This is great, but I wish Apple pushed out updates to Safari (particularly on iOS) more frequently - as it is, we might not see this on phones until September 2017. Not to mention WebRTC, Service Workers... you can't polyfill them like you can ES2015.
Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
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Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#52At the same time, right now it's relly backwards[1]. Luckily the shelf-life of Safari is much shorter than others, so we'll be able to use fetch() natively without polyfills soon-ish if you target modern browsers. [1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=fetch
This is the important list. I don't care about ES2015 or more—we'll always use Babel. I care about Service Workers and WebRTC more.
We'll use babel for builds.
Most development will be happening on modern browsers, so being able to reduce compilation requirements improves your iteration cycle and it makes it much easier to debug.
Source maps have lots of issues. Compare debugging async/await usage between the compiled and native version.
If you're working on a larger project, compilation times start becoming a huge pain. Cutting down on the number of transformations reduces development latency.
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#53Honnest question for Safari users: why Safari? I don't really know Safari. I used Chrome on Windows and iOS, and when I moved to OSX I naturally continued with Chrome. And the dev tools are really great.
I find it faster and more power efficient. It also fits with the rest of macOS much better than Chrome. Many long time Mac users are fussy about app consistency.
For example, initially Chrome and Firefox didn't even support text services in their rendering areas — stuff like the system-wide dictionary lookup. That the developers of these browsers ignored what made macOS unique really put me off. (As did hitting the dictionary shortcut on my keyboard when reading and not getting a result.)
One feature I use a lot in Safari is the reader view. Pressing a button turns a page into a consistently rendered and better-typeset version which focuses on the content only. It even collates multi-page content into a single page. I'm sure there are extensions on Chrome which do this (perhaps it even does it natively now?). But Apple's treatment of this feature makes me feel that they prioritise the same things about the web that I do: text and links. Everything else is just noise because I spend 95% of my time on the web reading.
Chrome still does not feel like a first class citizen of macOS. I'm not sure it even saved website passwords in your Keychain, though maybe this has changed.
Edit: oh I also like Safari's gesture based controls better when browsing with a trackpad. For example when you swipe to go back to the previous page, the entire page slides over and you can peek at the previous page underneath the "stack." You don't even need to trigger the actual back action to read content from the previous page if you naturally let your fingers rest mid-gesture. Last time I tried Chrome the "go back" gesture displayed a large, ugly arrow overlay on the left edge of the page. It did not correlate 1:1 with the position of my fingers. It did not show me the previous page's content until I completed the gesture, then it reloaded the previous page. I really did not like this.
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
More power efficient which is key because I use a laptop all the time, and often on battery power. It fits better with macOS conventions compared to Chrome and Firefox. It's faster. Safari content blockers (I use 1Blocker) seems to not slow down page loading at all compared to conventional ad-blockers on both Safari and Chrome, which does. I used Chrome on Mac for years. Then Safari became better, and then it kept ge…
The power efficiency isn't even close. The 2016 MBP battery lasts about 10 hours running Safari versus 3 hours running Chrome. I've never particularly liked Safari, but I'm close to switching myself because Chrome is such a disaster. From the energy impact tab on the Activity Monitor: Chrome: 43 Safari: 0.3
It's great, right? :)
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
An FYI regarding "In my experience, it's often faster than Chrome"... I found during development that Safari will start retrieving suggested URLs even before you finish typing them, so if I'm going to 'news.ycombinator.com', it makes the request when I hit 'n', and by the time I hit a few more characters and enter a few hundred milliseconds later, the request is already complete.
Chrome has been doing that for a long time and more. If you hunt around you'll find that chrome is even doing things like speculative DNS queries, opening TCP channels to endpoints that are often opened on pages that you might be trying to load, in some very limited cases even pre-downloading and executing a page "hidden" only to swap it in like you changed tabs once you "hit enter". [0][1] If you tend to be pretty "…
I don't know why, but when using a local development server only Safari manages to generate requests while typing the URL for me—Chrome does not. It's possible I've put more work into my Chrome privacy settings.
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#56Honnest question for Safari users: why Safari? I don't really know Safari. I used Chrome on Windows and iOS, and when I moved to OSX I naturally continued with Chrome. And the dev tools are really great.
Safari has always been faster and less resource-hungry than the competition on OS X/macOS. (The competition here meaning mostly Chrome and Firefox; before Opera migrated to use Chrome's renderer/engine, it was also similarly lightweight.) To me, Safari also feels more like a native app.
I still use Chrome for development, because Safari's development tools are next to completely useless. I don't even know why they bother.
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#57Honnest question for Safari users: why Safari? I don't really know Safari. I used Chrome on Windows and iOS, and when I moved to OSX I naturally continued with Chrome. And the dev tools are really great.
I find it faster and more power efficient. It also fits with the rest of macOS much better than Chrome. Many long time Mac users are fussy about app consistency. For example, initially Chrome and Firefox didn't even support text services in their rendering areas — stuff like the system-wide dictionary lookup. That the developers of these browsers ignored what made macOS unique really put me off. (As did hitting the d…
All of your points still remain true to this day, however Firefox does indeed have a reader view which works pretty nicely.
No Keychain integration is an issue for me as well.
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI chrome on macOS supports handoff too
Huh, I didn't realize that. Of course, I rarely use Chrome (usually only when I need Flash, which is thankfully almost never). I assume when going iOS -> macOS it hands the URL to your default web browser?
No, it only works between Chrome on Desktop and Chrome on iOS, and in my experience it's nowhere near as seamless as the one baked into Safari.
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#59Honnest question for Safari users: why Safari? I don't really know Safari. I used Chrome on Windows and iOS, and when I moved to OSX I naturally continued with Chrome. And the dev tools are really great.
The dev tools are indeed better on chrome. Which is why I mainly develop in Chrome. But just for casual reading? Safari is much better.
Re: Safari Technology Preview supports 100% of the ES2015/16/17 features
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
More power efficient which is key because I use a laptop all the time, and often on battery power. It fits better with macOS conventions compared to Chrome and Firefox. It's faster. Safari content blockers (I use 1Blocker) seems to not slow down page loading at all compared to conventional ad-blockers on both Safari and Chrome, which does. I used Chrome on Mac for years. Then Safari became better, and then it kept ge…
The power efficiency isn't even close. The 2016 MBP battery lasts about 10 hours running Safari versus 3 hours running Chrome. I've never particularly liked Safari, but I'm close to switching myself because Chrome is such a disaster. From the energy impact tab on the Activity Monitor: Chrome: 43 Safari: 0.3
+1. I use Safari for everything work, personal stuff like banking and news. Chrome incognito for you know what.