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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

blog.perrysun.com

131–140 of 623 posts

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#132
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of sites use WebRTC for video and audio calls. Google Meet, Discord, Slack for example. On desktop it's far more secure to use those in-browser than via desktop apps.

Yeah, and those all suck up my RAM. Color me nonplussed that WebKit doesn't follow in Chromium's footsteps.

Safari may be better than Chrome for backgrounded tabs or throttling when idle, but I can assure you its RAM usage is still quite high for many things, WebRTC included. I'm currently grappling with some OOM issues even on the latest iPhone 12 because Safari will wildly spike in RAM usage for certain things, especially around video and iframes (Nothing to do with JavaScript heap, this is webkit engine level stuff.)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever used their mobile site, it's clear they go out of their way to sabotage the experience so that people will use the native app instead

Shit they even admit as much with the popup for the app saying "it's better in the app".

As of late, if you’re not logged in, many features get disabled, like the ability to expand/read more comments.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#134
I highly recommend for developers on Macs to use Safari as their primary browser, and especially for developing. That way everything will just work. Then once you fix any bugs for firefox, it should work just fine on all browsers.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#135
post #52

Speaking from personal experience as a developer (although YMMV) - this is totally true. And I'm not even talking about some newfangled APIs like WebUSB and such (I don't really care about those personally). Safari's handling of regular HTML + CSS is regularly broken compared to other browsers. (At least in my experience.) Open the site in Chromium. Yep it works. Open the site in Firefox. Yep it works. Open the site…

Broken HTML+CSS in Safari? Examples? I started using Safari as my daily driver because I use all apple devices and I like extending my battery life. Before deciding that, I did stints with Firefox and Brave, both of whom had poor sync'ing. I can't remember the last time a site had broken HTML/CSS with Safari. My impression is the desire to have good mobile support keeps Safari support alive. I think I encountered mor…

I'm constantly having to add `translateZ(0)` to elements to get them to handle z-indexing or overflow: hidden correctly in Safari.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#136

> 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…

>This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. After developing during the IE 5.5/6 years there's no way I'm giving you a pass in calling IE cutting edge.

Perhaps you missed it by a year or two, but they invented ajax.

If thats not cutting edge, I dont know what is.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. After developing during the IE 5.5/6 years there's no way I'm giving you a pass in calling IE cutting edge.

At the time IE 6 was released, it was the best browser available. The problem was Microsoft acted is they had “won” and stopped updating it for years, where it calcified and became the hot mess we all knew and disliked.

That I never got. You are a market leader and you just stop whatever you are doing? How did that happen? Arguably the biggest mistake of MS.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#138

I speak as a non-developer but as someone who makes their living with a computer: From my perspective, Apple's conservative attitude is a positive. There are all sorts of web techs that enable the possibility of increased tracking, of websites being generally malicious, of all sorts of things that I don't want. Historically Apple has been on my side and I will continue to appreciate that until demonstrated otherwise.

Are you implying Mozilla Firefox cares less about the user than Apple? Why not let Mozilla have it's browser on iOS? It's not about the user, it's about having an iron chokehold on the developers and we are too cool aid drunk to call it out.

[deleted]

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#139
post #96

> 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…

I suspect that developers are simply angry with Apple for not letting them to fiddle with the latest stuff that Google is experimenting with. Chrome is the new IE but with better manners if you consider the non standard Chrome specific stuff that makes websites to work only in Chrome. Developers hated IE for not being standart, you had to write two versions of your CSS, you had to make your code accommodate the Box m…

We are not angry about the lack of toys. We are angry about not having the possibility of using PWA as an app model. PWA are useless without Apple's support.

My case was a WebBluetooth based download of data from a web page. Now I have to maintain two apps. Thanks.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#140
post #34
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…

You’re talking as if the W3C or even Mozilla don’t exist. This isn’t an Apple vs Google thing. This is an Apple vs web standards thing. That’s why Safari is outdated for developers.

The fact web standards exist doesn't not mean they are to be used or implemented. If that were the case, the web would have became the semantic web by now given how much standards the W3C wrote about that.
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