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

Safari is the new IE

nolanlawson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 368 posts

Re: Safari is the new IE

#211

Post by joesmo »

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…

Considering that Safari fails to start on a regular basis (amongst a ton of bugs and problems with it), I'd say that breaks the web a lot more than IE6.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#212

Post by ninkendo »

zamalek wrote: post #179
ninkendo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying "I didn't use any browser-specific hacks" with HTML4 is a strange statement, seeing as how many non-trivial layouts in html4 (and I'm assuming the older CSS standards that would typically go along with it) require browser-specific hacks to work. But honestly, I can't know because he's not naming anything specific anyway, just an anecdote about how IE8 was great at being standards-compliant and safari wasn't. W…

> Saying "I didn't use any browser-specific hacks" with HTML4 is a strange statement I was working on top of a huge CSS framework - the majority of styling work I did was tiny tweaks to styles where the appropriate hacks had already been solved. Also I didn't mention layout. The specific pain point was contenteditable in combination with JS - by the time I got to the code everything surrounding my little problem-spac…

> I was working on top of a huge CSS framework

Well, that's the whole thing then, isn't it? The huge CSS framework probably had tons of hacks (as you say) to make things work in IE8... it's a bit disingenuous to say you wrote everything to be clean and without browser hacks, if the hacks all exist but are buried under a "huge CSS framework".

Your whole experience could probably be restated as "I was working with a CSS framework that did a bunch of cross-browser hacks for me, and the tweaks I made to it didn't work in safari", which is a pretty uninteresting statement, because it's equally likely that any issues you had in safari are the fault of the CSS, and not the browser. (In fact, much much more likely.)

Re: Safari is the new IE

#213

Post by nicwolff »

collyw wrote: post #170
streptomycin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MS was deemed to have a monopoly on desktop software, Apple is not. You're allowed to hinder competition for software on your operating system, if the user can reasonably easily choose another operating system.

Apple has a monopoly of taste – a self-defining market that won't switch OSes even if that constrains their other choices. But they could, so the "market of Apple users" isn't a discrete market under the law.

[Edited: gosh I type slow.]

Re: Safari is the new IE

#214

Post by Grue3 »

Except Safari's market share is not anywhere near IE's. How many times have you seen a website that works only in Safari? I never did. However I've seen "only works in Chrome" many times. So if anything, Google Chrome is the new IE.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#215

Post by shadowmint »

VieElm wrote: post #85
exelius wrote: post #69

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. 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 who…

> That didn't happen with IE6

Yes it did...but anyway, the detail is irrelevant; it's the point you're refusing to acknowledge:

A developer, building a product, is obsessed with growth metrics, OR, a slave to the pedantic demands of a client they're working for.

Either way, those demands require that a site be available to as many people as justifiably possible. The questions you have to ask are:

1) Is the the $ value of a customer using IE6 worth the time taken to make the site work in it? (No, almost certainly not)

2) In IE8? (Hopefully not, but you know, there are still a lot of these guys, and it's almost always a demand in the .gov space...)

3) In Safari? Yes. There are tonnes of these guys, especially on mobile where they don't have a choice, and no matter what fancy javascript 0-day API you're in love with, you can work around it without any significant effort.

The point:

Is safari holding things back? Yes.

Is it OK? Not really. It sucks.

Can you ignore safari and pretend it doesn't exist, and lose those customers? No. No you can't.

We're webdevs, sucking it up is what we're good at. We've had years of practice.

Suck it up.

The path forward, I think we'll find in the long run is going to be less native apis, more WebAssembly-style low level polyfills to implement new 'universal' features that run on all js runtimes.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#216

Post by strmpnk »

anonymousguy wrote: post #166
streptomycin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also ironic given that most people have adopted some of that "broken CSS box model" in their CSS.

    box-sizing: border-box;
Now there were many other problems but I'm not sure people appreciate how such features eventually got standardized. Similar issues happened around DOM serialization with APIs like innerHTML, which Netscape refused to adopt because of "series of pointing at standards". Developers ended up adopting the idea and it was later standardized. XHR is another case. There are many more.

In the case of Safari, I can think of canvas, touch (love or hate it vs pointer events it was before any of the alternatives), DPI independence, &c.

It's some of these quirks that seems to show how newer web standards might be rushed through by increasingly aggressive vendor involvement. Apple hasn't changed all that much from when it first released Safari. It's only our expectations for the pace of new additions that has.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#217

Post by jdmichal »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #121
mhomde wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but before that IE fixed the web! :) Remember CSS on Netscape? IE4 was actually a beacon back in its day. Everything is cyclical: Lean - Average - Bloated - Lean - Average - Bloated

Are we currently in the bloated stage? - Chrome sucks up RAM like Photoshop. - Firefox Dev Edition is broken or slow every other build - IE is "ok"but their dev tools are incredibly sluggish and useless.

I think the Servo engine is going to anchor Mozilla's next transition to "lean".

Re: Safari is the new IE

#218

Post by nkron »

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…

Nolan is one of the main contributors to PouchDB - http://pouchdb.com/

Re: Safari is the new IE

#219

Post by mburns »

collyw wrote: post #170
streptomycin wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because Microsoft had a monopoly.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#220

Post by disusered »

criley2 wrote: post #131
exelius wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Chrome on Android works great and experiences literally zero of the issues mentioned for Safari. Chrome for Android is an app, not a system component, and does not require Android point releases to be updated. It is frequently updated on a regular schedule by Google and pushed out to devices. Using sources like www.caniuse.com, I frequently find that Safari/iOS does not support a feature that is supported on Android…

https://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html?ut...

What about the other 50% of Android users that don't have Chrome or Chrome WebView? I've been working mobile for a few years now and would love to drop anything before KitKat, but that's not something feasible given market share.

In practice, pre 4.4 embedded WebViews have worse support for standards than Mobile Safari. Chrome for Android was in part a system component in order to replace 4.4's embedded WebView, only until 5.0+ did it become decoupled.[1]

Google's evergreen approach reduces fragmentation of a core API and it's been a godsend. I know in the future, Safari will be left alone as a pain point. Just don't misrepresent the present situation, where older Android has worse standards support than Mobile Safari and can't even be debugged in devtools.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/webview/overview

Post reply on HN