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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

blog.perrysun.com

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#251

Post by mrtksn »

kristiandupont wrote: post #242
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…

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 brows…

Installing an app gives you a chance to consider the option first, with websites you are required to download and install it to take a look and see what is it all about.

On the other hand I wouldn't have a problem with the model where PWA's notifications and other functionalities are limited to apps added to the home screen and the options to manage those is exactly the same with native apps. I don't advocate that all apps must go through the App Store.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#252

Post by whostolemyhat »

kouteiheika wrote: post #10

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…

Our site broke in Safari because Safari handles dates (as in the built-in Date object) differently than all other browsers, so it's not just styling or visual things that can be different.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#253

Post by PostThisTooFast »

mrtksn wrote: post #96
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…

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…

"Standart?"

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#254

Post by Vinnl »

alwillis wrote: post #125
afavour wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn’t an Apple vs Google thing. This is an Apple vs web standards thing. It’s actually and Apple vs. APIs and technologies that allow fingerprinting on the web thing. Nobody mentions that Mozilla has sided with Apple much of the time to not implement some of these same APIs and technologies.

And yet nobody is writing such articles about Firefox. There's plenty that's not privacy-invasive and that Firefox thus does implement, that Safari does not or does buggily.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#255

Post by lucideer »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #161
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…

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…

But that isn't the case. At all. IE wasn't difficult because it was behind the times; it was difficult because it was deliberately different. The 2nd pillar of Microsoft's infamous Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy ensured incompatibility, which doubled developer efforts.

The idea of IE being purely an "outdated" browser seems to be one perpetuated by young devs reading & misunderstanding old blogposts. The narrative is attractive because it fits the impatient desire be an early adopter of "shiny new thing", but it doesn't match the reality of how IE6 actually worked.

Safari is compliant. It's behind but compliant. That makes it incredibly easy to develop for because backward compat. & progressive enhancement work well if you're not too lazy to develop according to well-known best practice.

What doesn't work well is the spec. du jour that the Google have just added to Chrome before submitting to a standards body and are proceeding to use their monopoly position to pressure other browsers to adopt. That's IE6 behaviour.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#256

Post by mrtksn »

whostolemyhat wrote: post #249
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…

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.

We could have had passwordless internet if people behaved nicely. Instead of signing in into Gmail with a password and 2FA code, typing your e-mail address would have been enough to see your e-mails if everyone was honest and never misuse this power.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#257

Post by bobmaxup »

mrtksn wrote: post #246
bobmaxup wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you disable them, they are not visible. If a website shows you a modal that looks like a notification consent prompt, I hardly see what that has to do with a browser vendor, which is the subject of this thread.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#258

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

For me the issue is simple. Does the mobile browser support the reader mode, allowing me to actually read an article instead of dealing with popups, ads and nags covering half of the screen etc.? Safari does. Chrome on iOS does not - at least the last time I checked. End of story.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#259

Post by Touche »

lucideer wrote: post #255
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…

But that isn't the case. At all. IE wasn't difficult because it was behind the times; it was difficult because it was deliberately different. The 2nd pillar of Microsoft's infamous Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy ensured incompatibility, which doubled developer efforts. The idea of IE being purely an "outdated" browser seems to be one perpetuated by young devs reading & misunderstanding old blogposts. The narrat…

You're concentrating on the time period when IE was the only game in town and ignoring the 10 or so years post Firefox/Chrome (until basically they switched to Chromium) when it was behind the times and was a tremendous drain on web development.

Any attempt to say that otherwise is just wildly incorrect.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#260

Post by ArchOversight »

soperj wrote: post #155
ArchOversight wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shared origin with Chrome" You mean Chrome was a fork from Webkit when Google decided they could no longer play nice with Apple...

You're saying it like Webkit wasn't also a fork.

That's not at all what I was saying. WebKit was a fork of KHTML, but implying that Safari has shared origin with Chrome was a little farfetched.
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