For developers, Safari is crap and outdated • Hacker News Board

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#81

Post by warglebargle » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 4:58 AM UTC

vagrantJin wrote: post #69

jolux wrote: post #22

Apple has its own opinions about what web standards it should implement. It’s as simple as that. Google has been extremely successful in convincing developers that browsers that don’t behave like Chrome are behaving wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I wish Safari had more features, fewer bugs, and an evergreen release cycle. It’s clear Apple do not see themselves as competing with Chrome, largely because of iOS, and I do wa…

> 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…

yeah there’s shame in that, following web standards is a bare minimum good behavior

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#82

Post by SimeVidas » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

halostatue wrote: post #79

SimeVidas wrote: post #67

> Further contributing to the frustration is the fact that unlike Chrome or Firefox, Safari updates are not automatic on regular basis. They’re only shipped together with the infrequent updates to the entire OS. I wouldn’t say twice a year is infrequent.

It’s more often than twice a year, at that. It would be nice if Safari and Safari WebView were updated more frequently like Chrome and other browsers, but the pace that exists is not as slow as people like to pretend.

OS updates happen more often, but Safari’s browser engine (WebKit) gets updated with bug fixes and new features exactly twice per year (in March and September), AFAIK.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#83

Post by busymom0 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:02 AM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #21

dhosek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the APIs that Safari doesn't support end up being attack vectors and/or useful tools for user fingerprinting. Personally, I use Safari as my browser on my Mac almost 100% of the time (the small fraction is because, thanks to T-Mobile, my Netflix DVD and streaming accounts have been separated and Netflix insists on sending a notification email if I log out and then log back in to the streaming account). On ra…

I'd drop chrome in an instant for safari, but I cannot find a decent adblocker for safari. ublock origin discontinued support

I use AdBlock Pro (it's free) and it works very well.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#84

Post by bfrog » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:02 AM UTC

Safari is perfectly fine. Chrome being a dominant web browser engine is the new issue at hand. Firefox and safari are seemingly second class at best now. It doesn’t help that google themselves only seem to test with chrome. Meets on Linux is broken in Firefox with the latest update as per usual with google.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#85

Post by ArchOversight » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:03 AM UTC

lifthrasiir wrote: post #73

vorador wrote: post #19

If you look at the features that Apple lags on adding support for, usually it's either because: 1. they can be abused (PWAs) 2. are complex to implement (WebRTC – for the longest time the recommendation in the WebRTC community if you wanted to build a C++ app was to bundle a good chunk of Chrome's libraries) 3. or could be bad for battery (web workers) So yeah, it makes some developers' jobs harder but generally ther…

Safari is not only notorious for unimplemented features but also for unique (and often critical) bugs in spite of the shared origin with Chrome.

"shared origin with Chrome"

You mean Chrome was a fork from Webkit when Google decided they could no longer play nice with Apple...

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#86

Post by diebeforei485 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:08 AM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #71

diebeforei485 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope the lack of background sync stays as a #wontfix, because I view it as a feature.

That shouldn't prevent it from being an opt-in toggle for the people (like me) who rely on it.

Disagree. Things that start as "optional opt-in toggles" can eventually become quasi-mandatory, for example if you're a student, employee, or citizen, and your school, workplace, or government creates an app that needs this.

In 2020, lots of universities required students to install fairly invasive stuff on their computers for remote learning, but -- thanks in large part to Apple's policies -- their phones remained pretty much untouched.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#87

Post by andrewmcwatters » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:08 AM UTC

rubyn00bie wrote: post #18

> 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…

Thank you. I have no idea what these people are talking about. They obviously didn't actually do development back then.

> Apple took years to finally add WebRTC support to Safari, far enough behind Chrome and Firefox that it practically became a running joke among developers and even industry observers.

Really? Because no one I know uses WebRTC and would rather use ffmpeg and sockets to do serious work like that over a desktop application.

> But at the same time, the lack of support for key web technologies and APIs has been both perplexing and annoying at the same time.

Yeah, what we all need is Web Bluetooth.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#88

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

jw14 wrote: post #52

kouteiheika wrote: post #10

Speaking from personal experience as a developer (although YMMV) - this is totally true. And I'm not even talking about some newfangled APIs like WebUSB and such (I don't really care about those personally). Safari's handling of regular HTML + CSS is regularly broken compared to other browsers. (At least in my experience.) Open the site in Chromium. Yep it works. Open the site in Firefox. Yep it works. Open the site…

Broken HTML+CSS in Safari? Examples? I started using Safari as my daily driver because I use all apple devices and I like extending my battery life. Before deciding that, I did stints with Firefox and Brave, both of whom had poor sync'ing. I can't remember the last time a site had broken HTML/CSS with Safari. My impression is the desire to have good mobile support keeps Safari support alive. I think I encountered mor…

I have elements with background-image assigned via CSS. Those divs require different CSS settings to get the height to layout correctly that FF/Chrome do not need.

Those same divs have border-radius applied, and are nested in another div with overflow:hidden. In FF/Chrome, the image scales as one would expect. In desktop Safari, during the CSS transition, the border radius of the overflowing element goes away and the element with the scale suddenly has square corners outside of the overflow. Once the transition ends, the corners disappear again.

This is on the Safari Technology Preview version

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#89

Post by afavour » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:10 AM UTC

halostatue wrote: post #62

afavour wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking as if it’s an either/or situation. For a company the size of Apple it definitely isn’t. They could fix long-standing bugs, implement web standards others have had for years and improve security, privacy and battery life. They just don’t.

Not necessarily. There are “web standards” pushed by Google that are inherently inimical to increased privacy and cannot be implemented with sufficient security for a billion devices. I have to use Chrome and Chromium-based browsers for a lot of what I do, and the very first thing I do when I have to set it up or configure a new profile is _disable_ crap like: - Web USB - Web MIDI - Web HID - Web Push - Web Motion Se…

I feel like Web USB and Web MIDI always come up in conversations like these and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that cares too deeply about either. Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s a market for them, but in the context of this conversation they just feel like diversions.

When I talk about Apple dedicating resources to Safari I mean that IndexedDB was broken for years. And was broken again just last month:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/16/apple_safari_indexedd...

This isn’t engineering that priotisises battery life. This is flat out neglect. Aren’t there unit tests for these kind of things pre-release?

I don’t want to be able to interface with a MIDI keyboard on my site, I just want to be able to store data reliably.

Re: For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

#90

Post by dwaite » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #17

saagarjha wrote: post #6

> Apple dragged their feet in adding support for PWAs in Safari, and when they finally did, limited the capabilities of a PWA so that native-like app functionality wouldn’t be possible, like notifications or a home screen icon shortcut Websites can get Home Screen shortcuts; this has been a thing since the original iPhone.

There's still no background sync or access to APIs that aren't purely cosmetic. That's why native implementations of an app always "feel" better.

You will likely never have Apple support functionality behind a PWA flag other than cosmetic things, because it is still the same overall security model - one of dynamically-updated web content without any third party auditor or enforcement against abuse.

Thats not to say they shouldn't support additional web functionality for everyone, just that "Add to Home Screen" is likely never going to unlock additional native hardware capabilities or exclusive background processing modes.

This is also why every browser implements web extensions via a store model. The store model allows the browser to serve as a port for auditing and revocation on abuse, because that is what the capabilities of web extensions require.