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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#301

Post by carlosrg »

simondotau wrote: post #203
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #153

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. That is absolute bullshit. Browser push notifications have been out for years on other browsers (INCLUDING desktop Safari), and they are the one thing that Apple is dragging their feet on the most because they know it's the most important thing that prevents a dev from just d…

Personally I think Apple holding the line on browser push might be the single greatest thing Apple has done for the web in the past decade. Meanwhile Google is moving the goalposts of "modern" web development so fast that it's nearly impossible for anyone to keep up. I can't believe the hacker community is so enthusiastic about this—you couldn't get a more canonical example of embrace, extend, extinguish as applied t…

> Meanwhile Google is moving the goalposts of "modern" web development so fast that it's nearly impossible for anyone to keep up.

For a second I thought you were talking about Apple’s UI frameworks and languages, with all the different Swift versions over the last couple of years and different UI frameworks like Cocoa, Catalyst, and SwiftUI, deprecation of OpenGL and introduction of their own graphics API, etc.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#302

Post by dijit »

the_gipsy wrote: post #295
tshaddox wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Push notifications are also a terrible feature that I don’t want on any of my browsers including desktop Safari. I don’t want developers to even have the option to show me a prompt to enable them.

That notifications are annoying is a myth.

The next advancement after the some of the first web-browsers was pop up blockers.

So, at the very least; someone was annoyed at “notifications”.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#303

Post by lionkor »

yourenotsmart wrote: post #248

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…

Oh wow, I could not agree more. I've always struggled to put it into words, but

> web devs are among the least educated, least sophisticated, most entitled and most whiny bunch there is

This is exactly what I see. I'm a C/C++ developer, and recently started to re-make my website[0] (very WIP) together with my partner, and I've had a few web-devs and other devs tell me that it's really fast (i didn't notice because I'm used to sites like HN), and I just said "it doesnt use js", and I kid you not, at least one or two couldn't even believe that(???). It's crazy how simple you can make a website, with just standard html and css.

I don't understand the push for frameworks and other js stuff, honestly. You said it - Megabytes. That's all you're really adding when all you want is a simple little website.

Of course you need it for interactivity, and any kind of account system will get more complicated, but the amount of sites that are just a webapp is horrifying.

[0]: https://kortlepel.com/

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#304

Post by mrtksn »

the_gipsy wrote: post #298
simondotau wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think Apple holding the line on browser push might be the single greatest thing Apple has done for the web in the past decade. Meanwhile Google is moving the goalposts of "modern" web development so fast that it's nearly impossible for anyone to keep up. I can't believe the hacker community is so enthusiastic about this—you couldn't get a more canonical example of embrace, extend, extinguish as applied t…

Android web browsers have had push notifications for ten years now. This is not shifting the goalpost. It just happens to be the one feature that would make millions of native apps redundant.

Are millions of native apps have become redundant on Android in those 10 years? What's the situation? What iOS users missing out?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#305

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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.

No No No

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#306

Post by omgitsabird »

To be fair, it is a lot better than it was a couple of years ago.

Safari iOS: https://caniuse.com/?compare=ios_saf+14.5-14.7&compareCats=a...

Safari TP: https://caniuse.com/?compare=safari+TP&compareCats=all#:~:te...

Firefox: https://caniuse.com/?compare=firefox+92&compareCats=all#:~:t...

Chrome: https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+95&compareCats=all#:~:te...

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#307

Post by berkes »

jolux wrote: post #61
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.

For the most part W3C is where standards go when they’re finished (often long after developers expect them to be available everywhere, especially these days). WebUSB for example is currently a draft, not a standard. Many of these complaints are about technologies that Chrome implements that have yet to be fully standardized.

> Many of these complaints are about technologies that Chrome implements

The article mentions explicitely: WebRTC, VP9, WebP, notifications, home screen icon shortcut, Local data storage, camera, microphone, USB port, and some more.

The only one in there that is not supported by w3c, as far as I know, is USB. All others are proper W3 standards yet unsupported by Apple WebKit/Safari.

Many of these complaints are about technologies that are fully standardized and supported by all other mayor browsers.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#308

Post by Orphis »

vorador wrote: post #19

If you look at the features that Apple lags on adding support for, usually it's either because: 1. they can be abused (PWAs) 2. are complex to implement (WebRTC – for the longest time the recommendation in the WebRTC community if you wanted to build a C++ app was to bundle a good chunk of Chrome's libraries) 3. or could be bad for battery (web workers) So yeah, it makes some developers' jobs harder but generally ther…

Chrome engineer, working on WebRTC here. Here's my personal opinion:

Safari's WebRTC implementation is not outdated, it's just bindings over the same library that is used and developed by Chrome. At worst, it's lagging a bit by a few months.

What the post highlights is how some features are not available, like some codecs on some platforms. That's unlikely to be a decision from the browser engineers but probably closer to the lawyers who need time to approve a codec or other engineers working on HW acceleration.

Another point is also that while WebRTC was available in most contexts, getUserMedia wasn't, and that's the API used to access cameras and microphones. Without it, WebRTC functionality loses its appeal. I believe that's now fixed and webviews can now use it.

While I don't necessarily approve of those decisions for the users' sake, I still respect their choice to be able to make decisions on their own product and chose when a feature is deemed safe for release in potentially dangerous contexts. I don't know their security model, but from talking with the engineers on many occasions, they are not unreasonable people.

And while Safari is lacking some new WebRTC related APIs released in Chrome, it would be fair to say that they are not all standardized yet at the IETF or W3C level. Other browsers don't necessarily implement them either, and that's fine.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#309

Post by the_gipsy »

dijit wrote: post #302
the_gipsy wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That notifications are annoying is a myth.

The next advancement after the some of the first web-browsers was pop up blockers. So, at the very least; someone was annoyed at “notifications”.

I’ve been using Android for some years, and notifications are a non-issue. Yet it always comes up from safari apologists.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#310

Post by berkes »

afavour wrote: post #89
halostatue wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. There are “web standards” pushed by Google that are inherently inimical to increased privacy and cannot be implemented with sufficient security for a billion devices. I have to use Chrome and Chromium-based browsers for a lot of what I do, and the very first thing I do when I have to set it up or configure a new profile is _disable_ crap like: - Web USB - Web MIDI - Web HID - Web Push - Web Motion Se…

I feel like Web USB and Web MIDI always come up in conversations like these and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that cares too deeply about either. Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a market for them, but in the context of this conversation they just feel like diversions. When I talk about Apple dedicating resources to Safari I mean that IndexedDB was broken for years . And was broken again just last month: https…

To pile on, several other APIs have little or no privacy issues, when done right.

Push notifications: no, obviously I don't want seo-loaden-adwords-stuffing.blog to send me push-notifications. But I do want m.twitter.com, weatheralerts.app or m.issuetracker.local to send me those. I don't want cdn.random-ad-network.com to read my location. But I do want weatheralerts and publictransport.planner to read them. bird.watcher is free to use my camera and littlealchemy.app is free to use localstorage.

Apple decides for me that I don't want this. Protecting users' privacy would mean research and innovation in how to make those choices. Anything from centralised whitelists to better UX for those permissions. Apple invests in none of these and instead denies it to all.

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