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Safari is the new IE

nolanlawson.com

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Re: Safari is the new IE

#101

Post by JohnBooty »

netfire wrote: post #74
JohnBooty wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, [Safari] still has the best perceived performance. Just open a page with a heavy layout and scroll up and down, or type an address or search term in the location bar and "feel" how fast it loads. The performance gap is particularly noticeable on older Macs. Safari feels about the same as other browsers on my recent Mac... but there's a big gap in responsiveness between Safari and the other browsers on my wif…

Its in Apple's interest to not have Safari work well on older machines (since they want people to buy new machines), or improve it in ways that would make the browser better compete against the app store (especially on mobile). It is in their interest to have it be a very nice looking document viewing platform, which is where I imagine most of their developer resources are going towards.

   Its in Apple's interest to not have Safari work well 
   on older machines (since they want people to buy new
   machines)
Then they're failing miserably, because as I (and others in this conversation) have attested to... Safari is noticeably faster than Firefox or Chrome on older Mac hardware.

So I don't think your theory holds any water. Sorry.

(Edit: My post was unclear. I and others feel that Safari, despite its other shortcomings, is the most responsive browser on OSX - not the least.)

Re: Safari is the new IE

#102

Post by streptomycin »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #84
rplnt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppor…

My pet peeve with Edge is that it still doesn't fully support IndexedDB and the developers have no ETA for when that will change.

But it's still better than Safari's IndexedDB support, though, even though they've basically not touched it since IE10!

Re: Safari is the new IE

#103

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Klathmon wrote: post #89
rplnt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WebRTC is not really new any more - a couple of years old (and existed in other forms long before), and still not widely adopted. In fact, not adopted in a single further browser in that time, and the original two are not compatible.

I'm thinking, its almost time to consider WebRTC 'failure to achieve traction'?

Re: Safari is the new IE

#104

Post by netfire »

coldtea wrote: post #46
superiortoyou wrote: post #7

If Safari became a little too good, people might stop buying or developing apps.

Which has been stated again and again, but was never an issue with Apple. First because what they make from the App Store is spare change for them. Second because they did have the best browser for a while, and did very much to advance the state of the art (from WebSQL, to Canvas, CSS 3D and other stuff, all originating there, along with the original fast-JITed JS engine who started the JS-race to what we have know).…

Curious where you are basing your revenue numbers from. Per Apple's reported statistics for 2014[1], developers pulled in $10 billion dollars in revenue from the app store. That means that Apple's revenue from the app store should also be in the low billions (based on the 70/30 cut they take from app store sales and purchases).

All without manufacturing logistics and hardware production costs. Obviously the computing infrastructure, payment processing and software engineering of the app store has a cost, but I'd imagine much less than those involved with building, distributing and selling a computer or mobile device.

It may not generate as much as hardware sales do, but billions of dollars hardly seems like spare change.

[1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/08App-Store-Rings-in...

Re: Safari is the new IE

#105

Post by ninkendo »

zamalek wrote: post #92
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…

I had to do some work[1] with, basically, HTML4. Eventually I reached the stage whereby the feature worked in every other browser (IE8+, including Opera), using clean and completely hack-free code. In 3 days I had done my work. Then I tested it in Safari. Two weeks later I gave up and basically had to `if (Safari)`. I don't know if the code still has that, but it probably does. This wasn't anything 'lacking'. Sure, i…

If your target browser is IE8 and you write a bunch of html4 that looks great in IE8, I would expect it to not work anywhere else.

Not only is IE8 a snowflake but html4 is particularly hard to get a good layout working. Lots of nontrivial layouts in pure html4 (and css 1/2) require tons of browser specific hacks.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#106

Post by leephillips »

headstorm wrote: post #97
Cshelton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has stopped supporting Safari on Windows. SO yes, you are using Safari 5.0, from over 2 and a half years ago...of course every other browser will beat it.

I might be mistaken but I read the parent as saying that each browser on his windows pc is faster than safari on his mbp.

Of course you're not mistaken; the meaning is completely obvious to a native English speaker, but that doesn't describe everyone here, of course.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#107

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Safari is the new IE

#108

Post by carussell »

atacrawl wrote: post #59
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.

In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). I'm a Safari user who develops first and foremost in Safari, and I completely disagree with this. Chrome runs rings around Safari in UI animation performance, it's almost embarrassing.

I read this as a comment about the design decisions in the Safari UI, not how it performs.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#109

Post by streptomycin »

dragonwriter wrote: post #99
streptomycin wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are already abstractions that work over both and work for nontrivial apps, including, IIRC, an indexedDB polyfill using WebSQL. Going the other way might be harder, but every rdbms is, itself, an abstraction over a nonrelational storage system of some kind, so it's clearly not impossible.

The IndexedDB polyfills over WebSQL are horribly slow and buggy. You'd be hard pressed to do something non-trivial with them. Believe me, I've tried. Still better than using Safari's IndexedDB though!

Re: Safari is the new IE

#110

Post by justwannasing »

espadrine wrote: post #2

Safari is worse than IE, however. You could install an alternative. Even if they weren't, I fully agree with progressive enhancement. It is always going to provide the right incentives for everyone. Only the features most used (by end-users) will become browser vendors' utmost priority.

It's not. At least not according to caniuse.com, html5test.com or css3test.com.
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