For developers, Safari is crap and outdated • Hacker News Board

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#241

Post by LAC-Tech » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:26 AM UTC

tarsinge wrote: post #202

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy is simple: back in the day devs got sick of IE because it was the one thing holding them back. You can make a site, easily, that looked beautiful on all the other major browsers, but because IE was outdated when it came to standards support, you had to basically spent all your time fighting with it. Safari serves that role today. There are tons of things I'd love to do but can't because they're not suppor…

Safari is not holding back, Safari is just not implementing Google’s PWA (because it doesn’t really make sense on Apple devices where it would be far inferior to native). You can make a beautiful site in Safari and it will work everywhere (I do professionally). Chrome is the new IE (2001 era, when it was cutting edge and pushing proprietary technology) except ActiveX is PWA.

It makes zero business sense for small-medium companies to make separate android and IOS apps. That's man hours that will be spent on a specific platform and its app store, instead of on improving the core product.

PWAs are here to stay.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#242

Post by kristiandupont » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:29 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #195

leppr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cluel…

I agree that those patterns are annoying but installing an app is at least as many clicks and in fact I may have to search through a few apps to make sure I am installing the right one and not some ripoff that Apple tries to lure me towards with their broken search.

PWA's could be allowed to use things like the push API only if added to the home screen and this problem would be completely solved. You don't like browsers becoming app platforms but I am sorry to say that that ship has sailed on desktop and while Apple is fighting it on mobile, it's a fight they will lose eventually.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#243

Post by docflabby » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:30 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #107

brundolf wrote: post #46

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".

The oddest thing is it's still better on the web than the Android app that's practically unusable. You click open in app and then it loses your thread you're trying to read. I don't even have any strong objections to the app but happy to dance though the dark ux pattern to read the posts!

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#244

Post by alserio » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:31 AM UTC

G3rn0ti wrote: post #201

alserio wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have to support IE11 and the fact that it doesn't support modern API its one of the reasons I hate it with passion. Something like not supporting css variables is seriously limiting. As second place I'll put the unusable dev tools. Spec compliance is more of a problem for css than js. I concede that with previous IE iteration the problem was much more worse.

At least it has dev tools. IE6 didn’t. So every time JS failed I had to alert myself into the heart of the problem…

I'm grateful to the previous generation of web dev, and their suffering to avoid us younger generations their pain.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#245

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:31 AM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #211

wernercd wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's opinions are simple: If they have a good browser, then the app store - their cash cow - becomes unneeded.

Google's opinions are just as simple: if the web loses even partly to apps, their cash cow becomes unneeded (80% of Google's revenue is online advertising).

Yes, exactly. Apple’s parochial interests are in opposition to the web being useful, Google’s are aligned with the web being useful.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#246

Post by mrtksn » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:31 AM UTC

bobmaxup wrote: post #238

mrtksn wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cluel…

You could just disable the notifications? You can do this in pretty much any browser. https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/customize-website-not...

That doesn't mean that the website wont ask. Because they have single chance, the API is called after they receive your consent through an HTML dialog that looks similar to the native one.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#247

Post by jhgb » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:32 AM UTC

tarsinge wrote: post #202

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analogy is simple: back in the day devs got sick of IE because it was the one thing holding them back. You can make a site, easily, that looked beautiful on all the other major browsers, but because IE was outdated when it came to standards support, you had to basically spent all your time fighting with it. Safari serves that role today. There are tons of things I'd love to do but can't because they're not suppor…

Safari is not holding back, Safari is just not implementing Google’s PWA (because it doesn’t really make sense on Apple devices where it would be far inferior to native). You can make a beautiful site in Safari and it will work everywhere (I do professionally). Chrome is the new IE (2001 era, when it was cutting edge and pushing proprietary technology) except ActiveX is PWA.

> because it doesn’t really make sense on Apple devices where it would be far inferior to native

That statement doesn't seem to make sense to me since Apple store's limitations make PWA's relatively more interesting on Apple devices than they would be on Android -- an existing application is not inferior to a non-existent one. On Android you can just serve the native applications yourself if Google doesn't like them. On Apple you can't so web application it is.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#248

Post by yourenotsmart » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:32 AM UTC

The problem isn't Safari as much, which pioneered HTML5, and is the most power-efficient browser on any platform I've seen. The problem is web devs.

Web developers have increasingly the attitude of "I don't want to learn how to make apps, I want to use HTML/CSS/JS for all apps I make", and this plays directly into Google's interests, which benefits from everything being web, because it has its tentacles all over the web (through search, analytics, ads, dns, hosting and so on).

So Google keeps adding questionable features to Chrome and pushing them as standards, including bizarre things like Bluetooth and USB access from web apps, and consistently trying to paint Safari as crap and outdated, and Firefox as stale and out of touch.

And unfortunately, it's clearly working.

I'm a developer, and among other platforms I also target the web, and let's be honest, web devs are among the least educated, least sophisticated, most entitled and most whiny bunch there is. I'll get the downvotes for saying this, because many of them are right here on this site, but it needs to be said.

It's increasingly rare to see even a decent web site these days that isn't some horror show cobbled together from megabytes (literally) of JS frameworks and JSON, if you wanna know why, here's why. We've created a monster and that monster now wants to eat all platforms, so everything everywhere including on your desktop, laptop, tablet and phone, is just tons of React/Angular spaghetti and you better like it.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#249

Post by whostolemyhat » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:34 AM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #195

leppr wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cluel…

Would you like to be notified about meetings in your calendar?

Yes

Would you like notifications when someone mentions or DMs you in your work chat?

Yes

Would you like to know when you get emails?

Yes

Also only one of the things you mentioned has anything to do with notifications.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#250

Post by bryanrasmussen » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 8:39 AM UTC

I use FF, I just filed a bug because aria-expanded does not work correctly with a button when reading with voiceover. It works correctly in Safari.

Safari's current beta has support for the lab and lch functions.

What I'm saying is not that Safari isn't a hindrance in a lot of ways but there are still standards that it supports better than other browsers and I can run into them on a weekly basis.