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For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

blog.perrysun.com

421–430 of 623 posts

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#421
post #43
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reddit is a pretty low bar Reddit is a multi billion dollar product and one of the most trafficked sites on the internet.

Why do they continue to degrade the mobile/desktop default web experience? Promoting the app is one thing, but then actively harming the user experience? Do most people not care? Insane either way. The day old.reddit dies Ill blacklist the site permanently.

They are degrading the web experience because it's easier to block trackers and advertisements in the web. When users are driven to the application, Reddit owns the whole experience and only people who are capable of configuring home firewalls have any hope of privacy.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#422
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was writing, copy&pasting, linking, etc. but in the end I gave up. There's simply too much that is wrong and it would take a long list to refute every single thing and I just does not have the time or energy to waste (Safari have taken enough already, as IE used to). In short, it isn't about "IE vs Safari". Both have multiple versions. What was awful was that IE was behind the times. Everything else was basically f…

> Safari is way more work today than IE was back in the day

There's a bunch of good and bad arguments in sibling comments: some of them may be subjective. But this quote really caught me out. Wow.

Wow.

Presuming that you've been developing website for more than 10 years, and that your knowledge of IE6 is based on hard experience and not just reading... what on earth are you doing that is so difficult in Safari?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except 0% of customers understand how PWAs work on mobile devices, 10% of webdevs understand how to make actually performant Apps, and 100% of execs think that using a PWA means their desktop site should be their mobile app (without realizing that, often times, your mobile UX likely has a vastly different context.)

> using a PWA means their desktop site should be their mobile app There's tons of mobile apps that never needed to be anything other than desktop sites honestly. Facebook, actually, is a perfect example.

I would argue that FB is actually a mobile app with a desktop site available as a checkbox that was reduced to being just a copy of the app in React. It didn't really explode until after the iPhone and like 85% of their users are on mobile Apps.

That said, an app for learning as an example should actually have a very different mobile experience as a user wont want hour-long study sessions on the subway (or in line at a subway restaurant.)

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#425

Hm, just a few notes: Progressive Web Apps are a Chrome-only thing by now, since Firefox has practically stripped support. (This was a somewhat experimental thing, anyways, and there are strong arguments, why users should be able to discern installed programs from external websites. You may argue that this makes much sense for Google, but isn't that desirable from an OS point of view.) WebRTC: While it's true that Sa…

Safari regularly breaks features that were stable for years: localstorage and indexedDB the most recent ones. So I am not sure how you can talk about "compatibility".

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to normalise endless notification spam, which is what having this feature in Google's advertiser-friendly conception of it available ultimately does. I'm already considered a bit strange my by friends for muting all group chats and disallowing notifications for things, we don't need to entrench this appalling social norm any further. I find the idea that everyone should be instantly available at the clic…

There is a huge difference that you can turn off a feature A which might be very useful feature for many and you can't even enable the feature A because money. This case is about the latter..

I think depriving users of that functionality is more than worth it if it also deprives the advertising industry of yet another way to make everyone's life worse.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes zero business sense for small-medium companies to make separate android and IOS apps. That's man hours that will be spent on a specific platform and its app store, instead of on improving the core product. PWAs are here to stay.

It makes zero sense for most small-to-medium companies to make any kind of end user-facing app, period (whether native or a webapp). Most small businesses' needs don't call for a content pipeline substantially more complicated than a word processor, with some of them needing to be able to handle a simple form every now and then. Even in the case of online sales, does every business in the world really need a bespoke storefront?

How about people publish their catalog, and then, like, 3 or 4 interoperable "shopper" apps (with preferably at least one developed in the open) can emerge to do the heavy lifting? The way it works now, where Amazon and O'Reilly and AutoZone all have to hire for developers mirrors the ridiculousness of the streaming media platforms, where just because Amazon or Disney+ or whoever has the content and Netflix doesn't, people act as if it makes complete sense that we should have to enter their dumb app and use that provider's shitty title browser and video player, instead of the user picking the app that works the way they want and using it to play from whichever catalog has the content they need.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#428

Hm, just a few notes: Progressive Web Apps are a Chrome-only thing by now, since Firefox has practically stripped support. (This was a somewhat experimental thing, anyways, and there are strong arguments, why users should be able to discern installed programs from external websites. You may argue that this makes much sense for Google, but isn't that desirable from an OS point of view.) WebRTC: While it's true that Sa…

P.S., my own critique on Safari: the tight tie-in into the OS.

Nowadays, as computers are often longer in use as they are in the support/update cycle, it would be really nice to be able to update Safari beyond the OS level. I get it that Safari is basically running the OS web-view framework and that there are serious issues with this (edit: meaning, updating a single framework out of sync with the rest of the OS), but you should be able to update Safari as a stand-alone application, even, if this means that it's practically running in virtualization using it's own framework overlays.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#429
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is a personal opinion, but I'm actually really glad Apple are dragging their feet on this. >I have my browser set up to wholesale reject all push notifications I am struggling to understand the reasoning here. You don't like feature X but fortunately there is a configuration to turn it off. But you would still like it taken away from everybody else? Perhaps I am misrepresenting your position, could you clarify?

I don't want to normalise endless notification spam, which is what having this feature in Google's advertiser-friendly conception of it available ultimately does. I'm already considered a bit strange my by friends for muting all group chats and disallowing notifications for things, we don't need to entrench this appalling social norm any further. I find the idea that everyone should be instantly available at the clic…

Isn't that what Apple's iOS notifications already do?

What's the justification for allowing it for a certain class of apps, but disallowing it for another class of apps, where the difference between the 2 categories of apps are just the technical infrastructure on which they are based?

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#430

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'…

The link to your generic-c github project is broken.
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