Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Not having to install another shitty spying marketing-loaded app.
Okay so, what we are missing on iOS? Do you have examples?
Just push notifications.
For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
581–590 of 623 posts
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Not having to install another shitty spying marketing-loaded app.
How is that any different to using the fully modern web app equivalent of this shitty spying marketing-loaded app?
Are you asking how going to a URL is different from installing an app?
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and from users perspective I don't care. I find in eerie having the browser being an App platform. Chrome and Android are very dominant platforms, if it is something groundbreaking that can be done in that model it would be done in Android and Chrome and Apple will adopt it. Google is not an underdog.
I have the exact opposite view. I have tons of apps on my phone that really have no business being apps, they should just be websites but with push notifications. For example, I'm not a huge traveler (obviously not in the past year), but even before the pandemic I'd use AirBnB like once a year maybe. I don't want to download an app for something I use once a year. But before and during my trip push notifications are…
What is the hesitation about just downloading an app for a week or two? The allergies to apps ITT are very interesting to me
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Chrome explicitly do not care about other browsers, and think that the world would be a better place if Chrome were the only one. They are gunning for monopoly. No shame in that. The chrome app is the biggest gateway to the internet globally and winning that war means complete dominance as the world moves towards web applications. Using the carrot rather than the stick. But therein lies the rub. Safari is betting o…
> They are gunning for monopoly. No shame in that. It is pretty shameful if you’re simultaneously claiming to be the biggest defender of the open web. > Why put in the effort It’s pretty clear why at this point: developers hate them and antitrust regulators are looking for the right opportunity to go for the throat. Apple screwed up when they killed Safari on Windows, they could have had a solid shot at being the #2…
All capitalists really want to be monopolists. There is some shame in that yes.
But the real shame is for the system, the laws, that allow that to happen.
Shaming Google or Apple does not do much. Legislating against monopolies like AppStore would be the solution.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#585Earlier 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.
This exactly.
Google's PWA agenda (displace native apps with web apps) is in opposition to Apple's (displace web apps with native apps) on iOS.
Apple's business interests are in opposition to PWAs, and Apple would also make the same argument you are citing that native apps offer a better user experience, performance per watt, privacy, security, etc..
However, mobile Safari can support something like Amazon Luna, so it can sidestep the app store to some extent as far as games are concerned.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#586> Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today. This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. The biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features. It would “fix” missing tags, that would then be broken on ev…
>This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. After developing during the IE 5.5/6 years there's no way I'm giving you a pass in calling IE cutting edge.
At it's birth - IE6 was absolutely cutting edge.
By it's death - IE6 was absolutely stagnant and fallen behind.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Your issue however also ties in to what the article said about how Apple does not auto update Safari. You're tied to Safari 12 partially because the upgrade flow is a huge disruptive process as you have to update your entire OS to a new major revision. Sorry, but to be clear, my lack of update is just that -- lack of ambition to do so. I don't really have a compelling reason to update MacOS or Safari. >Who can say w…
I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, but I think we're coming at it from different perspectives. I am looking at it from the perspective of software which does not yet exist but will be built in the future. In that case, missing Safari features _are_ a detriment to users, because it prevents developers from building this new software. From the perspective of users of existing software that seems to break…
> In that case, missing Safari features _are_ a detriment to users, because it prevents developers from building this new software.
> Perhaps they could have created a packaged native application for all major operating systems, but in reality that's a ton more work, and a huge impediment for users to convince collaborators to buy/install some native app so they can work on a drawing together.
> What other software are we missing out on because the barrier for interacting with USB/NFC/Bluetooth/Notifications/Background-Sync is too high.
These are quite a bit overstating the problem. The barrier to entry to develop a native app using safari is quite simple, and you can extend safari to do many things, including being spawned by golang and adding other FFI's for javascript functions. The barrier to entry is your willingness to learn and you only see these complaints coming from new developers. Taking a canvas API and implementing yet another collab drawing app is not innovating, it's using an API.
On the flip side, each new API brings more and more surface area for attacks. And if we keep stacking new APIs we don't have enough time to mature and secure up the existing ones. Notice the only example apps given are attempts to replace native apps with web apps.
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re holding on too tight to an argument for the sake of analogy. It’s cute and evocative but it’s blinding you to the bigger picture. The issues with Google monopolising the direction of standards development are the major issue facing browsers, users and developers on the web, today. I get that you’re disappointed Safari doesn’t support the same stuff, the same way as Chrome. Tough. You’re attempting to develop a…
> I get that you’re disappointed Safari doesn’t support the same stuff, the same way as Chrome. In some cases, yes, but in others, no. For example, Safari still clings to their proprietary image formats. That means I need two versions of each image: something legacy or proprietary for Safari users (PNG, JPEG, HEIF) and something to appease the Google Gods (WebP) so I don't get blasted by Core Web Vitals. It's the IE…
> That means I need two versions of each image: something legacy or proprietary for Safari users (PNG, JPEG, HEIF) and something to appease the Google Gods (WebP) so I don't get blasted by Core Web Vitals.
WebP uses VP8, which requires hardware support to run correctly. Apple's "proprietary" format is also open, and created by a standards body instead of Google. VP8 also has some patent claims on it by Nokia, even though Google has released it under a free patent license. I'd definitely second guess that if I were a legal dept. So really you're arguing that you prefer Google's proprietary format over Apple's. To each their own but know your desired format isn't as free and open as some would hope.
> Chrome does it, too, but at least Chrome users have the ability to choose another browser; no such luck on iOS.
What if iOS users view this as a feature? I know I certainly do. It's impossible these days to know with certainty which apps are running in a browser. And given Chrome supporting all the things it supports it can be a security issue. So knowing an app must be using webkit to me is a feature.
> I don't want to be forced to use Apple's proprietary image and video formats to achieve decent performance in Safari
Again, Apple's formats are open. And further this should be completely transparent to you as you should have conversion scripts in place already.
> My sites would work better in Lynx if I didn't have to spend so much time making them work in Safari
My experience is a bit different. I develop for Safari, then check it in Chrome and FF. It works most of the time with few exceptions that Chrome implements to perform it's magic.
> It can't be that important if nobody even knows what it's called.
That's actually the point. It supports the standards and you get a few extra market participants you wouldn't have if your customers happen to run that browser. You don't need to know the name at all, so long as it supports the standard. This benefits us by having more and more browser engines and competition, instead of the 3 we have today.
> Phones from 8 years ago run sites a lot better when they don't have to download redundant code and JS polyfills to achieve what could've been done with pure CSS.
The question is, is any of this needed? If it's CSS it clearly doesn't anything to do with the functionality of the site right?
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
Web developers (and/or the companies who hold their reins) have proven that they can not be trusted with access to notifications. I personally don't care how useful they may be for the 0.001% of applications when the remaining 99.999% are spammers. There's not one site that's allowed to spam me with notifications on the desktop, and I'm thrilled beyond belief that they can't do it on my iPhone.
There’s no reason they can’t be implemented exactly the same way as native apps on iOS. You get one ask, and if the user says no, all future asks are ignored by the system unless the user manually enables them. You could even implement additional restrictions like requiring the user spend a few minutes on the site before showing the dialogue.
They are already being like that since forever.
And Edge now doing it more aggressively. It tries to collect statistics from users. If most user say no to your website. Your site's permission prompt is going to be judged as spam and ignored by default for everyone (not even the popup is going to show, you only can enabled it manually in setting now)
Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated
#590Aside: If you have a Mac and complain about your computer overheating or fans spinning up constantly / “while doing light browsing”: start using Safari for anything video/audio encoding/decoding related, like streaming music and video, or just in general, especially for longer battery life. It helps immensely with no noticeable loss in performance. My fans no longer spin up watching a video on YouTube or DRM protecte…
Safari is great for some thing but its performance in others is lacking to say the least. Open a GitHub PR with 30 files to see what I’m talking about, the browser freezes for seconds (but you can scroll a partially-painted page so, yay?)
And the `partially-painted page` is going to be reported as bug and send to some unfortunate developer...
Obviously it can't be fixed because it is just not loaded yet. Safari is doing so much things that will be treated as a bug by QA and designer (While it is actually completely intentional)