patch releases (rather than waiting for a new major version). Even for bugs the Webkit team leave open for years, I think there's a big different between maintaining major incompatibilities in central features for years, and being slow fixing some edge-case glitches.

This is true but it's true of all software.

But it's not, is it? We're not talking about minor bugs here, we're talking about anomalous behaviour or unusual interpretations of the specs. Safari is far worse than any other major browser in that respect now that IE has largely faded away.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#526

Post by zenexer »

the_other wrote: post #417
zenexer wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea of IE being purely an "outdated" browser seems to be one perpetuated by young devs reading & misunderstanding old blogposts. That’s certainly not true: it was indeed outdated for much of its life. Yes, through IE6, it did things differently; beyond that point, though, it simply fell behind. It stopped evolving in any meaningful way—with the possible exception of tabs being introduced in IE7–while other bro…

You’re holding on too tight to an argument for the sake of analogy. It’s cute and evocative but it’s blinding you to the bigger picture. The issues with Google monopolising the direction of standards development are the major issue facing browsers, users and developers on the web, today. I get that you’re disappointed Safari doesn’t support the same stuff, the same way as Chrome. Tough. You’re attempting to develop a…

> I get that you’re disappointed Safari doesn’t support the same stuff, the same way as Chrome.

In some cases, yes, but in others, no. For example, Safari still clings to their proprietary image formats. That means I need two versions of each image: something legacy or proprietary for Safari users (PNG, JPEG, HEIF) and something to appease the Google Gods (WebP) so I don't get blasted by Core Web Vitals. It's the IE PNG and SVG issues all over again. (Yes, I'm aware that Safari keeps claiming they've added WebP support--it's broken and has been broken since its inception.)

It's this proprietary, "we're going to do things our way and ignore the conventions" that annoys me. Chrome does it, too, but at least Chrome users have the ability to choose another browser; no such luck on iOS. WebP has been around for a long time now as an unencumbered format; there's no reason to continue avoiding it other than those sweet, sweet royalties that Apple wants to collect on HEIF.

> If you want to use the new shiny, do so, but accept what you’re doing carries the risks it has and work that into your strategy.

No, I don't want to use the new shiny; I want to eliminate the old bloat--all the compatibility code required to achieve the same experience across a variety of browsers while simultaneously appeasing search engines.

I don't want to be forced to use Apple's proprietary image and video formats to achieve decent performance in Safari--formats that other browsers often can't reasonably support. I don't want to be forced to do things the "Apple way" and rely on JS when I could be using CSS that works in all other browsers.

This is the same path that IE took. Right now they're at the IE7 stage: you can get roughly the same effect that you can with other browsers, but you have to go about it differently. At the same time, they're starting to lag behind. IE7 really exemplified this lag: it took them far too long to add tabs. Proper PNG support was in a similar boat but took even longer.

> Some of your users could be on Lynx

My sites would work better in Lynx if I didn't have to spend so much time making them work in Safari--but they do work in Lynx; they're just less-than-pretty because, guess what, Safari lacks support for the CSS that I need to accommodate semantic HTML.

> on that browser which comes with Haiku

It can't be that important if nobody even knows what it's called.

> on a shitty phone from 8 years ago.

Phones from 8 years ago run sites a lot better when they don't have to download redundant code and JS polyfills to achieve what could've been done with pure CSS. Although, if they don't support TLSv1.2, they're not going to be able to connect to some of my sites anyway; tough cookies. (They'll still be able to access my static websites, where enforcing modern encryption is less of a concern.)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#527

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

Was IE outdated or was it the version the laziest IT department/sysadmin kept deploying that was old?

I remember someone telling me they couldn't use anything else other than IE6 at a non-tech job years after it was deprecated and at least two major versions behind.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#528

Post by masswerk »

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…

There is a tremendous bias in favor of Chrome in developer communities. E.g., things that aren't implemented in either Chrome or Firefox (well, it's their site) aren't even listed on MDN. (The CSS section is somewhat better on this.) Which creates this whatever-Chrome-is-doing effect…

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#529

Post by csydas »

admax88q wrote: post #484
csydas wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's about such things, it's about pushing features that are developer convenient but not really user convenient. I'm on an older MacOS version with Safari 12 (too lazy to update, but that's on me), and there are sites that work just fine one day and then break the next because they changed how they want to load random content for their forever scrolling. I'm sure there's a business case for the develop…

Personally I find very few sites that work in Chrome but not Firefox. But as a web developer I'm still irked by some of the more "fun" APIs that firefox refuses to support such as USB/PWAs/NFC etc. Your issue however also ties in to what the article said about how Apple does not auto update Safari. You're tied to Safari 12 partially because the upgrade flow is a huge disruptive process as you have to update your enti…

>Your issue however also ties in to what the article said about how Apple does not auto update Safari. You're tied to Safari 12 partially because the upgrade flow is a huge disruptive process as you have to update your entire OS to a new major revision.

Sorry, but to be clear, my lack of update is just that -- lack of ambition to do so. I don't really have a compelling reason to update MacOS or Safari.

>Who can say why those sites are breaking for your version of Safari. Web devs do love to just use the "latest and greatest" APIs just for fun, but it could also be that their changes have improved the experience for the rest of users on modern browsers, and that for them outweighs the loss of users still of Safari 12.

This is kind of my point though -- WebDev is kind of unique as I see it as there are far more opaque changes than with other software disciplines. Changelists are pretty common for every other software discipline, but I'm not sure I can recall too many websites ever mentioning backend changes they make.

WebDev changes and fast, and a general feeling is that "outdated" in WebDev appears far faster than anything else (e.g., a friend uses my old 2012 MacBook Air -- it works perfectly still, runs modern Editing and Authoring software (adobe suite), plays videos, works on most websites just fine. Some sites like imgur just shit the bed on it except for Chrome because of browser compatibility) For a situation like this, when absolutely everything else runs fine except for a single website on browsers, it feels hard to blame OS Vendors when it's only the site that is having issues being displayed.

>I am saying that the lack of modern features by Safari and Firefox _is_ a detriment to users and web devs,

I'm not sure I'm convinced for the reason above, but it's not really possible for an end user to comment because of:

- Lack of transparency on why the changes were done in the first place

- LifeCycle for features in WebDev are much different than other software life cycles

- Old OSes and hardware can run comparatively contemporary software (i.e., new and modern) without issue, it's only WebDev that bumps into this

- In many cases, the old stack worked "fine" for users regardless of browser

This is where the impression that it's just feature chasing comes from. You can say Safari is a detriment to me, but it has the best battery life (expected), is fastest on MacOS (also expected), has a UI I really like and prefer (likely expected as it's made to look like the rest of MacOS.

The new feature that web developers want to use from Chrome isn't just weighed against my experience on your site; it's weighed against the overall browser performance the computer performance, and the browser experience with the computer.

I might visit a single site for 10-30 minutes on a given day. I'm using the web browser almost constantly for many many many sites. When one site tries to tell me my browser is insufficient/outdated and it's the only one that is causing issues, I don't feel particularly persuaded by this. It's not about raw numbers; Hacker News performs the same way for me today as it did the day I joined, and while I'm sure they've done gobs of optimizations for the amount of traffic and users they handle, from my point of view as a user on many browsers, the experience is the same.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#530

Post by Jcowell »

paxys wrote: post #102
Synaesthesia wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is still the best mobile web browser in terms of performance and usability, and I'm using Firefox on Android, it's great, but Safari is the fastest.

Considering there are no other browsers on iOS to compare to, Safari is obviously the fastest by default.

The OP is comparing to android browsers as well though.
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