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

Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

magiclasso.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 316 posts

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#241

Post by sureIy »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #96

No not even close by every single possible measure. I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change. I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser th…

Safari was late until a couple of years ago when they started implementing new features more aggressively. Now it's always Firefox. Just check how long it took them to add support for the :has() selector and RegEx Lookbehind. We're years into "manifest v3" and background workers are nowhere to be found.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#242

Post by sureIy »

Loughla wrote: post #222
1over137 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machines don’t take cash?

In the nearest urban center the meters don't take cash. The machines also do not take direct payment. The kiosk on each block also does not take payments of any kind. They force you to use a 3rd party app not actually owned by the city. There is zero way to pay for parking unless you have a smart phone and data. I have no idea why no one has sued for access yet.

1950: put a coin in and walk away

2024: this

We are not living in the future. I wish more people rebelled against bad "smart" implementations.

If "smart" features are a downgrade in speed and ease, do not remove the old way.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#243

Post by dangus »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #240
aalimov_ wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say about Safari. After reading the response (outlining draft vs support dates) to your initial comment it seems like the reality is that your primary complaints dont make much sense. Maybe there are some other features that they were late to start supporting. Seems more like other browsers jumped on new features before they were standardized, and maybe that is at the he…

It *is* misleading because Apple saying that Safari supports a feature doesn't actually mean that the feature in question actually works. Rather than go through every single point (because I don't have all day), I'll just pick one: > IndexedDB API > W3C recommended standard in 2015. Supported in Safari in 2014. No. It didn't work in 2014, it wasn't working until 2016. (see: https://gist.github.com/nolanlawson/08eb857…

> because you can't reliably use features until the last two major versions of a browser support those feature

Maybe a bit of a nitpick but this particular comparison is exactly the same with any other browser.

Sure, Safari is locked to iOS version, but iOS adoption rates are insanely fast, about as fast as browser updates. We are talking 90% current major version adoption within 5 months. Here's a source with some historical info: https://worldmetrics.org/ios-version-statistics/

So really, at worse you're looking at being one year behind to cover 95%+ marketshare in iOS.

The latest version of Safari runs on the two previous versions of macOS, so it's even less of a problem on macOS.

> So you could spend 6 months working on a project, release your product, then get inundated with bad reviews because it didn't work for half the population with iPhones.

That could happen to you if you don't test your software on popular platforms.

Let's not forget, Safari and Chrome have the exact same open source core with proprietary commercial applciation development model. Safari has about 1/4 of the user base as Chrome. But here we are expecting the open source community around Webkit to fix bugs just as fast as Chrome?

You could have fixed the indexDB bug yourself if you wanted to. I would say that what you are framing as "Apple lying" about capabilities can be more generously interpreted as "Apple has 1/4 of the community developer resources to find and squash bugs in Webkit compared to Chromium." Really, it's far less less considering that essentially every other browser besides Mozilla uses the Chromium engine. Microsoft is of course another huge company also contributing to Chromium, and once you put Google and Microsoft together Apple doesn't look like such a behemoth anymore. The only thing that makes Apple "bigger" is the fact that they sell a lot of high margin hardware. In reality, the software businesses at Google and Microsoft are far larger and more complex than Apple (e.g., Apple has no enterprise cloud computing business, and essentially no enterprise software business at all).

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#244

Post by travisgriggs »

dcow wrote: post #230
WD-42 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only browser that seems to be able to get around this is Orion. No idea how they are doing it.

Orion is WebKit. Safari’s rendering engine is WebKit.

I tried Orion (m1 MBP) recently. From about 3wks ago til a few days ago. I liked the UI. But there were a lot of pages that didn’t work correctly. I persevered for a while. But gave up a few days ago and went back to Brave.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#245

Post by nox101 »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #96

No not even close by every single possible measure. I was there, I suffered through it, Google would have to make TONS of hostile moves for that fact to change. I have no interest in the arguments of a closed source subscription service that wants me to switch to the bundled browser of the wealthiest company on earth's most popular consumer OS, lecturing me about using the 4th wealthiest company on earth's browser th…

Another piece of evidence is Google tries at nearly every turn to help people write portable code, use best practices like feature detection instead of browser version sniffing, etc... They run https://web.dev/ and the founded baseline https://web.dev/baseline and the web platform dashboard https://web.dev/blog/web-platform-dashboard

MS in their IE days did the exact opposite, trying to make as many proprietary IE only features as possible.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#246

Post by leptons »

bawolff wrote: post #105
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it would be quite different from IE. Microsoft was so averse to breaking backwards compatibility, that IE stopped innovating and stagnated.

I don't think that is true. They stopped developing it full stop. Keeping back compat was not the issue.

Microsoft stopped developing IE when the government sued them for simply including IE with Windows, the same thing Apple does with Safari. But Apple is far more abusive and forbids any other browser engine on iOS, all browsers on iOS are forced to use Safari under the hood.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#247

Post by doctorpangloss »

dangus wrote: post #243
spartanatreyu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It *is* misleading because Apple saying that Safari supports a feature doesn't actually mean that the feature in question actually works. Rather than go through every single point (because I don't have all day), I'll just pick one: > IndexedDB API > W3C recommended standard in 2015. Supported in Safari in 2014. No. It didn't work in 2014, it wasn't working until 2016. (see: https://gist.github.com/nolanlawson/08eb857…

> because you can't reliably use features until the last two major versions of a browser support those feature Maybe a bit of a nitpick but this particular comparison is exactly the same with any other browser. Sure, Safari is locked to iOS version, but iOS adoption rates are insanely fast, about as fast as browser updates. We are talking 90% current major version adoption within 5 months. Here's a source with some h…

Apple purposefully does not support immersive WebXR in Mobile Safari. If it did 8th Wall wouldn't exist.

Mobile Safari would regularly break WASM. Like iOS 10.1 and 10.2 just broke it for no good reason. It had a broken WebGL 2 implementation for a long time. This hobbled Unity games.

The compressed textures support for WebGL was also broken for a long time.

The lowest latency WebRTC codecs that Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming used were also purposefully not enabled by default. Google had to smuggle in an obscure WebRTC feature for low latency via libwebrtc that Apple just didn't know about.

I have no idea why you guys are going out and defending this stuff. Android Chrome has much better support for web standards that Mobile Safari does, even in situations where the codebase was shared like libwebrtc, because of strategic Apple decisions.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#248

Post by refulgentis »

nerdix wrote: post #217
pirates wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentionally restricting apps from using core features of the OS with a paywall is making its products work?

I'm not sure which product(s) you're referring to. Apple has like 6 apps in the Play Store and one of them is for helping Android users migrate to iOS. On the other hand, Google has dozens of apps in the App Store. And Flutter Web not working on iOS doesn't even help Google. If anything it just hurts Flutter's adoption on the web which is already low. So I don't think there is some grand conspiracy within Google to t…

They sort of gave up halfway through lazily invoking the NPC bog-standard Google-on-iOS complaint: you need to pay for YouTube Premium to watch videos picture in picture over other apps.

(source: iOS dev turned Googler turned ex-Googler, so I soak in everyone's grudge matches :) )

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#249

Post by dragonwriter »

leptons wrote: post #246
bawolff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true. They stopped developing it full stop. Keeping back compat was not the issue.

Microsoft stopped developing IE when the government sued them for simply including IE with Windows, the same thing Apple does with Safari. But Apple is far more abusive and forbids any other browser engine on iOS, all browsers on iOS are forced to use Safari under the hood.

> Microsoft stopped developing IE when the government sued them for simply including IE with Windows

They weren't sued for simply including IE with Windows (bundling IE and business arrangements to prevent OEMs from replacing was one of several means of leveraging the Windows desktop OS monopoly to monopolize other markets in the antitrust suit), and they didn't stop developing IE when that suit was initiated.

> But Apple is far more abusive and forbids any other browser engine on iOS

Bundling wasn't the offense, illegally leveraging the desktop OS monopoly to monopolize other markets was the offense. Bundling was part of the means but the means itself want illegal, the ends to which the means were employed were.

Re: Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

#250

Post by dangus »

onion2k wrote: post #156
pjmlp wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely is, I was also there, just like everyone was doing IE only sites, not only plenty of people do the same with ChromeOS vision of the Web, they ship Chrome alongside Electron crap. Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.

Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world. Except it isn't. Maybe I'm being slightly obtuse here, but the world is not "Chrome Vs Safari". It's "Chrome Vs Safari Vs native apps". If Safari dies we'll be in a world of "Chrome Vs native apps", and that is what Apple wants. Browsers represent a way to deliver software to users that's outside of Apple's revenue mechanisms. Apple have every incentive to keep…

How many Regular Joe people are using progressive web apps in the first place? I think Android users also prefer apps over websites and PWAs anyway. I would guess that if I took a poll of all my real life not-technology friends that zero of them use a PWA, know what it is, or even have one installed by accident.

I think that this idea that Apple is making Safari deliberately shitty to stop PWAs from taking over may have been true at some point, but I think by now that battle has been lost and Apple doesn't have to defend that moat anymore. There's just a plain reality of installing native apps being a better user experience regardless of platform, even though it is more locked down and has its own significant list of disadvantages.

More recently, I have difficulty seeing what's so bad about Safari in this regard. It lets you add web apps to your home screen and works with notifications since iOS 16. Safari has features like picture-in-picture that the native YouTube app doesn't have. It also has extensions. Maybe there are some PWA features that I don't know about here that I'm missing?

Maybe this is my dumbest opinion: say what you want about Electron, every Electron app I've used has been a better experience installed as a native app than used inside a browser. Not much better, but better enough that I didn't want to keep using them in the browser (regardless of choice of browser). Slack comes to mind. I greatly dislike using Slack in a browser, and it's hard to point my finger on exactly why that is.

Post reply on HN