> Internet Explorer is now a thing of the past, replaced by the far-better Microsoft Edge.
Not really. There still are IE-only webapps ran by some government agencies.
For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
261–270 of 623 posts
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#262I'm at the point where, at least on the Desktop, I'd rather support a Chromium webview powered "native" app than bother supporting web browsers directly. Why should I be excited about Filesystem API and the like when we can already do that on the operating system directly? It's really easy to understand the rise of Electron in this context. I don't think Electron is the final form, however. There's nothing wrong with…
> Why should I be excited about Filesystem API and the like when we can already do that on the operating system directly?
Because it's easier to update to a website than it is to release a ton of binaries ({windows, Linux, macos}x{x86,x64,arm64}) and have users download them.
Not to mention it's safer and faster for the user.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#263> Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today.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…
Was just fighting Safari few days ago and I completely agree.
Noticed that "vw" and "vh" CSS3 units dont work in it like they do in other browsers. Upon digging, found a medium article explaining it - but as I was in safari, the article's code snippets or images wouldn't load properly.
As much as I got a bit hyped to try using safari after WWDC - I just can't. It's so discombobulated regarding web standards that I wonder if it can even count as a "web browser" any more than emacs can.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No. Google's are aligned with the web being useful to Google. This is not the same as "the web being useful".
And these days more often than not Mozilla (which has no stakes in either apps or online advertisement) sides with Apple: https://webapicontroversy.com
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#265Earlier 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…
At the time of their release IE4-IE6 have been the most standard-compliant browser. IE was also the fastest at the time. Netscape was in a technological dead-end, and it took considerable time until its complete rewrite (Netscape 6/Mozilla/Firefox) stabilized and caught up. The biggest problem was MS simply dropping its development (IMHO their biggest strategic blunder of 2000s).
Back then all browsers had unstandardized behavior, there was plenty of Netscape specific and IE specific hacks. Some of them were intended as EEE, some of them were result of weak standardization or mere technical limitations of their respective architectures.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#266That article has false info.
It is still possible to use Mobile Safari to add App Icon: https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/PWA#ios-safari
And that app icon does open PWA app full screen.
I'm maintainer of Wekan https://wekan.github.io , Wekan also works as PWA app.
For best mobile experience, enable drag handles:
https://github.com/wekan/wekan/issues/3755
There has been fixes to HTML/CSS/JS so Wekan also works well on Safari.
Apple M1 with Safari has fastest Javascript execution.
Safari works well enough for me.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#267Speaking 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…
> Thanks to their walled garden the only available web browser on iOS is Safari, and since no developer can afford to ignore iOS as a platform they have no choice but to deal with it.
As the sole developer and maintainer of a Javascript library for working with the element, most of the problems I encounter when working on the code are to do with things which work fine in every other browser, but die in flames on Safari.
I'm getting to the stage where dropping support of the Safari browser (and thus all iOS browsers) is something I consider on an ever-more serious basis. One of these days I'm gonna add a big banner message to the library's website stating: "If you need your canvas to work on Safari/iOS, try coding it using [list of competing canvas libraries, with links]."
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and those all suck up my RAM. Color me nonplussed that WebKit doesn't follow in Chromium's footsteps.
Discord in particular, is an example of Electron done right. It's super performant and low impact on resources. MS Teams, made by a vastly richer company, is an example of the opposite. It's not Electron that's eating your RAM.
Visual Studio Code was also done right but it seems to get worse with patches.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#269Regarding 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?
DevDocs.io is a very useful offline app. Download your desired documentation in advance, and continue coding when your net is out. Apps I'd like to see are Pixlr and RegExr. Any utility like that makes a good PWA candidate.
RegExr is really a quite useful example. So, some kind of JavaScript program, you'd like to use sporadically. Docs on the other hand are downloadable since forever.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#270Speaking 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.
Differently in what way?