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Safari 13 Is Out

developer.apple.com

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#51
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were legacy extensions delivered outside the app store. Those are deprecated and with Safari 13 were removed. There are other extensions delivered through the App Store you can install. For example, there is a uBlock extension there.

What could be driving that, I wonder? Are they concerned with malware? Regardless, it seems like a big thing to omit from the notes.

At a guess: Engineering overhead of two separate extension models, the "real extension" model can't do the kind of cross process communication a lot of extensions really need (password managers, etc).

Then performance problems of extensions injecting and running a pile of JS into all pages.

But yeah, I am not looking forward to losing ublock. I (Safari fanboy) will probably delay updating as long as possible.

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#52
post #31

It really, really is a shame that they removed proper extensions. While Safari never had a good extension story, it was at least bearable, and in all other regards its simply the best Mac browser. Now I have to take a really hard look at switching back to Firefox, and that would be a downgrade in almost every regard I care about. Pity.

I made the switch to FF 2 months ago after being a Safari zealot (for nearly 10-14 years). I did not notice any memory hogging (was an issue in past). I have not rebooted FF in 20+ days. I really enjoy the "container" concept in FF. (ymmv of course)

I've used FF almost exclusively for a large chunk of the aughts, so there is some familiarity left.

My main concern today is actually a matter of trust. Mozilla has had enough privacy-related debacles and questionable decisions that after each update, there is a lingering doubt in the back of my head whether I need to crawl through some settings again or worse, edit obscure config keys to keep it from doing what it shouldn't have been doing in the first place. It's the same feeling I have after a Windows update, albeit to a lesser extent.

I used to be a huge advocate for Firefox. My name is one of the many thousands of donors in their NYT ad from 2004. It pains me to say that these days, Firefox feels somewhat user hostile.

If I do find myself leaving Safari, it's merely the least-bad choice from a continuously shrinking field of options.

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#53
post #27
post #11

Apple removed the ability to use uBlock Origin or similar. I tried few ad blocker from the app store, but non of them block Youtube's video ad, making it useless. We still have Firefox for now I guess.

They've had a natively compiled content blocking engine for years, and I've been using Ka-Block. It works really well without killing your battery.

Looks like it is only for iOS, is this true?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ka-block/id1037173557

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#54
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a "proper" extension? The only things in the release notes seem to be about broadening the API somewhat.

There were legacy extensions delivered outside the app store. Those are deprecated and with Safari 13 were removed. There are other extensions delivered through the App Store you can install. For example, there is a uBlock extension there.

The "uBlock" app extension in the store has nothing to do with uBlock Origin. Do not install it.

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#55
post #31

It really, really is a shame that they removed proper extensions. While Safari never had a good extension story, it was at least bearable, and in all other regards its simply the best Mac browser. Now I have to take a really hard look at switching back to Firefox, and that would be a downgrade in almost every regard I care about. Pity.

What extensions do you miss?

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#56
post #31

It really, really is a shame that they removed proper extensions. While Safari never had a good extension story, it was at least bearable, and in all other regards its simply the best Mac browser. Now I have to take a really hard look at switching back to Firefox, and that would be a downgrade in almost every regard I care about. Pity.

What's a "proper" extension? The only things in the release notes seem to be about broadening the API somewhat.

They did not just broaden the API. Previously, extensions were written in Javascript, roughly following open web standards[0]. This let you write your extension (nearly) once and have it work in all web browsers.

Now, all of those Javascript extensions are deprecated (users can no longer install them). If you want your extension to work, you now have to rewrite the majority of it from scratch in Swift[1]

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web... [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/saf...

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#57
post #30
post #7

* Added support for the Pointer Events API enabling consistent access to mouse, trackpad, touch, and Apple Pencil events. https://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer - now you can use one unified event capture everywhere, instead of having to choose between "click" and "touch"!

Mostly you can just need a click event now since "fastclick" can now work on all modern devices (albeit may need meta viewport or CSS). In my experience writing a component suite I have found I don't use touch[a-z]+ events that much (just like mouse[a-z]+ events don't get used much either). I would be very careful before believing the promise of Pointer Events, unless you need to be on the bleeding edge for some reas…

I'm currently rewriting a legacy application to use Pointer Events + pepjs polyfill. Your experiences don't align super well with mine. I'm curious as to why.

What does vdom diffing / dynamic page content have to do with using pointer/touch/mouse events?

If anything, the last scenario you describe sounds like it would be mitigated by use of https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set... which is only available to PointerEvent implementations?

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#58
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Safari is the new Opera. Technically superior in many ways but also barely competing. Opera went on to abandon their custom technology in favor of Chrome's after losing their dominant position in mobile to Safari and Chrome. As long as the EU doesn't force Apple to accept fair competition on iOS Safari's future looks bright!

Safari is the new IE6, because the version of Safari you have is locked to the version of iOS you have. Features like Pointer Events, visualViewport, ES2017 etc are available on Android 4.4 , because Google still updates Chrome on old Android devices. I struggle to support iOS 9 (Safari 9) and I barely support iOS 7, because we have a number of users with old devices and we are not a consumer app so we can't just ign…

I would say you can pretty much aim for iOS 10 or even 11 as a minimum. The number of devices running iOS 7 is quite small. My moms iPad 2 runs iOS 9 and that’s about one of the oldest Idevices going

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#59
post #7

* Added support for the Pointer Events API enabling consistent access to mouse, trackpad, touch, and Apple Pencil events. https://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer - now you can use one unified event capture everywhere, instead of having to choose between "click" and "touch"!

The Pointer Events spec is a real joy.

For example, if you want to roll your own "drag" event for a given element, the API allows you to do this without reference to document or a parent container element. You can just declare that the element currently receiving pointer events capture subsequent pointer events until you release it[1].

Additionally, the API naturally lends itself to patterns that can easily be extended for multi-touch situations.

I'm quite curious which developer led the charge for this API and how they warded off committee meddling by people who lacked knowledge about the benefits of this approach.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/set...

Re: Safari 13 Is Out

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only downside is that FF battery life is much worse than Safari. Supposedly they're working on being smarter about GPU usage to improve this, but I haven't checked lately to see if it has made a difference.

On newer versions (of Firefox Nightly), they use the native CoreAnimations library now for vastly improved battery life: https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240

It's still a very long way from Safari on battery life. As is Google Chrome, by the way.
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