Safari is the new IE • Hacker News Board

Re: Safari is the new IE

#161

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:50 PM UTC

mmorris wrote: post #153

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

Not an expert, but hopeful that WebRTC will be a success in the end. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic? > still not widely adopted Certainly everyone involved with WebRTC wishes that it had the support of IE and Safari, but Chrome + Firefox + Opera is nothing to sneeze at, particularly if you're targeting a savvy audience. > Original two are not compatible Maybe I'm confused, are you saying that Firefox and Chrome are…

All the important scalable features are incompatible - so-called 'bundling' where many streams use a single port etc. Aggregation of error feedback so an MCU can sensibly report bandwidth limits. Slow connect/reconnect times. No 'supernode' support. Pretty much anything that takes it from a toy with 3 or 4 p2p connections, to a product that can handle up to 100 streams with audio/video switching realtime through an MCU or P2P dynamically.

Other products can do this. WebRTC suffers from being based on RTP/RTCP and SIP-style signaling. There's not enough juice there to get the job done.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#162

Post by untog » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:50 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #103

Klathmon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

IMO this is directly related to the post. WebRTC is a technology that has huge potential on mobile (given phones have cameras etc) but Apple haven't/won't implement it.

WebGL is a good comparison here - it was pretty dead before Apple implemented it. When they did (in iOS8) you started seeing a ton more WebGL things popping up.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#163

Post by ninkendo » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

netfire wrote: post #152

ninkendo wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he interpreted your post as being the opposite of what you meant it to say. You said the performance gap is more noticeable but you probably mean in favor of safari, although it could be interpreted either way.

I did, and I should have read it more carefully. That being said, I think there is a balance that Apple tries to maintain here. If there experience on older systems is terrible, they run the risk of people switching to a different operating system and platform. If the experience isn't significantly better on newer hardware, however, customers won't be motivated to upgrade.

I would definitely not attribute it to any purposeful attempt at by a company to make things worse for older systems... human beings developing software on new hardware is already enough to make performance issues happen.

In reality, if the lead developers of some software find the experience to be good enough on their machines, that's going to lead to it becoming worse on old hardware, no matter what the company (as people have said in this thread, it's even worse with chrome and firefox.)

It takes huge amounts of effort to ensure that the development work you're doing is performant on a range of hardware. If you neglect doing that, I'd definitely chalk it up to laziness and not malice.

(In other words, I agree that performance gets worse from version to version, but you don't need to attribute to malice that which can equally be attributed to laziness.)

Re: Safari is the new IE

#164

Post by tempodox » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:51 PM UTC

It would be easy to interpret Apple's behavior as a declaration of war on the browser. They want to force everyone into their brave new native app ecosystem where it costs you three tithes (30%) of your revenue. They certainly don't want to give you any encouragement to circumvent that via browser.

And web apps become ever more attractive in the appleverse: You stay in control, not Apple, and you get the revenue, not Apple. It's quite clear why Apple doesn't want that.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#165

Post by ttflee » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:55 PM UTC

riquito wrote: post #149

philwelch wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only was Safari always WebKit based, WebKit is Apple's browser engine (forked from KHTML and open sourced) that Chrome used to use until they forked it.

And it's a fork of the KHTML engine used by the Konqueror web browser for the KDE project

Back in 1995, Internet Explorer then was licensed after Mosaic, and for Mozilla the name was coined as 'Mosaic Killer'.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#166

Post by anonymousguy » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:55 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #91

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…

What rules that had been there for tens of years were broken by IE6? IE6 was the best browser available when it was released, and the web standards ecosystem was nothing like it is today. I think the analogy is very clear. If you want to code like it's 2000, supporting IE6 is easy, because IE6 is a very good 2000 browser. If you want to code like it's 2010, supporting Safari is easy, because Safari is a very good 201…

Perhaps the biggest thing is that IE6 had a broken CSS box model.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#167

Post by thanatropism » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

"X is the new Y" considered harmful.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#168

Post by smrtinsert » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #91

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…

What rules that had been there for tens of years were broken by IE6? IE6 was the best browser available when it was released, and the web standards ecosystem was nothing like it is today. I think the analogy is very clear. If you want to code like it's 2000, supporting IE6 is easy, because IE6 is a very good 2000 browser. If you want to code like it's 2010, supporting Safari is easy, because Safari is a very good 201…

Absolutely the truth. There was a reason the only answer was tables for a very long time.

A major source of hatred for IE was the fact the IE team did work prior to the browser standards, a practice which is now standard operating procedure. Where would be without ajax?

Re: Safari is the new IE

#169

Post by jasonlotito » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 2:59 PM UTC

carussell wrote: post #108

atacrawl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the stuff that I shouldn't spend time using in a browser? I don't really open up a browser hoping to spend time with it's UI.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#170

Post by collyw » Tue, Jun 30, 2015, 3:01 PM UTC

streptomycin wrote: post #91

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…

What rules that had been there for tens of years were broken by IE6? IE6 was the best browser available when it was released, and the web standards ecosystem was nothing like it is today. I think the analogy is very clear. If you want to code like it's 2000, supporting IE6 is easy, because IE6 is a very good 2000 browser. If you want to code like it's 2010, supporting Safari is easy, because Safari is a very good 201…

"Another difference is that MS never blocked you from installing a better browser, but Apple does that on iOS. That policy is becoming increasingly ridiculous..."

Why has that not resulted in anti competitive behavior lawsuits? MS got in to a fair bit of trouble for similar things. They didn't stop you installing an alternative.