For developers, Safari is crap and outdated • Hacker News Board

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#191

Post by onion2k » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #164

onion2k wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criticism was that "no one uses WebRTC", not that WebRTC was inefficient. Clearly millions of people do use it, so you aren't refuting the point in any way. Perhaps if Apple had supported WebRTC earlier their engineers could have influenced the way it works to make it better. That's the main problem with ignoring standards in an org the size of Apple - you don't get to contribute to them. I don't mind that Safari…

> Clearly millions of people do use it, so you aren't refuting the point in any way. Are forced to use it. And millions more would be forced to use it if Safari handed it on a plate as well...

The overwhelming majority don't know, or really care, that they're using it. People don't care about tech. They care about what they see. User complaints will never be "WebRTC is bad!". They'll be things like "Google Meet kills my phone battery!", or "Teams doesn't work on my iPhone!". The solution to those complaints is usually to make the underlying tech better rather than chuck it out entirely and use something else.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#192

Post by diebeforei485 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:02 AM UTC

nmfisher wrote: post #108

diebeforei485 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of apps are in the intersection of being performant enough to be written in JavaScript and also generate lots of in-app purchase revenue (which is typically recurring revenue)? Certainly not most games, which are the biggest money-spinners, and also not pro camera apps or video editing apps. Video streaming apps (eg. Netflix / YouTube Premium) come to mind, but they don't rely too much on in app purchase I…

> What sort of apps are in the intersection of being performant enough to be written in JavaScript and also generate lots of in-app purchase revenue (which is typically recurring revenue)? Or maybe it's just selection bias - we don't see these types of apps because the experience is so fundamentally broken, noone ever bothers to develop them.

We'd see at least one of them on the App Store, then. 30% revenue share is a lot (and I hope Congress bans the anti-steering provisions and apps can link you to their website to pay), but it doesn't kill entire categories of apps.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#193

Post by rudian » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

samtheprogram wrote: post #40

Aside: If you have a Mac and complain about your computer overheating or fans spinning up constantly / “while doing light browsing”: start using Safari for anything video/audio encoding/decoding related, like streaming music and video, or just in general, especially for longer battery life. It helps immensely with no noticeable loss in performance. My fans no longer spin up watching a video on YouTube or DRM protecte…

Safari is great for some thing but its performance in others is lacking to say the least. Open a GitHub PR with 30 files to see what I’m talking about, the browser freezes for seconds (but you can scroll a partially-painted page so, yay?)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#194

Post by rimliu » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

oaiey wrote: post #139

mrtksn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PWAs are useless.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#195

Post by mrtksn » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:04 AM UTC

leppr wrote: post #188

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope they never implement them on mobile Safari, those things are a pain in the backside on the desktop.

In what way?

I see you are new here, would you like to receive notifications from us? You need to decide on it before even looking at out offerings.

NO

Okay, what about signing up to our newsletter?

NO

Okay, we will track you now all over the internet but if you like you can manage that.

JUST GO AWAY

Okay, btw to see the rest of the article or any of the pictures you need to create an account first.

---

Web technologist are clueless about what the Web has become. Please let browsers remain HTML and CSS viewing tools and make an app that I can review on the App Store page before committing to install it.

I hope Apple never implements website notifications on mobile.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#196

Post by dmitriid » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:05 AM UTC

afavour wrote: post #34

jolux wrote: 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.

Yes. From Google's point of view they don't exist.

https://webapicontroversy.com/ and WebHID timeline: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1419436102373584905

There are countless other examples

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#197

Post by tommek4077 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:06 AM UTC

pacifika wrote: post #122

tommek4077 wrote: post #101

Regarding PWA support, I often read you can use PWAs offline. I can not imagine a Website that I would want offline. Can someone please give me an useful example of such an offline Website?

Any website you might access whilst on a train or in other situations with spotty connectivity

I don't understand. Where is the data coming from? When it is open, I have it open, if I click anywhere, what should be displayed? Is it for some kind of ebook and fetching the coming pages beforehand?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#198

Post by rimliu » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #136

pupppet wrote: post #112

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.

Perhaps you missed it by a year or two, but they invented ajax. If thats not cutting edge, I dont know what is.

People complaining about Safari also seem not to know how much it brought when first iPhone was released. Canvas, CSS animations, etc.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#199

Post by tommek4077 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

upbeat_general wrote: post #123

tommek4077 wrote: post #101

Regarding PWA support, I often read you can use PWAs offline. I can not imagine a Website that I would want offline. Can someone please give me an useful example of such an offline Website?

I think the idea is not necessarily to make fully offline websites (though some people will), but to provide a more consistent interface akin to native apps. Most apps you use require network access but you can still interact with them on very slow/broken connection. Meanwhile you try to load a website and it’s a much different experience. But as for offline apps, I could imagine music/podcast players (where you can…

But all those examples are already working without PWAs. In the past we called those programs or applications. Why using the browser as runtime?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#200

Post by bmn__ » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 7:08 AM UTC

rubyn00bie wrote: post #18

> 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…

> IE was cutting edge until Firefox.

I was there. I call bullshit. Competitors like Opera and IE for Mac (a completely different codebase and product) could do alpha-transparent images in the background, CSS sibling selectors, display:table-* and dozens more. For a few fortunate Web developers who were strong willed enough to heed the call from Alistapart to standards compliant code, we were able to circumvent the lack of "cutting edge" features – typically already published years ago – by employing HTC http://enwp.org/HTML_Components> and hiding this from other browsers with conditional comments. Nowadays this would be called a polyfill.

The reality is that IE suffered immense neglect.