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Safari Ruined My Tuesday

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61–70 of 140 posts

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#61
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with the browser being the next generation cross-platform execution environment. All the older options for this (Java, Flash etc.) sucked... I would like to see a strong competitor to Chrome someday though... - Firefox still has weird issues occasionally (most recently scroll position randomly jumping sometimes). I still keep it around though because its sane when it comes to standards and will…

> Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform At the moment. Apple has a fairly long history of keeping cross-platform ports alive even if they aren't publicly available (that's why the transitions from 68K->PowerPC->Intel->Apple Silicon have been relatively smooth). I would bet that Apple could roll out a cross-platform Safari in fairly short order, should the powers that be decide that it makes b…

But they have not, so "Apple has a fairly long history of keeping cross-platform ports alive even if they aren't publicly available" means a load of nothing at the moment.

I get that Apple are not trying to make a Chrome/Chromium competitor because it is not worth it for them and in that they have succeeded --- Safari is indeed not a competitor to Chrome/Chromium... So... good job?

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#62
post #5

> It's like living with IE6 again There is a CSS bug. CSS bugs are dirt common. It's a miracle that there are as few CSS bugs as there are. However, I remember IE6. IE6 was a total fucking mess. Everything was broken on IE6. It wasn't just a bug, it was a complete support nightmare. I routinely encounter problems with CSS that reveal maddening differences between Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. That's just for desktop.…

> However, I remember IE6. IE6 was a total fucking mess. Everything was broken on IE6. It wasn't just a bug, it was a complete support nightmare.

Indeed. While Safari does have its problems, it is a long, long way from being as bad as IE used to be. I recall one project where making it work on IE required that about 30% of the code be rewritten.

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#63
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A recommendation predicated with "Get a Mac first for development work"? Last I checked Safari unlike Firefox and Chrome is not cross platform. Small aside: Webkit browsers used to have problems with CSS (especially things involving 3d) when hardware acceleration is unavailable. Spent so many hours back in the day debugging why certain CSS effects did not work. Switched to Firefox and worked like a charm... Only real…

GNOME Web is officially recommended by Apple for testing WebKit on Linux. The devtools even look identical to those on Safari.

That’s good to know actually, thanks.

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#64
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My general recommendation is to make Safari your main browser for development work. How do you that if you don't own a mac?

Well, you can't, but it'd be the same story as if you only had a Mac in 2006 and wanted to test IE6. Consumers have a choice for the devices they use, so it might make business sense to test changes with hardware your customers use at the same frequency or more often than you do on your own preferred hardware.

As dumb as it was, IE was providing free VMs preloaded with IE versions for developers. Apple is horribly developer hostile. My company refuses to test and run around with Safari bugs, the advice is to install a better browser.

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#65
It's quite interesting to read the history of how Blink came to be[0]. Seems like it started on what amounts to a misunderstanding. And now, because of it, Safari's fallen hopelessly behind in web standards support, security, and even resource use (see RAM use in Safari vs Chrome with many tabs open, Safari uses 1.5x-2x more RAM). Apple's big weakness is that it has laser focus on a few cash cows, and lets everything else linger; the quality of Chrome developer relations, carefulness to not break things in updates (see Safari & IndexDB), huge resources invested in Chrome security, and focus on features and power users (tab list in the menu bar! tab search that doesn't take seconds to load on x86! better UI! tabs on top! multiple profile support! ability to open local HTML files without going into the Develop menu!). Why can't Apple just care to make a good browser?

Does anyone have any insights into how the Safari team functions at Apple, and why they're not catching up?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5489641

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it can definitely happen. In earlier drafts of the current iteration of my website, I used `mix-blend-mode: multiply` liberally (most significantly for the left sidebar), and discovered that in Chromium under Windows anything you used it on would stop rendering after a few thousand pixels (4096 or 8192 or something, my memory’s fuzzy and I don’t have the bug IDs handy), meaning that most of some of my articles we…

Your bug reported 16,384px after accounting for device scale: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398 I knew it'd be this number right away, because it's also the maximum screenshot height thanks to being the maximum height of a surface in Chromium (Actually last I checked this technically depends on the GL backend used, but 16kpx seems common)

4096 was a common max GL texture size on low end hardware.

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#67
Part of the problem is the very slow release cadence of Safari. Features are tied to annual OS releases, bug fixes seem to often not meet the bar for incremental updates, which have no discernable schedule.

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can't, but it'd be the same story as if you only had a Mac in 2006 and wanted to test IE6. Consumers have a choice for the devices they use, so it might make business sense to test changes with hardware your customers use at the same frequency or more often than you do on your own preferred hardware.

As dumb as it was, IE was providing free VMs preloaded with IE versions for developers. Apple is horribly developer hostile. My company refuses to test and run around with Safari bugs, the advice is to install a better browser.

Then I won’t be a customer. Is the best quality browser for me. Not perfect, but better than the alternatives. I’m happy to walk away from the tiny number of sites that break in Safari. And that’s just on desktop where I could use something besides Safari if I wanted to.

Whereas you’re literally saying you’re happy to walk away from over 35% of mobile users, while telling them to do something they can’t do without replacing their device. That’s… one way to run a business.

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#69
post #5

> It's like living with IE6 again There is a CSS bug. CSS bugs are dirt common. It's a miracle that there are as few CSS bugs as there are. However, I remember IE6. IE6 was a total fucking mess. Everything was broken on IE6. It wasn't just a bug, it was a complete support nightmare. I routinely encounter problems with CSS that reveal maddening differences between Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. That's just for desktop.…

> However, I remember IE6. IE6 was a total fucking mess. Everything was broken on IE6. It wasn't just a bug, it was a complete support nightmare. Indeed. While Safari does have its problems, it is a long, long way from being as bad as IE used to be. I recall one project where making it work on IE required that about 30% of the code be rewritten.

And that’s not even the worst part. The worst was all of the corporate sites that were built to run exclusively on IE6 and straight up couldn’t be used in alternative browsers. I’m talking scripts written in VBScript rather than JavaScript. ActiveX plug-ins rather than something cross-platform.

Re: Safari Ruined My Tuesday

#70
I had the weird experience of someone reporting that a SSL issue was occurring in Safari but not with Chrome.

After a bunch of investigation and rabbit holes it turned out that it was an app issue where the "_" character wasn't being filtered from sub-domains.

https://my_name.domain.com -> works in Chrome, not in Safari

This is interesting to me as Safari is _correct_ in their implementation (that the underscore character isn't valid in domains), but again an instance of FF+Chrome working where Safari doesn't.

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