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Safari is the new IE

nolanlawson.com

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Re: Safari is the new IE

#81

Post by Vexs »

leephillips wrote: post #63
dmd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> significantly less power This is the big issue for most people, I think. I would love to use Chrome, but when I do, (a) thighs burn to a crisp if my machine is on my lap directly and (b) the battery depletes, literally, 1.5x as fast.

I've noticed this using Chrome on Ubuntu. Is Firefox the best alternative, (is it significantly more efficient?) or can you suggest something else?

Chromium has a bit less bloat than chrome, but less features correspondingly. Aside from that, firefox seems to be the big contender.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#82

Post by fuj »

benjamindc wrote: post #16

Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). You might disagree with Apple's priorities, but it doesn't mean other browsers are "better" per se, they're just different. Safari's release cycle, however, is stupid per se.

Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things.

Fanboyism 101 2nd Edition

Chapter 1

How to spot an Apple fanboy 1000 miles away

Re: Safari is the new IE

#83

Post by streptomycin »

exelius wrote: post #60
LoSboccacc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safari on mobile is a bit of a different story; yes it has problems that's a understatement., working on ios safari has been a travesty: it steals a good 20% of view area and 25% of clickable area, it makes a mess with pages trying to be responsive by misreporting the viewport area, it has loads of bugs with resizing and orientation change events and just dies if one script in any page becomes unresponsive

Right, but the problems Safari has on mobile aren't going to be fixed by implementing IndexedDB; and honestly the WebSQL vs IndexedDB argument is irrelevant to most people: 95% of web developers will just use a framework that abstracts the differences. And I wouldn't claim that mobile Chrome is a whole lot better on this front, even (or especially) on Android. The limitations of mobile CPUs combined with higher user…

Have fun abstracting the difference between a relational database and a NoSQL database! That will only work for trivial applications.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#84

Post by drzaiusapelord »

rplnt wrote: post #57
NietTim wrote: post #38

Nolan, I'm not familiar with what you do or have done, but have you ever tried to make a website back in the day? Ever tried to support IE6? 7? 8? IE literally broke the web. CSS rules which worked in every browser ever wouldn't work in IE. Entire webpages weren't formatting correctly, having to spend hours, days, on workarounds. Comparing Safari to IE is just wrong. Safari doesn't break the web, it 'just' lacks supp…

In the same vain, Chrome does break web by introducing various custom features that can't be found in other browsers. See all those Google demos from past several years: "You need Chrome to view this" sounds very much like those "IE5+" warnings.

I have to support IE11 for corporate software, websites, etc. I'll used it as my main browser for a day or so to test things out and its just incredible how its become a 2nd class citizen and how you pretty much need Chrome or Safari nowadays to get by. I'm partial to Firefox and it works well enough, but designers only have so much time and they'll hit big targets first - Chrome/Sarafi and leave IE be with FF support just working because Gecko and Webkit render very, very alike. Things are pretty much the opposite they've been just a few years ago. Obviously, supporting standards are good and IE11 is better at standards than anything before, but there's still bad blood here.

That said, I was just playing with Edge on Win10. Its like a pre-bundled Chrome. Fast, compliant, etc. It hilariously even breaks MS software, for example, I can't open the address book in Outlook Web Access because some deprecated html control that Chrome no longer supports. So if Chrome no longer supports, Edge doesn't either!

I guess we'll see if extensions ever take off for it. If they do I could see it hurting Chrome's marketshare. Personally, the Chrome/Google juggernaut needs to be knocked down a peg or two. I hope Edge gets popular just to keep Google's sometimes anti-consumer ambitions in check. For example, using FF in Android means Play Store links don't work right and a million other things. Google isn't incentivized to make alternative browsers work well in Android. They want use to use Chrome and all of its spying/tracking/marketing stuff cooked in.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#85

Post by VieElm »

exelius wrote: post #69
VieElm wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing you've said here really addresses the problem discussed and really you're looking at this from the perspective of the consumer and not the developer. > Safari is nowhere near that bad [as IE was in the past] Doesn't address the problems developers are having. > I have yet to run across a page that works in Chrome that doesn't work in Safari. Try any webpage that uses WebRTC, and there's a growing number of th…

> Nothing you've said here really addresses the problem discussed and really you're looking at this from the perspective of the consumer and not the developer. That's entirely the point: developers and users have different needs. But the developers will follow the users to whatever browser the users feel is best. Apple's priorities are on improving battery life, page responsiveness, etc. If users value Apple's browse…

> then the developers will simply follow the users.

That didn't happen with IE6. I think the web as platform is bigger than Apple as big as it may be. It's amazing to me that you're OK with a single company holding back the entire platform because of a single device. People use the web with machines that don't even have batteries.

Really to a developer who cares about the open web and standards, just throwing the whole concept of the web out of the window for the sake of Apple's priorities is so, so bad and it will never happen. At least that's my hope and prediction. The open web as a platform will guide my behavior with regards to how I engineer applications that run in the browser, whether Safari is on board or not.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#86

Post by notduncansmith »

verbin217 wrote: post #40
realityking wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While web assembly may give us performance, it doesn't give us access to new platform API. Web assembly can in no way replace Service Worker, IndexedDB or Web Manifests. It also won't help with Web Components unless you're aming for a Web where we just draw on a big canvas.

I want a web where we just draw on a big canvas. That's a pretty simple API for implementers to get right. Then we could move the scene graph (DOM) and it's rendering engine entirely into the application language where it could be more readily hot-fixed. It'd be like PDFJS but for your whole fucking web browser.

Have you looked into the Famo.us project? It's not my cup of tea in terms of implementation, but it sounds like exactly what you're looking for. Alternatively, what's keeping you from just using ?

Re: Safari is the new IE

#87

Post by advanderveer »

Here is an unpopular opinion: Maybe we should chill down on the constant innovation of "the web". I think we are at the point that we need some stablity, such that technologies (and companies!) build on top of it get some time to focus on maintainability, safety and usability instead of having to constantly spend time playing catch up.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#88

Post by yoklov »

Touche wrote: post #37
benjamindc wrote: post #16

Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). You might disagree with Apple's priorities, but it doesn't mean other browsers are "better" per se, they're just different. Safari's release cycle, however, is stupid per se.

> Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). So then let's name these things, specifically, if you really believe that. I'm not aware of any new specs related to animations in the last couple of years. Can you name them?

I'm not really well informed here, but I'd guess that he means how the animations, visual effects, Ui, etc. actually look and behave, rather than new specs.

One thing I've noticed several times is that in chrome, many CSS animations aren't animated across sub-pixel boundaries. I don't know necessarily that safari does this (again, I'm not well informed here -- for all I know this has been fixed in Chrome), but if they did, that would count in my book, despite not being a new spec.

(Honestly, my suspicion is that they aren't though, since a high dpi screen removes most of the need for sub-pixel accuracy).

Re: Safari is the new IE

#89

Post by Klathmon »

rplnt wrote: post #57
NietTim wrote: post #38

Nolan, I'm not familiar with what you do or have done, but have you ever tried to make a website back in the day? Ever tried to support IE6? 7? 8? IE literally broke the web. CSS rules which worked in every browser ever wouldn't work in IE. Entire webpages weren't formatting correctly, having to spend hours, days, on workarounds. Comparing Safari to IE is just wrong. Safari doesn't break the web, it 'just' lacks supp…

In the same vain, Chrome does break web by introducing various custom features that can't be found in other browsers. See all those Google demos from past several years: "You need Chrome to view this" sounds very much like those "IE5+" warnings.

It's one thing to be the first to implement standards, it's another to completely ignore them for years.

The "Chrome Experiments" was a way to show off the WebGL capability in chrome that no other browsers had at the time. (Now those demos will mostly work in all browsers)

Plus you are forgetting that those are experiments. They were never really meant to be actual "apps". Making an experiment/demo for one browser is fine IMO. Especially when only 1 or 2 browsers have implemented the standard currently.

It's like webRTC. I made a "demo" webRTC app about a year ago, and it only worked in chrome OR firefox (but they couldn't talk to each other). That's not chrome or firefox breaking the web, that's the other browsers not being at the cutting edge, but i don't blame them. WebRTC was (and still is) VERY new, it wasn't even finalized and i was using the app as a bit of a tech demo to see what may be possible in the near future.

The chrome experiments were the same way. WebGL wasn't fully finalized, it was one of the first implementations of it, and people wanted to try it out, so Chrome Experiments was born.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#90

Post by vdaniuk »

Tloewald wrote: post #75
vdaniuk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple wants to make the best experience for users while maintaining vendor lock-in. iOS users invest hundreds of dollars in apps and games and enjoy exclusive products. This creates a very significant barrier to switch to another mobile platform. Quite obviously increased switching costs for users are important for iOS to maintain leadership in platform wars. Therefore, rapid advancement of web apps user experience t…

Making web lose -> make users unhappy in short (and probably long) term, damage Apple's reputation in long term It's totally awesome how Google created its Play store so that it seamlessly works on competing platforms -- after all it's a largely open-source stack that would easily run on (say) iPhones. No wait, they use it as a bludgeon to keep third parties in line (and create vendor lock-in).

> Making web lose -> make users unhappy in short term

Sure, it decreases user satisfaction for a SUBSET of users, who care about web apps. This subset seems to be strategically negligible for Apple. This is a trade-off which is absolutely rational from the shareholders/management perspective.

>It's totally awesome how Google created its Play store so that it seamlessly works on competing platforms

Your fanboyism shows. This thread is not about Google, also a corporation which actions are driven by interests of management and shareholders.

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