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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

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Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#361

Post by Dah00n »

lionkor wrote: post #303
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'…

You mention a simple site with HTML and CSS. That is actually quite funny in a discussion about Safari as CSS is one of the areas that Safari is behind other browsers. A site with those frameworks would very likely work better in Safari than one without them (but yes I dislike them too which is one of the reasons I dislike Safari).

https://caniuse.com/

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#363

Post by afavour »

mikl wrote: post #350
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 That’s why Safari is outdated for developers.

If we’re talking about mobile browsers, Mozilla functionally doesn’t exist. That space is just Safari vs. Chrome(ium). And Apple are not obliged to have 100% feature parity with Chrome.

And if we’re talking about iOS browsers, Google doesn’t functionally exist. That space is just Safari.

…hence why people complain about Apple’s neglect.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#364

Post by BoxOfRain »

leppr wrote: post #336
BoxOfRain wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a personal opinion, but I'm actually really glad Apple are dragging their feet on this. I absolutely despise presumptious software that feels entitled to my attention as and when it chooses. I have my browser set up to wholesale reject all push notifications, I don't let the vast majority of my apps send me push notifications, and any application that feels entitled to pollute my inbox (email already has an a…

Push notifications allow me to spend less time on my phone/PC. Without them, I would have to regularly check the app of interest for any important updates, losing both time and mental space with another thing to keep in the back of my mind. Thanks to push notifications, I can defer interacting with the app to when it's actually relevant. Also as I argued in another comment [1], web notifications are simply better tha…

What updates are actually important though? A good 80% of notifications I'd get before I started systematically disabling them by default weren't important at all, they were just pointless nagware trying to get me to engage with the software more frequently so some analytics manager can justify why they shouldn't be sacked that quarter. It doesn't matter to these people that most of the extra clicks and presses are people telling them to piss off so they can get on with actually important work, they only care that engagement is going up. Proper tail wagging the dog bullshit.

Excessive notifications are a dark pattern which needs to be resisted, not encouraged. I'll continue blocking every single one of them and looking at apps on my own schedule, I will not allow random software to interrupt my flow because it thinks it has a right to my attention. Littering is culturally accepted too, but that doesn't mean either littering or its digital equivalent should be.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#365

Post by tempodox »

DonHopkins wrote: post #217
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't that be == !== === if we're talking about our analogies with JavaScript? Though maybe I just proved your point about missing the forest for the trees :-P

Brendan Eich doesn't understand equality.

Indeed, there's a difference between “looks equal enough if you squint sufficiently” and “actually equal”. Apart from the difference between equality and identity.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#366

Post by horsawlarway »

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.

"Safari is not holding back"

Name a place where safari is being innovative on the web.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#367

Post by Dah00n »

simondotau wrote: post #209
teruakohatu wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple _does_ put effort into Safari. I did not say they did not. What I said was... > that does not materially help the bottom line. Security, privacy, and battery life sell phones. Better PWA and WebRTC would cost them money because those modern Web technologies compete with the App Store.

> Security, privacy, and battery life sell phones. Because that's what people want.

No they want Security, privacy, and battery life. Yes, I know there's no difference to the quote (copy&paste). The difference is that what Apple says is security and privacy is often fluff and done for PR and isn't actually what people want when the say they want security and privacy. Look no further than what Apple call end-to-end encryption in iMessage. It is on par with VW saying their diesel engines had such and such emission when in reality they both have huge and multiple asterisks.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#368

Post by mrtksn »

mannerheim wrote: post #360
mrtksn wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Safari integrates nicely with the desktop Safari. You can access the mobile Safari through the developer tools in the desktop Safari and debug as if it is the desktop one. It a shame that Safari is not OSS.

Did you mean to reply to the other comment? Desktop Safari still requires a Mac as far as I'm aware...

Yes it is unfortunate that requires a Mac but a Hackintosh is always an option :) Some many years ago it had a Windows version but it was discontinued.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#369

Post by Dah00n »

jw14 wrote: post #52
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…

Broken HTML+CSS in Safari? Examples? I started using Safari as my daily driver because I use all apple devices and I like extending my battery life. Before deciding that, I did stints with Firefox and Brave, both of whom had poor sync'ing. I can't remember the last time a site had broken HTML/CSS with Safari. My impression is the desire to have good mobile support keeps Safari support alive. I think I encountered mor…

I think you are missing the point. The reason you don't see broken sites is because developers take extra time making sites work in Safari. They shouldn't have to.

>My impression is the desire to have good mobile support keeps Safari support alive.

I would very much argue the opposite. A good browser in iOS is directly against what Apple want (people in the app store, not in browsers). Safari is at best the absolute bare minimum a company like Apple can get away with and not a line of code more. Having just redesigned our business site I have just finished fixing the site to be the same in Safari as in the other browsers. I was forced to do this extra work to not exclude Apple customers but if I could have left it as is I wouldn't have wasted my time.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#370

Post by oaiey »

coldtea wrote: post #165
oaiey wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not angry about the lack of toys. We are angry about not having the possibility of using PWA as an app model. PWA are useless without Apple's support. My case was a WebBluetooth based download of data from a web page. Now I have to maintain two apps. Thanks.

> We are not angry about the lack of toys. We are angry about not having the possibility of using PWA as an app model. I, on the other hand, am angry that PWA is even considered as an app model. A regression, if I ever saw one...

Fair perspective.
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