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Safari is the new IE

nolanlawson.com

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Re: Safari is the new IE

#171

Post by smrtinsert »

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.

It's so easy to be cavalier about random popular facts. I would love for someone to go back and load up the alternative browsers available at the time on some vms and take stock of their featuresets. Factoring in popularity at the time I'm pretty sure not much would have changed.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#172

Post by ebbv »

Failing to support newly proposed APIs != making your own non-standard implementations of things and refusing to care about compatibility.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#173

Post by ninkendo »

swsieber wrote: post #159
ninkendo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You missed his point. He mentioned IE8+ and Opera as working targets to highlight the fact Safari was being lame. He said every browser - that would include complaint ones like firefox and chrome. He also specifically said he avoided browser specific hacks.

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. Which is such an extraordinary claim (and is so contrary to established precedent) that without any extraordinary evidence, I have a lot of trouble accepting it.

(And it's amazing how many people think "I'm not doing any browser hacks" while they're using something like jQuery, which is a library 100% devoted to doing browser hacks for you while abstracting you from that fact.)

Re: Safari is the new IE

#174

Post by Pxtl »

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…

Yeah, I was a big believer in "screw it we'll just use tables" back then. When CSS finally caught on it basically was the end of dynamic-width websites for a few years.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#175

Post by ben010783 »

mbell wrote: post #41
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 use Safari for all my general browsing for one reason: It uses 1/2 to 1/5 the power that chrome does.

I doubt it will ever be as good as Safari, but Google is working on this: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/12/chrome-os-x-performance-...

Re: Safari is the new IE

#177

Post by jessaustin »

etchalon wrote: post #151
Touche wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how fixing IndexedDB bugs hurts battery life? Can you explain how WebRTC hurts battery life?

It doesn't hurt battery life. It just takes engineering hours away from working on battery life.

But that argument can justify any deficiency in Safari, so it's unconvincing. Eventually you're just saying, "Apple don't care about all these new web things." Which is the point of TFA.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#178

Post by jasonlotito »

sergimansilla wrote: post #4

Agreed. However, it 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. Apple really put some effort in making it "feel" extremely fast.

Safari still has some pretty glaring problems. Take going back, for example. Going back, it loads an image of the previous page before it actually loads the real page. This gives the perception that it's loaded immediately, but it's not really loaded. This means the page is not responsive. It also looks fuzzy, and you can see it's fake. It's horrible, and while it's intended to fake being fast, it only serves to remind me that it's not actually fast.

Then their is the problem with black boxes. I don't know why, but all to often, safari loads a page and there are black boxes on that page. Just covering up portions of the web page. I have to resize the window or do something to get Safari to rerender the page so it will go away. This happens frequently.

Couple this with all the other issues OSX has, I can't but make the assumption that Apple is focused on Quantity rather than Quality.

Of the 3 big browsers in Mac, Firefox is still, in my mind, the most solid. Safari suffers some serious problems, not the least of which is that it's only for Mac.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#179

Post by zamalek »

ninkendo wrote: post #173
swsieber wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed his point. He mentioned IE8+ and Opera as working targets to highlight the fact Safari was being lame. He said every browser - that would include complaint ones like firefox and chrome. He also specifically said he avoided browser specific hacks.

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-space had been solved by the rest of the team. Again, specifically, Safari demonstrated wildly different behavior within that specific space, where other browsers only behaved marginally different (a relative term, contenteditable is a complete mess, sadly, still in HTML5) in a way that I could find a viable subset of functionality that worked consistently.

Re: Safari is the new IE

#180

Post by lorenzhs »

dredmorbius wrote: post #125
smrtinsert wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's amazing. Thanks for reminding me how much contempt they have for choice.

Not quite my area of expertise, but I believe that browsers on Android also tend to use the core Android browser components though they can dress them up slightly differently.

They can, but they don't have to. Mozilla ships a Gecko engine in Firefox for Android.
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