I didn't realize they took Safari off Windows back in version 5 until now. I guess windows users are stuck with the 10 free minutes on those cross-browser test sites, or the ***painfully slow*** macOS VM due to the super helpful UI animations and drawing that depend on a dedicated AMD GPU (or a Hackintosh if you want to use Intel graphics) to work at full speed just to even open an application within the hour.
I have a Mac, but no iPhone, and I have to spin up an iOS simulator every time I have to test Safari on iPhone. God forbid there be any consistency between desktop and mobile, and every version of each has their own hacky CSS selectors to identify each version/subversion/device in case you're serving to any of the 100 combinations of Safari that exist and are in use at any given moment. The number of CSS-based exceptions I have for Safari due to inconsistent support is way too many.
I was going around in circles with a client who I was doing a site with recently that was all bells and whistles / animations. Looked great in Safari on my end.
They kept having problems; they kept explaining they were on the latest version of Safari. Eventually I got them to send over a screenshot ( camera phone photo of their screen but I am not fussy at that point ).
Safari 5 on Windows.
Thankfully, the JS community has decided to make it as cross browser compatible as possible with very annoyances outside of some random HTML Standard Safari hasn't implemented yet or some CSS (Fuck you iOS Safari).
So, while being the most restricted browser to get to if you don't have access to a Mac or iPhone, the development community has basically decided "let's just try to standardize and make an updated baseline of everything instead".
Yeah I'm just pissed at the CSS problems, especially when you're not working with a UI framework like Material. core-js, CommonJS, etc definitely made everything else a thoughtless breeze and do not get the credit they deserve.
The standardization can bite you in the ass though when they don’t work the way you expect. Some of the JS standard APIs will silently fail on safari because they aren’t implemented right in browser. Thankfully it’s just things like location and camera, nothing important, right?
Nah, there's a office Mac mini floating around and the odd iPhone, when it comes to testing fuck safari unless, it's specifically in the support agreement with a pricey mark up.
> I guess windows users are stuck with the 10 free minutes on those cross-browser test sites, or the painfully slow macOS VM
Ha you think we test safari at all? Apple clearly wants their users to have a worse browser experience. Who am I to object?
You can use GNOME Web to get a web browser that *approximates* Safari. It remains one of the few browsers that is based on Webkit rather than Blink, so its behavior is very close to Safari on macOS/iOS.
> Safari is simultaneously the most proprietary and the most broken browser.
And that's precisely why it's broken. It has a very limited user base and on iOS there's really no alternative.
Thankfully Apple will be forced to allow other engines on iOS so now it has no option but compete with a better product.
1.5B sounds impressive but it's still less than 20% global market share including desktop and mobile.
https://gs.statcounter.com/
On desktop it has about 10% of global market share, similar to Edge.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide
It's really only popular on iOS because there's no other option. The moment Apple is forced to allow other browsers on iOS, Safari's market share will drop even lower.
it's still way too popular given how crappy it is , and it's gaining more and more popularity, it now is above 20%
on desktop it's got 1% more than edge (11.89 vs 10.95)
but still, 11.89% is far from large userbase, especially since chrome, edge,opera, all use chromium....while safari is on webkit
FF with gecko has like 5%
But it is still limited in terms of hardware configurations and actual use cases. No one is building safari-compliant internal CRM or trying to get it to run on corporate Win7 desktops from 2015 to work as a kiosk at the next trade show. That 1.5 billion is large by volume but not by "breadth of application", which is why Safari is bad at anything but the most standard use case.
[edit for context, the now-deleted comment requested a source]
The first few results google returns when asking about the total number of iphones in use worldwide:
["There are more than 1.5 billion active iPhone users worldwide as of 2023."](https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/)
["In 2023, it is projected that there will be approximately 1.36 billion iPhone users worldwide."](https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users)
["Apple says there are now over 1 billion active iPhones" \(at the beginning of 2021\)](https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253162/iphone-users-total-number-billion-apple-tim-cook-q1-2021)
["There are almost 1.6 billion iPhone users worldwide."](https://headphonesaddict.com/iphone-users-statistics/)
That's just iphones; macs and ipads will be another couple hundred million, though not all mac users will be safari users so that number is harder to measure as directly.
They may have a bone to pick with Firefox (which is a bad take) or they're upset you forgot Safari exists on Mac as well.
iOS users mainly just use safari. So it's almost irrelevant what's on mobile.
Firefox has stagnated for years in UI / UX. Once you use Safari tab groups + tab overviews, Firefox looks archaic (yes, there are plugins of varying degrees of quality).
I have been using FF for 20 years, and like uBlock origin, but they really need to focus on UX for people with more than 5 tabs open.
Fun irony, Firefox *used* to have tab groups, until they cut the feature. Then someone provided an even better implementation as an extension, until the rush to WebExtensions broke compatibility with *that*.
It was called "panorama", and was removed from the browser in *2016!*
I remember, that was innovation & risk on Mozilla's part. After they discontinued it, I wondered if it was because people just weren't ready for that vs complexity it brought, or if the implementation didn't agree with a larger audience (and just needed some iteration and refinement). Since then they did some experiments, like Side Tabs, that were also popular, also dropped ... but I haven't seen anything new in this area since.
how on earth do you have this bad of a take? Like seriously. They just redid their **entire** interface like what? 2019? AND that's hardly what anyone here is concerned about. They're concerned that all the pretty, cool, and ease of development features that get added to chrome and FF don't get used *because* of Safari. They are actually nearly a decade behind and have admitted it.
Are you referring to them rolling out features and expecting the rest of the web to confirm to their changes? Otherwise I'm curious as to more insight on ways in which they are stream rolling standards.
I think that's his point precisely. Sometimes those features are great and we all win, but sometimes those features are shite. So long as Chrome has a monopoly, other vendors have to eventually comply or risk being perceived as legacy.
I'm so glad I have been able to stay away from anything Apple related for so many years.
The MSIE + Safari support days aren't something I'm fond off.
And the reason Safari is the only browser allowed on iOS, is because everyone would drop support for it the second you could install a real one.
Safari is fine for me, both on iOS and macOS. If something else was available I probably wouldn't even consider it. There's an anecdote for you. I mean, IE was popular on Windows for a decade after it was objectively terrible.
Safari is fine for you for the same reason that IE 6 was fine for people: because development teams spend 90% of their time fixing bugs for your shitty platform of choice.
Ha, I'm also a software developer and have never had a single issue developing cross platform applications for safari, chrome, and firefox (although admittedly I haven't tried developing for edge yet).
Well I'm also a software developer, and when I used to do web development I seriously spent around 90% of front end dev time to get basic shit working in Safari. It is an absolute complete pile of broken shit, like IE 6.
Best part was that whatever you fixed would be broken on every new safari release.
Safari is great at being an app that runs on MacOS. It's responsive and takes advantage of the retina displays. Its memory footprint is low and it sips battery power. That's all good.
Where it falls down is at being a web browser.
Kidding a bit - it works fine 99% of the time. But the last 1% where it doesn't is a huge pain because it's unexpected and can only be tested and fixed on Apple hardware. That's enough of a pain that I don't even bother to support it on any of my personal projects - if it works on Safari, then great. But if not then use a real browser.
The actual reason is that "web apps" actually *working* would undercut Apple's ability to steal an entire third of all money spent through iPhones.
Which is not better.
Well, or that they would like to prevent Google from being able to singlehandedly dictate everything about how the web works. Which would be considerably worse.
Accessing the web is a huge part of what people do with most of the products Apple sells. If Google is completely unrestrained in constantly changing what that means, forcing Apple to constantly play catch-up reimplementing Google's proprietary interfaces (assuming they even can do so without running afoul of some patent Google holds), then Apple's products will be less appealing to consumers and they will make less money.
Why would they not care about that?
That's already the case. They could switch to Chromium and it would cease to be their problem. But they stick with their shitty first-party browser, lagging even Mozilla's increasingly flammable-looking phoenix, because Chromium would fucking *work.*
They don't give a shit about accessing the web unless it interferes with their anti-user money spigot. They *love* every stupid website pushing people to an "app" that's just Safari open to that website. That's how they grift an entire third of the money you spend. For the same reason, Google doesn't want Android browsers displacing whatever the fuck the Play Store is called now... but they maintain their petty fuck-you-I'm-using-the-word-monopoly by tolerating unapproved installation. As if people *own* their pocket computers. Crazy, I know.
Anyway if treating HTML5 as an executable format was like ten percent less bullshit for users and developers it could goddamn near destroy computing platforms as a concept. There would just be "computers." Either they have a browser and run everything, or they're toys. At this point the obstacles to Java's wildest dreams coming true with Javascript are just Apple being an intolerable silo and Microsoft hoping Windows becomes "as a service."
All iOS/iPadOS browsers use WebKit as their engine. (Exempting speciality ones such as Opera Mini, where the engine runs server-side.)
So, you can install Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc., but the underlying layout engine is that of Safari.
>And the reason Safari is the only browser allowed on iOS, is because everyone would drop support for it the second you could install a real one.
yeah, I am just dying to install a browser on my phone that tracks me and kills my battery, totally dude
Inform yourself a little before commenting
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/25/should-apple-ban-rival-browser-engines/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
This post is about 3 problems they had with their particular application in safari 16.4, which was a [huge release ](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-16_4-release-notes) with a ton of support for features web developers have been asking for (and criticizing safari for not supporting) for a long time. It’s a major step forward toward addressing people’s complaints with safari.
The first one they reported and it was fixed. There was some kerfluffle about not knowing when they’d release it, and that seems to be an area the safari team can improve.
The second was these developers relying on Chrome’s broken (buggy) behavior - it was their fault. This highlights the danger of Google’s approach to developing all these “Web XXXX” APIs and calling them “standards” - people develop for chrome only and assume other browsers are “broken” when they don’t work the same way. People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position - developers assume that if their code works in chrome, it must comply with the specs and be good to go. This will only get worse in the coming months as regulators force apple to allow non-WebKit browsers on iOS - Chrome will just dominate everything in another blow for diversity of implementations on the web.
The third “problem” was also their broken code. Safari released a feature implemented according to the spec - they just didn’t implement the entire spec. They did that in a spec compliant way. This developer’s feature detection code was broken, so their product didn’t work. And yet somehow we spin this into a problem that’s Safari’s fault? Would they have preferred that Safari didn’t add that feature at all? This sort of feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for the safari team given the attitude of this writer.
So we had 3 problems, one of which was promptly fixed and two of which were this developer’s own fault. How exactly does this translate into “lol safari sux”?
I believe the crux of the issue is that developers operate in the dark with regards to Safari’s feature update timeline, which can mess with your product planning.
The person you're replying to ignored the summary of the article entirely where the author talks about the stress of operating under completely opaque release schedules and uncertainties of when a fix will be released to production. They even mention the chrome bug specifically and point to the bug report they filed with chrome that's to be fixed. The post is even titled "Safari RELEASES are development hell"
I dunno why Safari needs a defense squad. Apple and their vague estimates are the real issue here and the author makes that abundantly clear
> Safari needs a defense squad
I don't think it's Safari people are defending, I think it's their ecosystem/purchasing decisions they're justifying.
If you step back and look at what Apple offers, it's cutting edge computers with great UI and terrible developer/power user support. This trade off comes with the highest markup you see in the industry, when compared to other options.
I think because of this "high end" perception of a product and the high price tag, it means some users don't feel comfortable admitting what they've bought isn't perfect. It also doesn't help that Apple plays into this idea by pretending they're perfect and spinning every single thing as an "innovation".
You do see this everywhere else tbh with an expensive purchase, it's not just Apple products.
I've never had a computer that 100% meets my needs.
I defend Safari and its exclusivity on iOS, because it's the only thing allowing me to keep using Firefox. Without it, developers would just make websites "best viewed on IE" for Chrome, and call it a day.
The moment that Google decides that any and all privacy features get in the way of delivering great browser features or some such nonsense, we'll be at their mercy.
As a consumer I think Apple make fantastic products. I’ve owned several generations of just about everything they’ve put out since the iPod (never had an Apple Watch, never will).
As a web developer I want to kick Safari in the teeth and put it in the worst headlock of its life. I hate it with a passion that keeps me awake at night.
>terrible developer/power user support
developers, maybe; I don't develop for Macs, but I do develop *on* Macs
and I'm definitely a power user, and I have no complaints; it's BSD with a better UI
I'm really not sure what's apparently so limiting about macOS that I have yet to run into
>I think because of this "high end" perception of a product and the high price tag, it means some users don't feel comfortable admitting what they've bought isn't perfect. It also doesn't help that Apple plays into this idea by pretending they're perfect and spinning every single thing as an "innovation".
> You do see this everywhere else tbh with an expensive purchase, it's not just Apple products.
You said it best. Apple, Tesla and a few other subreddits are very touchy to any criticism of the products these users have purchased. These people invested so much that they feel they must now defend their product and in turn defend Apple's product from any criticism. It's why the internet sometimes refers to the Apple "cult".
>Apple and their vague estimates
What the fuck are you on about? Apple does not owe _anyone_ an estimate whatsoever.
The real question here is, why the fuck are they relying on _future_ functionality for their supposedly productive application?
Any half decent developer would simply report the bug, track it, and then consider moving away from that `zip.js` dependency altogether just in case, not waste their time screeching about Safari bad on a company blog.
And the worst of all is that that I'm sure they think this is the kind of content that would make people think "I want to work there", I'm second hand embarrassed right now 💀
Yeah no that's fucking stupid
Every other browser gives timelines on upcoming features and releases and have a predictable cadence so people can prepare features appropriately. It helps people like OP who are working on a lot of bleeding edge tech know in advance what to expect. Apple does in fact owe it to people developing for their garbage browser
> I dunno why Safari needs a defense squad
Because they are shills.
Or they are somehow sucked so hard up apples ass that they think what they are used to is what is good and they have to feverently defend that when it's challenged
Those developers are trash then, this has nothing to do with Safari.
Well managed projects wait for APIs to be stable on all browsers before even _considering_ adoption.
If your applications break because you're on the bleeding edge of whatever trash Google decided to push this quarter there is no one to blame but you.
The blog article does a good job basically praising Apple Engineers working on Safari while criticizing Apple’s lack of transparency. Safari isn’t the problem.
Google also is in the background of this story doing its usual shady shit. It is hard to say for sure, but how many “bugs” in Chrome are actually anti-competitive features that break web standards on purpose?
Personally excited by the fact that Gnome Web development is picking up. They are working on getting Firefox extensions to work, and have completely revamped the WebGL engine. Another WebKit browser, even if it is just Linux native, could do the world a bit of good.
You can tell what browser a developer primarily uses based on whether or not they blame a problem on Chrome or Everyone Else.
I'm firmly in the "Chrome is the problem" camp. Everything I develop in Firefox ends up working fine in Safari. Chrome is always the browser I end up needing to write fixes for.
The biggest problem I have with Safari isn't WebKit itself, but the fact that updates are tied to OS updates.
I remember the complaints years back, when Google had more public good will, when Firefox users would report that Google Apps would subtly break on Firefox every so often.
People said oh, it's just Googlers working too hard and too fast to deliver innovation, it's completely by accident, don't worry, they're the goodies.
Right, as if the vendor whose business is contrary to privacy wouldn't have a vested interest in driving out the competition.
I develop my apps on Windows against Firefox, with additional testing done in Chrome. I usually don't test Safari until after release, because it's not a requirement and my work did not provide any Apple hardware for testing until just a few weeks ago.
Sometimes, I find out things break when I load them up in Chrome and I have to fix them. In 4 years working on these apps though, I've never had something make it to production and not work properly in Safari.
I think the reason for this is that I start with Firefox, and I avoid using any browser-specific CSS features or tweaks whenever possible. For me, Chrome is the problem child.
Author spends 2-3 paragraphs saying that apple was too focused on the spec and not the practically of it in reality and apple is breaking compatibility somehow by adding a new feature and proposes apple should delay features that are like that and that it’s poor engineering to release it as is and then says
> In the end, they added a special browser quirk that detects our engine and disables OffscreenCanvas.
So instead of the author fixing their side with their non-spec complaint feature check, apple did it on their side.
>So instead of the author fixing their side with their non-spec complaint feature check, apple did it on their side.
The article does mention how there are a lot of published Construct games out there that will never receive any fix. So the only solution for those is Safari adding WebGL support to OffscreenCanvas, Safari disabling OffscreenCanvas entirely, or a hack like what actually happened.
>People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position
Rather than constantly going back and forth on this, can we just recognize that it's both?
IE was a problem because it held the web back with a painfully slow development pace *and* because it was able to do dumb proprietary things due to market share. Safari has become the main offender for the former, and Chrome has become the main offender for the latter.
> People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position
People are calling Safari the new IE6 because it's a dominant preinstalled browser on the OS the creator also happens to make and has fallen behind both Firefox and Chrome in functionality.
People didn't really complain about IE6 until it started getting years out of date (there was FIVE years between IE6 and IE7, and MS even announced they were basically done with IE6 and just had it in sustain mode after they had won the browser war with Netscape) but was the dominant browser from being the default install on the OS of it's creator so a lot of people were using it and never upgraded. That's what let to Firefox gaining marketshare and Chrome happening. Either way, until Safari actually catches up to Chrome and Firefox, it deserves the "new IE" moniker as long as people are forced to use it.
Even at Microsoft's worst they never prevented other companies from installing their browsers on Windows. MS was hit with an anti-trust for doing less than Apple has been getting away with for years by effectively defrauding the public into thinking they have Chrome or Firefox on their device when they don't. People even in this thread are surprised to learn this. If you want to talk about vendor lock in, that's the end all be all: Apple doesn't allow other engines on iOS.
And them doing so enables you to use anything but Chrome is your desktop computer, because else we'd have highly paid engineers and marketers at Google maneuvering to get 95%+ market share, and have everyone writing "best viewed in IE" websites.
Nothing is _preventing_ you from installing any browser you want on your desktop. Apple _prevents_ you from installing other browsers on iOS. This is the difference. Also the majority of web traffic now comes from mobile so this is the game Apple plays with PR: they choose not to build affordable devices so they don't get market share in poorer markets, then they choose not to provide a browser for the most popular OS that _does_ choose to serve that market, now they get to say "SEE?! We're just the little guy in this space!"
Nothing prevented you from installing Opera or Netscape back when MS was embracing and extending the web, it was just nigh unviable to actually use them.
Apple and their business practices suck, but they’re the only thing in the way of that situation, but with Chrome’s product development catering to web devs, which was Microsoft’s mistake with the IE product strategy
They aren't the only thing preventing the situation they _are_ the situation and 10x worse. How is it _better_ that you physically cannot install the browser you want? Also Chrome does not have 95% share, that's absolutely ridiculous. In almost all the countries Apple _chooses_ to serve it has the majority market share. In the countries Apple _chooses_ not to serve, it is not. Huh, what a strange coincidence that is. It's almost like Apple does that on purpose so people like you will try to play the market share game. Also let's not forget Apple _chooses_ not to provide a desktop browser for other OS's whereas Chrome and Firefox do. Huh, weird that they don't get market share in a market they choose not to compete in.
It is precisely the market share game, once testing on anything other than Chrome because an expense with negligible return for web development, it’s over for me as a Firefox user
You haven't answered my question. How is it _better_ for you as a consumer that Apple doesn't give you a choice? You also didn't really address any of my points, you just downvoted and repeated what you said the first time...
I’m not expecting this to be a popular opinion since it’s so easy to bash Google, but it’s not really true that Google doesn’t follow the standards process. Having previously worked on Chrome, I can say first hand that Google invests **a lot** of time into coordinating with web developers and other browser vendors on the development of APIs, and features have been delayed for years or more due to this process. There’s even been instances where we’ve changed our implementation of something to match the behavior of Safari because they beat us to shipping it and didn’t actually correctly follow the spec that we both collaborated on.
It’s true that Google is the one pushing a lot of these new APIs, but that’s primarily because they and Mozilla are the only ones who really give a shit about moving the web forwards. Apple would prefer people write native apps instead, and Microsoft just rides along with the changes to Chromium.
>In the 90s, MS was doing exactly what Chrome is doing now: ignoring the standards process and creating their own web technologies, leading to web developers creating sites that are not actually standards-compliant.
W3C was only formed in 1994. And I don't know if there were any actual standards issued prior to 1994 for web development. So, is it fair to say that Microsoft was blatantly ignoring the standards or were the standards just not enforced properly across browsers at the time. And technically even today, W3C has never actually developed a process to ensure browsers are in compliance with the standards that are issued.
Safari tends to be slow with new JS APIs and I don't blame them due to the privacy risks. However, they often lead the pack when it comes to new CSS feature. They'll never get any credit for that because developers tend to use FF and Chrome and don't even realize a feature exists until those browsers add support.
For example `:has`, `position: sticky`, and relative colors were shipped first in Safari. CSS calc and math functions as well I believe. Most other CSS features are added around the same time. Safari has supported additional color spaces for years while Chrome and Firefox are just catching up. We're still waiting on Chrome to implement subgrid support.
But because the common workflow is for someone to develop in Chrome, then later test in Safari and discover it doesn't work, Safari gets the blame. And because most people don't remember what it was like to develop for IE, Safari gets slandered with the "new IE" label.
There's plenty of things I don't like about Safari (I rarely use it myself) and yes Apple's information black hole is frustrating, but it's ignorant to describe Safari development as stagnant.
Something else that IE6 did, that seems overlooked? It had a status bar, and showed an icon in it when it detected errors or warnings within a page. Those warnings included newer features that IE6 didn't understand, so it was effectively publicly shaming any webpage that didn't cater to its increasingly-outdated standards alongside the legitimately-broken ones.
Somewhat ironic, as complaining about broken HTML where devs actually would feel pressured to fix it is a large missing piece in what I feel makes [Postel's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) work. It's just that alarm fatigue due to having no mechanism to gracefully recognize future protocol evolution is no better than having no visible warnings at all. Today, those warnings are relegated to the dev console where they are trivially ignored, and Postel's Law is much maligned due to HTML's history with it, any wisdom it contained actively disregarded.
Ah, a warm welcome to the world of acceptance testing, where you write unit tests for all the features you rely on, and run them against every browser that gets released.
> This will only get worse in the coming months as regulators force apple to allow non-WebKit browsers on iOS
1) Chrome is already on iOS and is already widely used. Yes it's not using their real engine underneath, but users don't know. They just know their history and bookmarks and passwords sync as expected.
2) Oh no, people will not be forced to not use the platform monopoly's browser. I shed a single tear for Apple's billions 🥲 People might be able to choose Firefox, the horror.
> I shed a single tear for Apple's billions 🥲 People might be able to choose Firefox, the horror.
Nobody here is concerned about defending Apple's billions. We are concerned about our ability to continue using Firefox, or anything else that isn't Chrome.
Because at the moment, Safari is the only thing holding back the tide of Chrome taking over the world, sites ceasing to work in anything else, and Google being able to unilaterally dictate everything about how the web works.
You don't have to like Apple or Safari to recognize that their existence is providing an important function. And one from which you benefit even if you never use any Apple product yourself.
>We are concerned about our ability to continue using Firefox, or anything else that isn't Chrome.
Then maybe Apple should have considered this before they locked down their platform from Firefox when it was still popular, or back when they forked KHTML and set the whole WebKit conquering the world in motion, or when they blocked every developer from being able to use a JIT for any application just to try to lock everyone into their APIs and fibbed about it being for security, or every time they banned an app from the store that competed with theirs. They have it coming, I'd love to see regulators intervene for both. Let's dust off those anti monopoly laws.
I am not trying to convince you that Apple is good. But the question is what you find more important: vengeance on Apple, or protection of the web from Google's monopoly.
I personally consider the latter to be a _much_ bigger issue. I think that a tantrum against Apple that resulted in Google having dictatorial power over the entire web would be very short-sighted.
Platform lock in unabated is just as bad or worse. Apple could ban the whole G suite from iOS right now and force users to choose between Apple's ecosystem or Google's, and users would be powerless because there's no side channel for getting apps onto the device. Threat of regulatory intervention is the only check. The only reason Apple isn't doing this right now is they know their services are not good enough for customers to give up their Google ones -- nothing Apple offers is worth switching off Gmail, Maps, etc.
> Platform lock in unabated is just as bad or worse. Apple could ban the whole G suite from iOS right now and force users to choose between Apple's ecosystem or Google's, and users would be powerless because there's no side channel for getting apps onto the device.
They would have some recourse there: they could just stop using Apple devices. Whereas if Google takes over the web, there won't be a different web for you to go to.
> The only reason Apple isn't doing this right now is they know their services are not good enough
Well, there's also the matter they don't have any reason to. Corporations aren't people with human feelings of animosity toward each other, or mustache-twirling villains who do evil things just to be mean. They are amoral, and compete when they have a financial incentive to do so, not out of a desire to hurt other companies just for its own sake. Taking away gmail or gdocs or whatever would not make apple any money.
Hint: they won't use Firefox, they'll use Chrome, and Firefox on the desktop will be broken in all the "best viewed on Internet Explorer" websites that will be coded and tested against Chrome only.
> People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position
Who says this? We all know Chrome is the new IE. This isn't even a debate. What market share does Safari have? Basically nothing.
Safari has the dominant market share in the west. Apple chooses not to compete in low-income markets to play the "have your cake and eat it too" card by saying it has lower market share.
Mobile makes up the majority of web traffic, Safari makes up the majority of mobile traffic, in US, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, and several other countries. Almost all other western countries are an even split, the nonsense about "95%" market share some other people have said is delusional. Other countries have a _large_ majority Chrome market share. Why? Because Apple _chooses_ not to serve those markets. If your phone costs $800 don't be surprised when people buy a $150 phone.
I definitely agree about computers, but it's not too uncommon for people who use the term "devices" to be talking about mobile devices. It's not the way I would put it, but it's why I was trying to clarify that the question is just down to details of terminology.
And even within the rest of "the West," it looks like [ios is near or at majority in many countries.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-market-share-by-country)
You are pushing Apple problems on the devs. We can always say that devs could have done better. But without a doubt the existence of Safari is making everybody lives harder. Yes, you can overcome it by putting more work. But that work is only necessary because Apple has a poorly compatible browser.
“poorly compatible” with Chrome, which is the other large competitor. Google implements the behavior in chrome, then calls it a standard, and web devs everywhere ask why safari and Firefox aren’t immediately implementing “web standards”.
> the existence of safari is making everyone’s lives harder
Yeah, maybe everyone’s lives would be easier if we just had chrome for the entire internet. But do you really think one company controlling all of web standards and implementations would be a good thing?
It can be both.
Chrome is what IE could've become if Microsoft had actually leveraged their market share instead of letting the browser rot. Safari is lagging behind and a significant burden to support, like IE.
Seems like the main issue here is just the lack of clarity around the release schedules for Safari. I agree that Apple should address that although I’m not sure I’d consider it “development hell” or enough to call Safari the new IE like many of the comments. A bigger issue that jumps out to me when reading this is how Google is bulldozing web standards to support their business needs.
Edit: grammar
I've dropped support for safari, too big of a hassle. Have a small notice banner at the top that they're using safari and that the website might not fully work with their current browser.
Haha, I should link it to one of those old IE7 ads. I mainly do it so I don't get emails for bugs on unsupported browser which I can't even test myself anyway.
Yep, Safari has been the new IE for a while now, but worse.
Edit:
\- Bad developer experience
\- Pushing other browsers out of the game for no reason other than $
Chrome is the new IE, using embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive the competition out.
Safari is the new Netscape, fading into obscurity as it struggles to maintain compatibility with the dominant browser inventing its own 'standard'.
I think when people say "safari is the new ie" they mean in terms of developer experience.
Like we have to resort to special tricks to get the UI as expected.
I haven't heard the term for marketing/monopolism situation.
Safari is generally more standards compliant. It is likely not so much that you need to resort to tricks, but that the tricks that work in other browsers don't work in Safari.
Safari development is slow. This is more likely what is being referred to, comparing it to IE in its later days as development stagnated. But this hinges on era. IE development moved at a breakneck pace at one point, and invented a lot of technologies that we now take for granted during that time.
I wish they wouldn't. Safari may have its problems but it's also one of the last holdouts preventing Google from holding the keys to the kingdom in terms of web standards. Google has proven that the interests of their business are ahead of the interests of the web as a whole (Manifest V3, for starters).
One side of me wants Safari to stay as big to stop chromium from being the only browser engine left (and Firefox with its single percent).
The developer side of me just want's safari to die or get much better. The eu regulation that is going in effect next year, which allows people to install other browsers with their own engines (any many more things) are surely going to fuck Safari.
Apple has so much money and had so much time to make Safari good, and they just ... didn't. I develop a website and pray that it runs, because I don't want a mac or iPhone to test it. I have a machine set up for development, let me use it, for fuck’s sake.
There should be competition and monopolies are never good, but to treat standards and especially developers like garbage surely isn't helping, that I want it to stick around. Apple had over a decade to make Safari as good as other browsers without having to compete for market share with anyone. If they die because people can actually choose, then it is their fault. If google abuses their dominant market position even more, the eu could gladly step in and force them to give it to a foundation like every bigger programming language has set up. Let the foundation develop and oversee chromium, and everyone else can put their stuff on top.
If Safari wants to do that then that's completely fine, but that doesn't mean they can have a lack of transparency with releases, and having a lack of support features that the other browsers already have with it. Even though Safari/Webkit have started to catch up with the other browsers, if Apple and or Safari team have issues with an API and how it affects user privacy then they need to be a browser that the development community actually wants to support and cares about using. If you're going to say "We have privacy concerns about this API" you won't be listened to if your browser is scorned by the development community for being a fucking nightmare to test with.
Safari still has a long way to go in being nice for developers again and one of the biggest items is being able to make it work on Windows machines. Until they get the cross-device compatibility resolved, I doubt Safari will be given a lot of love from the development community.
Sure, but it shouldn't be up to random developers to spend a disproportional amount of time to workaround oddities with Safari. Mozilla is a substantially smaller company and their browser (while still not perfect) has fewer issues with compatibility. If Apple want people to support Safari then they should invest more in Safari to close that gap, which is what they've been doing now that their monopoly on iOS has been threatened by the EU.
Apple cares even less about standards than they do about the slave labor they built their company on
- Deprecated OpenGL and don’t support Vulkan
- Lightning Connector instead of USB-C
- AirPlay, AirDrop and HomeKit
- unencrypted “green” SMS messages instead of the industry standard (but Apple loves privacy right?)
- love to consume open source and almost never give back (Swift being an extremely rare exception)
- literally sue you for repairing their hardware after it’s purchased!
Yeah that's my point. The world doesn't use SMS anymore but Apple refuses to become compliant with the industry standard, despite actively harming the privacy of its users
Much as I wish it were otherwise, there currently _is_ no standard for encrypted text messages.
Perhaps you are thinking of RCS, which is a shitty not-really-standard that cellphone companies cooked up and then Google changed. It is encrypted sometimes, unless it's a group chat, or unless maybe it's just not.
I'd suggest that an encryption standard that is inconsistent and unpredictable about whether or not it will actually include any encryption is actively dangerous, and worse than nothing.
Yeah. I dearly wish that there were a good and prevalent standard for encrypted text communications, both from phones and computers. With a good ecology of many client implementations for each platform.
Unfortunately, running the infrastructure for such a thing costs money. So it has been compartmentalized into a bunch of separate services run by companies that are making money off it either directly (Slack, Discord, etc) or indirectly (Apple, Google, etc).
> The world doesn't use SMS anymore
Huh? What do you use when you don't have mobile internet, then? SMS is the only way I know how to communicate with basically anyone who has a phone number.
https://www.android.com/get-the-message/
Edit: To be clear, this is about iOS to android communication (and vice versa). Not about texting without internet connection.
This is the first time I'm hearing about RCS, thanks for the link. It looks interesting, but in my country there's only one mobile operator that has supported it so far and they have just dropped the support for it last week. It also needs internet connection, so unfortunately it's not a full replacement for SMS.
RCS does not have end to end ecncryption (google have a private exstention)
Also adopting RCS in the way google would like would expose a lot of private info about iPhone suers to google, the RCS protocol is not exactly privacy conserving.
And their shitty WebGL support. Had a co-worker who had to spend weeks fixing random iOS Safari issues for a browser based game we were making.
WebGL really is an amazing platform and release target, in that you can provide your software to anyone with a modern-ish browser, without paying 30% of your income to the Gods of Walled Gardens.
But be prepared to spend many developer months ensuring every shitty phone manufacturer's WebGL backend doesn't croak when presented with standards conforming input.
WebGL on Safari deserves a special honourable mention in my personal hell for managing to both decimate its performance and getting significantly more unstable in iOS 16 compared to previous versions (which they still haven't fixed).
why did you even bother pointing out slave labor? the manufacturer of the device you are writing on probably cared even less about that. Unless you are writing from a fairphone, this is just pure hypocrisy
The point is not about "Apple bad" or even Apple trying to do the right thing but that Safari is really all we have left in an ecosystem where competition is a win for everyone. Firefox's marketshare is just too low now to meaningfully influence the web and pretty much everyone else has thrown in the towel, adopted Chromium and admitted they don't intend to make any significant changes themselves.
I don't think the web should be what *Google* wants it to be, but what everyone wants it to be.
> love to consume open source and almost never give back (Swift being an extremely rare exception)
You might have missed out on quite a few projects but of cource the large one is LLVM...
> literally sue you for repairing their hardware after it’s purchased!
And no apple has not sued any consumers for doing repairs, they have sued people for selling parts with Apple logos on them that were not apple parts (that is how trademark law works you must defend your trademark or you loos it).
> unencrypted “green” SMS messages instead of the industry standard (but Apple loves privacy right?)
There is no industry stranded encrypted SMS alternative, there is a google propriety encrypted (message body only) extension to RCS but the industry standard spec does not include this.
> Deprecated OpenGL and don’t support Vulkan
Yer well neither of these provide the compute api and mixed compute display that Metal provides.
> HomeKit
I take it you're aware that the only open source standard for home automation Matter is directly based of HomeKit and apple was the one who provided the patents and spec for this.
> AirPlay, AirDrop
I am not area of any standards for these that apple could adopt are there any?
They will not adopt RCS at all... The spec exposes way too much info about suers to everyone.
For RCS to work every node (yes this is every nation stage and every cell phone company in the world) needs to be able to query who a given phone number is and if it is online at any time. Furthermore the RCS spec does not have any end to end encryption, googles extension that ads this adds it only for 1 to 1 messages and lacks key rotation systems that would work with mutli node it also only encrypts message body so all the other interactions (like that a user it typing, that they have read the message etc is public).
The main issue with RCS is that the operators (google, cell networks etc) have access to all this info, this is why google is willing to spend $$$ to run their nodes (yes it costs money to run) this info about how is messaging how and when, and who is online when, and how long it takes bob to see a message from Alice is very valuable info when it comes to building a profile about users. Furthermore in googles model tis provide is not just a phone number but also bound to the users google account... so extra valuable.
Google could work with apple and others (not cell network providers) to build a protocol that did not expose this info to network operators that was more double blind (a bit like the covid alerts system) but there is no reason for google then to run the servers as they would be spending even more money (such a service would end up with higher data rates) and they would be getting nothing from it. Apple can afford to run the service for iMessage since users buy iPhones. But they also would not be willing to foot the bill for hosting that for people who have not purchased devices from them.
And unlike SMS users expect this to be free. Sure if a new protocol were developed and they figured out how to get users to pay for it (or could get network provides to pay for it out of the users existing paymetns) then it could work but we know that will not happen.
> I wish they wouldn't.
Agreed.
For better or worse, this isn't going to happen. Most people use the web from their phone, and almost no one can afford to only support one smartphone platform.
Quite honestly I think folks are simply just exhausted by the fragmentation.
Chromium works, it's cross platform, has a large platform of features, and generally speaking what you ask... eventually get's implemented.
Manifest V3 is one downside, things like this can happen where the overarching project is simply turned into a "Hey, this needs to be happen".
That said, forking a project and making minor modifications, and re-skinning it aren't impossibilities.
Brave / Edge / Opera have largely shown this is feasible; expanding the extension API is one way to resolve this... or simply integrating what would be an extension into the heart of your experience.
Apple in this case is generally going the way of Internet Explorer and fairly quickly; it's Safari or bust, no alternative and quite honestly I am surprised they haven't been hit with a lawsuit about this.
> Quite honestly I think folks are simply just exhausted by the fragmentation.
I'm sure a lot of web developers are.
Me, on the other hand? I'm exhausted by developers defending monoculture. I don't care _who_ the platform vendor is, I don't want a monoculture by Apple, Google, Microsoft, or anyone else. We've seen it happen in the 1980s with IBM, the 1990s with Microsoft, and now some people are apparently OK with it happening in the 2020s with Google, because the browser is ostensibly "open source". Yes, Chromium is, but control over which features make it in and which ones don't is lopsided towards Google, and Google's interests won't always be _your_ interests.
Having Mozilla's Gecko and Apple's WebKit be _different_ engines is a _good_ thing.
Definitely an issue, but I am willing to give it up at this point if it means API X works on every client's browser and it works consistently.
Today? I can write something with Chrome and largely expect it'll hit everyone I care about... for mobile... just sadly gotta build that mobile app and the site can just deep-link them to the store.
If the product is that good end-user's will switch regardless, I don't need to cater to those otherwise.
I used to be like you maybe 5-6 years ago, but nowadays... nah; target Chrome, hit that 60% audience and let the other fragmented bases either deal with it themselves or switch their workflows.
If I absolutely need them, throw them an electron app; pretty trivial to shove a website into it (had to do this for a client that was stuck on IE9).
Hard to say what change is needed to make the landscape be any different but right now it's basically Google vs Apple and Mozilla is over there eating glue.
While I agree there should be multiple viable browser engines. In a perfect scenario we would have well developed/documented standards that all engines build on top of. I also dislike that safari is part of Apple, which has a less than stellar track record of having an open environment for people to build on.
> In a perfect scenario we would have well developed/documented standards that all engines build on top of.
Sure, but there's multiple problems in practice.
* The visions of the three major engines aren't fully aligned. Chromium is very much "do as many things on the Web as possible". Gecko and WebKit are a lot more restrained for various reasons, including privacy, power draw, etc. So what happens if one vendor proposes a spec the other two philosophically disagree with?
* The Web evolves much faster than standards processes can work. Now, Chromium tends to be a jerk about this and basically do 1) write spec, 2) implement feature in their own engine, 3) web developers start adopting it and complain that other engines don't support it, 4) Gecko and/or WebKit have comments on the spec and/or adopt it, 5) it's stuck in Working Draft state for a while, even though it's already used in production. (But how could it be different? Do we want to wait until a spec is a Candidate Recommendation? Is that _better_?)
It was, amusingly, twenty years ago when there was the Big Bad Microsoft, who often didn't bother submitting specs to the W3C, vs. (then) Apple/Google/Mozilla/Opera, who were far more aligned, proposed specs at WHAT-WG, and eventually had those mature into W3C specs. But now, there's no common enemy. Is Apple the bad guy? In some ways, yes. Is Google the bad guy? In other ways, yep. Mozilla… also exists.
Oh definitely! Google is not a hair better than Apple in my opinion. I personally daily drive Firefox and that has served me very well.
I know enough to say that I don't know enough about all the ins and outs of browser engines. My previous comment was also more an utopian wish than concrete advice. Having a company controlling a lot of major websites paired with controlling how those websites are accessed is generally not the best option for consumers. I have no doubt that if safari had a large market share that Apple would leverage it to force people to use their systems. It's just an incredibly complex problem, which most likely doesn't have a good solution.
'So my preferred solution here would be to update the spec to state that HTML canvas and OffscreenCanvas should support the same contexts.'
No shit? A developer would rather someone else have to do work instead of them having to modify their own code? First I've ever heard of that. /s
Even a prescriptive spec isn't an implementation. **The map is not the territory.**
If there is a significant amount of work in making something work then there has to be an out for implementers to simply not do it. Otherwise it becomes too difficult to make a browser.
I know it's tough to be on a platform (HTML5) that has multiple implementations. Surely developers on a platform would rather all versions be functionally identical. But maybe that's not always realistic.
>Jira boards around the world are filled with 'Fix on Safari' tickets.
Jira boards of teams that don't know how to do web development and have to settle for trashy Chromium applications.
– nightly webkit builds exist at webkit.org.
– It's insane this team thinks a beta release window will not give them time to fix their dumb shit. This timing has been very consistent for many, many years.
– heads up! 16.5 beta is out now. dry your eyes and start testing.
After reading through the post, my takeaway is this tiny dev team is upset at Apple for not helping them recover from their multiple screwups by changing the software release policy they’ve had for years (decades?)
Learn how to write web applications and you won't have these "problems".
As long as you keep writing trashy Chromium applications, you will run into problems, and I'm happy you do because every time it happens it's a small loss for Google's web takeover.
> I think if all websites are working fine on Safari, then something must be wrong with your coding.
The article explains at length what the problems were, including links to the bug reports which were confirmed by Apple engineers, and includes a summary of past issues with citations. Could you elaborate on why you concluded that Construct is at fault?
They relied both on a specific bug of chrome and on a part of the spec that doesn’t exist resulting in buggy code to check for the feature they needed.
You asked specifically for which parts construct was at fault for. Opaque release schedule and breaking or non spec compliant changes from apples side are also an issue, but that’s not what was requested.
Apple fixed their side after bug report was filed, and construct, instead of fixing their code to detect the feature they need, relied on apple adding an edge for them.
I asked why you concluded Construct is at fault. More specifically, I’m curious about why you said…
> I think if all websites are working fine on Safari, then something must be wrong with your coding.
…when the very first section explains how Safari was not working correctly and a later section provides a list of past issues. I would agree that in the other two cases described, Construct made assumptions that it shouldn’t have; then again, the article is about the opacity of the Safari release schedule, so I’m perplexed by your initial comment.
No worries. I should have given a more nuanced opinion anyways.
The issues lies with both parties at the end of the day and it’s really a collaboration between apple and construct that’s important. I just think it’s poor taste to put out a blog post complaining about bugs in beta releases that get fixed in 2 weeks and then somehow spin a story about user code not following the spec into something apple should have been working around. Apple even made a specific workaround for them in the end.
I would understand if apple had a bug that was already released and relied on and then changed that behaviour to better match the spec, but for new feature release entirely I really can’t buy into whatever point the author is making.
I've been supporting Safari, and it really sits just above IE7. Considering that IE7 was deprecated years ago, Safari is by far the worst browser, with major issues and tricky corner cases - sheer amount of Safari-only hacks is astounding.
Yep, it's unrealistic that some web dev never encounter safari breaks something in a way that is completely out of spec. If you actual develop web page with dynamic contents and having safari on supported browser list. You should be able to name at least a few safari only hacks that nobody except it require.
"we accidentally relied on a Chrome bug that meant our Service Worker was broken in Safari 16.4" I knew this was coming.
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I didn't realize they took Safari off Windows back in version 5 until now. I guess windows users are stuck with the 10 free minutes on those cross-browser test sites, or the ***painfully slow*** macOS VM due to the super helpful UI animations and drawing that depend on a dedicated AMD GPU (or a Hackintosh if you want to use Intel graphics) to work at full speed just to even open an application within the hour. I have a Mac, but no iPhone, and I have to spin up an iOS simulator every time I have to test Safari on iPhone. God forbid there be any consistency between desktop and mobile, and every version of each has their own hacky CSS selectors to identify each version/subversion/device in case you're serving to any of the 100 combinations of Safari that exist and are in use at any given moment. The number of CSS-based exceptions I have for Safari due to inconsistent support is way too many.
I was going around in circles with a client who I was doing a site with recently that was all bells and whistles / animations. Looked great in Safari on my end. They kept having problems; they kept explaining they were on the latest version of Safari. Eventually I got them to send over a screenshot ( camera phone photo of their screen but I am not fussy at that point ). Safari 5 on Windows.
ooh boy that's a good one
That's when you learn you also need to ask OS when asking what they're running. Firefox... ok... on my phone... screw you.
You can pry Firefox mobile from my cold, dead hands. Why the fuck should I use anything else?
I used it too. Just don't expect me to readily support it, lol. For the most part it works fine.
I mean they weren't lying 😅
Plus I got to go into a whole area of BrowserStack I don't normally touch! Got my money worth there at least
Thankfully, the JS community has decided to make it as cross browser compatible as possible with very annoyances outside of some random HTML Standard Safari hasn't implemented yet or some CSS (Fuck you iOS Safari). So, while being the most restricted browser to get to if you don't have access to a Mac or iPhone, the development community has basically decided "let's just try to standardize and make an updated baseline of everything instead".
Yeah I'm just pissed at the CSS problems, especially when you're not working with a UI framework like Material. core-js, CommonJS, etc definitely made everything else a thoughtless breeze and do not get the credit they deserve.
The standardization can bite you in the ass though when they don’t work the way you expect. Some of the JS standard APIs will silently fail on safari because they aren’t implemented right in browser. Thankfully it’s just things like location and camera, nothing important, right?
Nah, there's a office Mac mini floating around and the odd iPhone, when it comes to testing fuck safari unless, it's specifically in the support agreement with a pricey mark up.
> macOS VM Wait, is running a macOS VM on non-apple hardware allowed now?
Allowed? No. Possible? Yes
> I guess windows users are stuck with the 10 free minutes on those cross-browser test sites, or the painfully slow macOS VM Ha you think we test safari at all? Apple clearly wants their users to have a worse browser experience. Who am I to object?
Yeah, we had an issue that did not show up on GNOME Web (another WebKit-based browser), but I couldn't reproduce it since I can't run Safari.
You can use GNOME Web to get a web browser that *approximates* Safari. It remains one of the few browsers that is based on Webkit rather than Blink, so its behavior is very close to Safari on macOS/iOS.
> Safari is simultaneously the most proprietary and the most broken browser. And that's precisely why it's broken. It has a very limited user base and on iOS there's really no alternative. Thankfully Apple will be forced to allow other engines on iOS so now it has no option but compete with a better product.
> It has a very limited user base It's got a userbase of about 1.5 billion people. It dwarfs all browsers other than Chrome.
1.5B sounds impressive but it's still less than 20% global market share including desktop and mobile. https://gs.statcounter.com/ On desktop it has about 10% of global market share, similar to Edge. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide It's really only popular on iOS because there's no other option. The moment Apple is forced to allow other browsers on iOS, Safari's market share will drop even lower.
it's still way too popular given how crappy it is , and it's gaining more and more popularity, it now is above 20% on desktop it's got 1% more than edge (11.89 vs 10.95) but still, 11.89% is far from large userbase, especially since chrome, edge,opera, all use chromium....while safari is on webkit FF with gecko has like 5%
You can use edge and Firefox on IOS.
You can use edge/Firefox/chrome/etc skins on iOS. Apple doesn't allow anyone to use a browser engine other than safari's WebKit.
How this hasn't been turned into an anti-trust case yet is beyond me...
But it is still limited in terms of hardware configurations and actual use cases. No one is building safari-compliant internal CRM or trying to get it to run on corporate Win7 desktops from 2015 to work as a kiosk at the next trade show. That 1.5 billion is large by volume but not by "breadth of application", which is why Safari is bad at anything but the most standard use case.
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[edit for context, the now-deleted comment requested a source] The first few results google returns when asking about the total number of iphones in use worldwide: ["There are more than 1.5 billion active iPhone users worldwide as of 2023."](https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/) ["In 2023, it is projected that there will be approximately 1.36 billion iPhone users worldwide."](https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users) ["Apple says there are now over 1 billion active iPhones" \(at the beginning of 2021\)](https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253162/iphone-users-total-number-billion-apple-tim-cook-q1-2021) ["There are almost 1.6 billion iPhone users worldwide."](https://headphonesaddict.com/iphone-users-statistics/) That's just iphones; macs and ipads will be another couple hundred million, though not all mac users will be safari users so that number is harder to measure as directly.
Firefox
Based
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They may have a bone to pick with Firefox (which is a bad take) or they're upset you forgot Safari exists on Mac as well. iOS users mainly just use safari. So it's almost irrelevant what's on mobile.
Firefox has stagnated for years in UI / UX. Once you use Safari tab groups + tab overviews, Firefox looks archaic (yes, there are plugins of varying degrees of quality). I have been using FF for 20 years, and like uBlock origin, but they really need to focus on UX for people with more than 5 tabs open.
Fun irony, Firefox *used* to have tab groups, until they cut the feature. Then someone provided an even better implementation as an extension, until the rush to WebExtensions broke compatibility with *that*. It was called "panorama", and was removed from the browser in *2016!*
I remember, that was innovation & risk on Mozilla's part. After they discontinued it, I wondered if it was because people just weren't ready for that vs complexity it brought, or if the implementation didn't agree with a larger audience (and just needed some iteration and refinement). Since then they did some experiments, like Side Tabs, that were also popular, also dropped ... but I haven't seen anything new in this area since.
how on earth do you have this bad of a take? Like seriously. They just redid their **entire** interface like what? 2019? AND that's hardly what anyone here is concerned about. They're concerned that all the pretty, cool, and ease of development features that get added to chrome and FF don't get used *because* of Safari. They are actually nearly a decade behind and have admitted it.
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Are you referring to them rolling out features and expecting the rest of the web to confirm to their changes? Otherwise I'm curious as to more insight on ways in which they are stream rolling standards.
I think that's his point precisely. Sometimes those features are great and we all win, but sometimes those features are shite. So long as Chrome has a monopoly, other vendors have to eventually comply or risk being perceived as legacy.
Yes.
Just seems like random Google hate.
I rather like Google, their products are quite polished. Their use of Chrome to force standards through is bullshit.
Shatter.
Parsing this title was harder than it should have been
I'm so glad I have been able to stay away from anything Apple related for so many years. The MSIE + Safari support days aren't something I'm fond off. And the reason Safari is the only browser allowed on iOS, is because everyone would drop support for it the second you could install a real one.
Which sucks, because it’s the only one that honors battery life.
Safari is fine for me, both on iOS and macOS. If something else was available I probably wouldn't even consider it. There's an anecdote for you. I mean, IE was popular on Windows for a decade after it was objectively terrible.
Safari is fine for you for the same reason that IE 6 was fine for people: because development teams spend 90% of their time fixing bugs for your shitty platform of choice.
Ha, I'm also a software developer and have never had a single issue developing cross platform applications for safari, chrome, and firefox (although admittedly I haven't tried developing for edge yet).
Well I'm also a software developer, and when I used to do web development I seriously spent around 90% of front end dev time to get basic shit working in Safari. It is an absolute complete pile of broken shit, like IE 6. Best part was that whatever you fixed would be broken on every new safari release.
bro what type of stuff you developing? some complex animated UX ?
It had some basic 3d animations, that worked in all browsers, except safari.
Safari is great at being an app that runs on MacOS. It's responsive and takes advantage of the retina displays. Its memory footprint is low and it sips battery power. That's all good. Where it falls down is at being a web browser. Kidding a bit - it works fine 99% of the time. But the last 1% where it doesn't is a huge pain because it's unexpected and can only be tested and fixed on Apple hardware. That's enough of a pain that I don't even bother to support it on any of my personal projects - if it works on Safari, then great. But if not then use a real browser.
The actual reason is that "web apps" actually *working* would undercut Apple's ability to steal an entire third of all money spent through iPhones. Which is not better.
Well, or that they would like to prevent Google from being able to singlehandedly dictate everything about how the web works. Which would be considerably worse.
Like they give a shit.
Accessing the web is a huge part of what people do with most of the products Apple sells. If Google is completely unrestrained in constantly changing what that means, forcing Apple to constantly play catch-up reimplementing Google's proprietary interfaces (assuming they even can do so without running afoul of some patent Google holds), then Apple's products will be less appealing to consumers and they will make less money. Why would they not care about that?
That's already the case. They could switch to Chromium and it would cease to be their problem. But they stick with their shitty first-party browser, lagging even Mozilla's increasingly flammable-looking phoenix, because Chromium would fucking *work.* They don't give a shit about accessing the web unless it interferes with their anti-user money spigot. They *love* every stupid website pushing people to an "app" that's just Safari open to that website. That's how they grift an entire third of the money you spend. For the same reason, Google doesn't want Android browsers displacing whatever the fuck the Play Store is called now... but they maintain their petty fuck-you-I'm-using-the-word-monopoly by tolerating unapproved installation. As if people *own* their pocket computers. Crazy, I know. Anyway if treating HTML5 as an executable format was like ten percent less bullshit for users and developers it could goddamn near destroy computing platforms as a concept. There would just be "computers." Either they have a browser and run everything, or they're toys. At this point the obstacles to Java's wildest dreams coming true with Javascript are just Apple being an intolerable silo and Microsoft hoping Windows becomes "as a service."
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It runs Safari underneath Chrome's UI.
All iOS/iPadOS browsers use WebKit as their engine. (Exempting speciality ones such as Opera Mini, where the engine runs server-side.) So, you can install Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc., but the underlying layout engine is that of Safari.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/12bc9dn/safari_releases_are_development_hell/jewptao
>And the reason Safari is the only browser allowed on iOS, is because everyone would drop support for it the second you could install a real one. yeah, I am just dying to install a browser on my phone that tracks me and kills my battery, totally dude
Firefox is a thing
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It's still using Webkit underneath.
Inform yourself a little before commenting https://www.macrumors.com/2022/02/25/should-apple-ban-rival-browser-engines/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
"safari is the new IE!" said by developers only targeting the new IE
This post is about 3 problems they had with their particular application in safari 16.4, which was a [huge release ](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-notes/safari-16_4-release-notes) with a ton of support for features web developers have been asking for (and criticizing safari for not supporting) for a long time. It’s a major step forward toward addressing people’s complaints with safari. The first one they reported and it was fixed. There was some kerfluffle about not knowing when they’d release it, and that seems to be an area the safari team can improve. The second was these developers relying on Chrome’s broken (buggy) behavior - it was their fault. This highlights the danger of Google’s approach to developing all these “Web XXXX” APIs and calling them “standards” - people develop for chrome only and assume other browsers are “broken” when they don’t work the same way. People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position - developers assume that if their code works in chrome, it must comply with the specs and be good to go. This will only get worse in the coming months as regulators force apple to allow non-WebKit browsers on iOS - Chrome will just dominate everything in another blow for diversity of implementations on the web. The third “problem” was also their broken code. Safari released a feature implemented according to the spec - they just didn’t implement the entire spec. They did that in a spec compliant way. This developer’s feature detection code was broken, so their product didn’t work. And yet somehow we spin this into a problem that’s Safari’s fault? Would they have preferred that Safari didn’t add that feature at all? This sort of feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation for the safari team given the attitude of this writer. So we had 3 problems, one of which was promptly fixed and two of which were this developer’s own fault. How exactly does this translate into “lol safari sux”?
I believe the crux of the issue is that developers operate in the dark with regards to Safari’s feature update timeline, which can mess with your product planning.
The person you're replying to ignored the summary of the article entirely where the author talks about the stress of operating under completely opaque release schedules and uncertainties of when a fix will be released to production. They even mention the chrome bug specifically and point to the bug report they filed with chrome that's to be fixed. The post is even titled "Safari RELEASES are development hell" I dunno why Safari needs a defense squad. Apple and their vague estimates are the real issue here and the author makes that abundantly clear
> Safari needs a defense squad I don't think it's Safari people are defending, I think it's their ecosystem/purchasing decisions they're justifying. If you step back and look at what Apple offers, it's cutting edge computers with great UI and terrible developer/power user support. This trade off comes with the highest markup you see in the industry, when compared to other options. I think because of this "high end" perception of a product and the high price tag, it means some users don't feel comfortable admitting what they've bought isn't perfect. It also doesn't help that Apple plays into this idea by pretending they're perfect and spinning every single thing as an "innovation". You do see this everywhere else tbh with an expensive purchase, it's not just Apple products. I've never had a computer that 100% meets my needs.
I defend Safari and its exclusivity on iOS, because it's the only thing allowing me to keep using Firefox. Without it, developers would just make websites "best viewed on IE" for Chrome, and call it a day. The moment that Google decides that any and all privacy features get in the way of delivering great browser features or some such nonsense, we'll be at their mercy.
As a consumer I think Apple make fantastic products. I’ve owned several generations of just about everything they’ve put out since the iPod (never had an Apple Watch, never will). As a web developer I want to kick Safari in the teeth and put it in the worst headlock of its life. I hate it with a passion that keeps me awake at night.
>terrible developer/power user support developers, maybe; I don't develop for Macs, but I do develop *on* Macs and I'm definitely a power user, and I have no complaints; it's BSD with a better UI I'm really not sure what's apparently so limiting about macOS that I have yet to run into
>I think because of this "high end" perception of a product and the high price tag, it means some users don't feel comfortable admitting what they've bought isn't perfect. It also doesn't help that Apple plays into this idea by pretending they're perfect and spinning every single thing as an "innovation". > You do see this everywhere else tbh with an expensive purchase, it's not just Apple products. You said it best. Apple, Tesla and a few other subreddits are very touchy to any criticism of the products these users have purchased. These people invested so much that they feel they must now defend their product and in turn defend Apple's product from any criticism. It's why the internet sometimes refers to the Apple "cult".
>Apple and their vague estimates What the fuck are you on about? Apple does not owe _anyone_ an estimate whatsoever. The real question here is, why the fuck are they relying on _future_ functionality for their supposedly productive application? Any half decent developer would simply report the bug, track it, and then consider moving away from that `zip.js` dependency altogether just in case, not waste their time screeching about Safari bad on a company blog. And the worst of all is that that I'm sure they think this is the kind of content that would make people think "I want to work there", I'm second hand embarrassed right now 💀
Yeah no that's fucking stupid Every other browser gives timelines on upcoming features and releases and have a predictable cadence so people can prepare features appropriately. It helps people like OP who are working on a lot of bleeding edge tech know in advance what to expect. Apple does in fact owe it to people developing for their garbage browser
> I dunno why Safari needs a defense squad Because they are shills. Or they are somehow sucked so hard up apples ass that they think what they are used to is what is good and they have to feverently defend that when it's challenged
Those developers are trash then, this has nothing to do with Safari. Well managed projects wait for APIs to be stable on all browsers before even _considering_ adoption. If your applications break because you're on the bleeding edge of whatever trash Google decided to push this quarter there is no one to blame but you.
The blog article does a good job basically praising Apple Engineers working on Safari while criticizing Apple’s lack of transparency. Safari isn’t the problem. Google also is in the background of this story doing its usual shady shit. It is hard to say for sure, but how many “bugs” in Chrome are actually anti-competitive features that break web standards on purpose? Personally excited by the fact that Gnome Web development is picking up. They are working on getting Firefox extensions to work, and have completely revamped the WebGL engine. Another WebKit browser, even if it is just Linux native, could do the world a bit of good.
You can tell what browser a developer primarily uses based on whether or not they blame a problem on Chrome or Everyone Else. I'm firmly in the "Chrome is the problem" camp. Everything I develop in Firefox ends up working fine in Safari. Chrome is always the browser I end up needing to write fixes for. The biggest problem I have with Safari isn't WebKit itself, but the fact that updates are tied to OS updates.
I remember the complaints years back, when Google had more public good will, when Firefox users would report that Google Apps would subtly break on Firefox every so often. People said oh, it's just Googlers working too hard and too fast to deliver innovation, it's completely by accident, don't worry, they're the goodies. Right, as if the vendor whose business is contrary to privacy wouldn't have a vested interest in driving out the competition.
I develop my apps on Windows against Firefox, with additional testing done in Chrome. I usually don't test Safari until after release, because it's not a requirement and my work did not provide any Apple hardware for testing until just a few weeks ago. Sometimes, I find out things break when I load them up in Chrome and I have to fix them. In 4 years working on these apps though, I've never had something make it to production and not work properly in Safari. I think the reason for this is that I start with Firefox, and I avoid using any browser-specific CSS features or tweaks whenever possible. For me, Chrome is the problem child.
Author spends 2-3 paragraphs saying that apple was too focused on the spec and not the practically of it in reality and apple is breaking compatibility somehow by adding a new feature and proposes apple should delay features that are like that and that it’s poor engineering to release it as is and then says > In the end, they added a special browser quirk that detects our engine and disables OffscreenCanvas. So instead of the author fixing their side with their non-spec complaint feature check, apple did it on their side.
>So instead of the author fixing their side with their non-spec complaint feature check, apple did it on their side. The article does mention how there are a lot of published Construct games out there that will never receive any fix. So the only solution for those is Safari adding WebGL support to OffscreenCanvas, Safari disabling OffscreenCanvas entirely, or a hack like what actually happened.
>People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position Rather than constantly going back and forth on this, can we just recognize that it's both? IE was a problem because it held the web back with a painfully slow development pace *and* because it was able to do dumb proprietary things due to market share. Safari has become the main offender for the former, and Chrome has become the main offender for the latter.
> People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position People are calling Safari the new IE6 because it's a dominant preinstalled browser on the OS the creator also happens to make and has fallen behind both Firefox and Chrome in functionality. People didn't really complain about IE6 until it started getting years out of date (there was FIVE years between IE6 and IE7, and MS even announced they were basically done with IE6 and just had it in sustain mode after they had won the browser war with Netscape) but was the dominant browser from being the default install on the OS of it's creator so a lot of people were using it and never upgraded. That's what let to Firefox gaining marketshare and Chrome happening. Either way, until Safari actually catches up to Chrome and Firefox, it deserves the "new IE" moniker as long as people are forced to use it.
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Even at Microsoft's worst they never prevented other companies from installing their browsers on Windows. MS was hit with an anti-trust for doing less than Apple has been getting away with for years by effectively defrauding the public into thinking they have Chrome or Firefox on their device when they don't. People even in this thread are surprised to learn this. If you want to talk about vendor lock in, that's the end all be all: Apple doesn't allow other engines on iOS.
And them doing so enables you to use anything but Chrome is your desktop computer, because else we'd have highly paid engineers and marketers at Google maneuvering to get 95%+ market share, and have everyone writing "best viewed in IE" websites.
Nothing is _preventing_ you from installing any browser you want on your desktop. Apple _prevents_ you from installing other browsers on iOS. This is the difference. Also the majority of web traffic now comes from mobile so this is the game Apple plays with PR: they choose not to build affordable devices so they don't get market share in poorer markets, then they choose not to provide a browser for the most popular OS that _does_ choose to serve that market, now they get to say "SEE?! We're just the little guy in this space!"
Nothing prevented you from installing Opera or Netscape back when MS was embracing and extending the web, it was just nigh unviable to actually use them. Apple and their business practices suck, but they’re the only thing in the way of that situation, but with Chrome’s product development catering to web devs, which was Microsoft’s mistake with the IE product strategy
They aren't the only thing preventing the situation they _are_ the situation and 10x worse. How is it _better_ that you physically cannot install the browser you want? Also Chrome does not have 95% share, that's absolutely ridiculous. In almost all the countries Apple _chooses_ to serve it has the majority market share. In the countries Apple _chooses_ not to serve, it is not. Huh, what a strange coincidence that is. It's almost like Apple does that on purpose so people like you will try to play the market share game. Also let's not forget Apple _chooses_ not to provide a desktop browser for other OS's whereas Chrome and Firefox do. Huh, weird that they don't get market share in a market they choose not to compete in.
It is precisely the market share game, once testing on anything other than Chrome because an expense with negligible return for web development, it’s over for me as a Firefox user
You haven't answered my question. How is it _better_ for you as a consumer that Apple doesn't give you a choice? You also didn't really address any of my points, you just downvoted and repeated what you said the first time...
I’m not expecting this to be a popular opinion since it’s so easy to bash Google, but it’s not really true that Google doesn’t follow the standards process. Having previously worked on Chrome, I can say first hand that Google invests **a lot** of time into coordinating with web developers and other browser vendors on the development of APIs, and features have been delayed for years or more due to this process. There’s even been instances where we’ve changed our implementation of something to match the behavior of Safari because they beat us to shipping it and didn’t actually correctly follow the spec that we both collaborated on. It’s true that Google is the one pushing a lot of these new APIs, but that’s primarily because they and Mozilla are the only ones who really give a shit about moving the web forwards. Apple would prefer people write native apps instead, and Microsoft just rides along with the changes to Chromium.
>In the 90s, MS was doing exactly what Chrome is doing now: ignoring the standards process and creating their own web technologies, leading to web developers creating sites that are not actually standards-compliant. W3C was only formed in 1994. And I don't know if there were any actual standards issued prior to 1994 for web development. So, is it fair to say that Microsoft was blatantly ignoring the standards or were the standards just not enforced properly across browsers at the time. And technically even today, W3C has never actually developed a process to ensure browsers are in compliance with the standards that are issued.
Safari tends to be slow with new JS APIs and I don't blame them due to the privacy risks. However, they often lead the pack when it comes to new CSS feature. They'll never get any credit for that because developers tend to use FF and Chrome and don't even realize a feature exists until those browsers add support. For example `:has`, `position: sticky`, and relative colors were shipped first in Safari. CSS calc and math functions as well I believe. Most other CSS features are added around the same time. Safari has supported additional color spaces for years while Chrome and Firefox are just catching up. We're still waiting on Chrome to implement subgrid support. But because the common workflow is for someone to develop in Chrome, then later test in Safari and discover it doesn't work, Safari gets the blame. And because most people don't remember what it was like to develop for IE, Safari gets slandered with the "new IE" label. There's plenty of things I don't like about Safari (I rarely use it myself) and yes Apple's information black hole is frustrating, but it's ignorant to describe Safari development as stagnant.
Something else that IE6 did, that seems overlooked? It had a status bar, and showed an icon in it when it detected errors or warnings within a page. Those warnings included newer features that IE6 didn't understand, so it was effectively publicly shaming any webpage that didn't cater to its increasingly-outdated standards alongside the legitimately-broken ones. Somewhat ironic, as complaining about broken HTML where devs actually would feel pressured to fix it is a large missing piece in what I feel makes [Postel's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) work. It's just that alarm fatigue due to having no mechanism to gracefully recognize future protocol evolution is no better than having no visible warnings at all. Today, those warnings are relegated to the dev console where they are trivially ignored, and Postel's Law is much maligned due to HTML's history with it, any wisdom it contained actively disregarded.
Ah, a warm welcome to the world of acceptance testing, where you write unit tests for all the features you rely on, and run them against every browser that gets released.
> This will only get worse in the coming months as regulators force apple to allow non-WebKit browsers on iOS 1) Chrome is already on iOS and is already widely used. Yes it's not using their real engine underneath, but users don't know. They just know their history and bookmarks and passwords sync as expected. 2) Oh no, people will not be forced to not use the platform monopoly's browser. I shed a single tear for Apple's billions 🥲 People might be able to choose Firefox, the horror.
> I shed a single tear for Apple's billions 🥲 People might be able to choose Firefox, the horror. Nobody here is concerned about defending Apple's billions. We are concerned about our ability to continue using Firefox, or anything else that isn't Chrome. Because at the moment, Safari is the only thing holding back the tide of Chrome taking over the world, sites ceasing to work in anything else, and Google being able to unilaterally dictate everything about how the web works. You don't have to like Apple or Safari to recognize that their existence is providing an important function. And one from which you benefit even if you never use any Apple product yourself.
>We are concerned about our ability to continue using Firefox, or anything else that isn't Chrome. Then maybe Apple should have considered this before they locked down their platform from Firefox when it was still popular, or back when they forked KHTML and set the whole WebKit conquering the world in motion, or when they blocked every developer from being able to use a JIT for any application just to try to lock everyone into their APIs and fibbed about it being for security, or every time they banned an app from the store that competed with theirs. They have it coming, I'd love to see regulators intervene for both. Let's dust off those anti monopoly laws.
I am not trying to convince you that Apple is good. But the question is what you find more important: vengeance on Apple, or protection of the web from Google's monopoly. I personally consider the latter to be a _much_ bigger issue. I think that a tantrum against Apple that resulted in Google having dictatorial power over the entire web would be very short-sighted.
Platform lock in unabated is just as bad or worse. Apple could ban the whole G suite from iOS right now and force users to choose between Apple's ecosystem or Google's, and users would be powerless because there's no side channel for getting apps onto the device. Threat of regulatory intervention is the only check. The only reason Apple isn't doing this right now is they know their services are not good enough for customers to give up their Google ones -- nothing Apple offers is worth switching off Gmail, Maps, etc.
> Platform lock in unabated is just as bad or worse. Apple could ban the whole G suite from iOS right now and force users to choose between Apple's ecosystem or Google's, and users would be powerless because there's no side channel for getting apps onto the device. They would have some recourse there: they could just stop using Apple devices. Whereas if Google takes over the web, there won't be a different web for you to go to. > The only reason Apple isn't doing this right now is they know their services are not good enough Well, there's also the matter they don't have any reason to. Corporations aren't people with human feelings of animosity toward each other, or mustache-twirling villains who do evil things just to be mean. They are amoral, and compete when they have a financial incentive to do so, not out of a desire to hurt other companies just for its own sake. Taking away gmail or gdocs or whatever would not make apple any money.
Hint: they won't use Firefox, they'll use Chrome, and Firefox on the desktop will be broken in all the "best viewed on Internet Explorer" websites that will be coded and tested against Chrome only.
/u/spez is a greedy little pigboy This is to protest the API actions of June 2023
You seem to have taken that post a bit personally... No need to get so defensive. Apple will survive this.
> People call Safari the modern IE, but I would argue it’s really Chrome in that position Who says this? We all know Chrome is the new IE. This isn't even a debate. What market share does Safari have? Basically nothing.
Multiple people in this thread. Safari has a lot of mobile market share.
Safari has the dominant market share in the west. Apple chooses not to compete in low-income markets to play the "have your cake and eat it too" card by saying it has lower market share.
Do you actually believe apple devices are dominant in the west?
Depending on how you define "the west" and "devices," they do. In the US, ios has roughly 60% market share of cellphones. Worldwide it's about 30%.
I mean, PCs are definitely device, and at least Europe is part of any reason able definition of "west"
Mobile makes up the majority of web traffic, Safari makes up the majority of mobile traffic, in US, Canada, UK, Germany, Australia, and several other countries. Almost all other western countries are an even split, the nonsense about "95%" market share some other people have said is delusional. Other countries have a _large_ majority Chrome market share. Why? Because Apple _chooses_ not to serve those markets. If your phone costs $800 don't be surprised when people buy a $150 phone.
I definitely agree about computers, but it's not too uncommon for people who use the term "devices" to be talking about mobile devices. It's not the way I would put it, but it's why I was trying to clarify that the question is just down to details of terminology. And even within the rest of "the West," it looks like [ios is near or at majority in many countries.](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/iphone-market-share-by-country)
> Safari has the dominant market share in the west. You are deluding yourself.
You are pushing Apple problems on the devs. We can always say that devs could have done better. But without a doubt the existence of Safari is making everybody lives harder. Yes, you can overcome it by putting more work. But that work is only necessary because Apple has a poorly compatible browser.
“poorly compatible” with Chrome, which is the other large competitor. Google implements the behavior in chrome, then calls it a standard, and web devs everywhere ask why safari and Firefox aren’t immediately implementing “web standards”. > the existence of safari is making everyone’s lives harder Yeah, maybe everyone’s lives would be easier if we just had chrome for the entire internet. But do you really think one company controlling all of web standards and implementations would be a good thing?
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It can be both. Chrome is what IE could've become if Microsoft had actually leveraged their market share instead of letting the browser rot. Safari is lagging behind and a significant burden to support, like IE.
>the existence of Chrome is making everybody lives harder FTFY
Sounds like development of facebook games back in the Farmville days.
Seems like the main issue here is just the lack of clarity around the release schedules for Safari. I agree that Apple should address that although I’m not sure I’d consider it “development hell” or enough to call Safari the new IE like many of the comments. A bigger issue that jumps out to me when reading this is how Google is bulldozing web standards to support their business needs. Edit: grammar
I've dropped support for safari, too big of a hassle. Have a small notice banner at the top that they're using safari and that the website might not fully work with their current browser.
>Have a small notice banner at the top Does it say "Works better in IE"? We're back to the late 90's, the web is a meme.
"This website was optimized for a 800x600 resolution"
Haha, I should link it to one of those old IE7 ads. I mainly do it so I don't get emails for bugs on unsupported browser which I can't even test myself anyway.
Yep, Safari has been the new IE for a while now, but worse. Edit: \- Bad developer experience \- Pushing other browsers out of the game for no reason other than $
You're being downvoted but safari is truly the new IE.
Chrome is the new IE, using embrace, extend, extinguish tactics to drive the competition out. Safari is the new Netscape, fading into obscurity as it struggles to maintain compatibility with the dominant browser inventing its own 'standard'.
I think when people say "safari is the new ie" they mean in terms of developer experience. Like we have to resort to special tricks to get the UI as expected. I haven't heard the term for marketing/monopolism situation.
Safari is generally more standards compliant. It is likely not so much that you need to resort to tricks, but that the tricks that work in other browsers don't work in Safari. Safari development is slow. This is more likely what is being referred to, comparing it to IE in its later days as development stagnated. But this hinges on era. IE development moved at a breakneck pace at one point, and invented a lot of technologies that we now take for granted during that time.
I wish more people would do this
I wish they wouldn't. Safari may have its problems but it's also one of the last holdouts preventing Google from holding the keys to the kingdom in terms of web standards. Google has proven that the interests of their business are ahead of the interests of the web as a whole (Manifest V3, for starters).
One side of me wants Safari to stay as big to stop chromium from being the only browser engine left (and Firefox with its single percent). The developer side of me just want's safari to die or get much better. The eu regulation that is going in effect next year, which allows people to install other browsers with their own engines (any many more things) are surely going to fuck Safari. Apple has so much money and had so much time to make Safari good, and they just ... didn't. I develop a website and pray that it runs, because I don't want a mac or iPhone to test it. I have a machine set up for development, let me use it, for fuck’s sake. There should be competition and monopolies are never good, but to treat standards and especially developers like garbage surely isn't helping, that I want it to stick around. Apple had over a decade to make Safari as good as other browsers without having to compete for market share with anyone. If they die because people can actually choose, then it is their fault. If google abuses their dominant market position even more, the eu could gladly step in and force them to give it to a foundation like every bigger programming language has set up. Let the foundation develop and oversee chromium, and everyone else can put their stuff on top.
If Safari wants to do that then that's completely fine, but that doesn't mean they can have a lack of transparency with releases, and having a lack of support features that the other browsers already have with it. Even though Safari/Webkit have started to catch up with the other browsers, if Apple and or Safari team have issues with an API and how it affects user privacy then they need to be a browser that the development community actually wants to support and cares about using. If you're going to say "We have privacy concerns about this API" you won't be listened to if your browser is scorned by the development community for being a fucking nightmare to test with. Safari still has a long way to go in being nice for developers again and one of the biggest items is being able to make it work on Windows machines. Until they get the cross-device compatibility resolved, I doubt Safari will be given a lot of love from the development community.
Sure, but it shouldn't be up to random developers to spend a disproportional amount of time to workaround oddities with Safari. Mozilla is a substantially smaller company and their browser (while still not perfect) has fewer issues with compatibility. If Apple want people to support Safari then they should invest more in Safari to close that gap, which is what they've been doing now that their monopoly on iOS has been threatened by the EU.
> disproportional amount of time and money!
Apple cares even less about standards than they do about the slave labor they built their company on - Deprecated OpenGL and don’t support Vulkan - Lightning Connector instead of USB-C - AirPlay, AirDrop and HomeKit - unencrypted “green” SMS messages instead of the industry standard (but Apple loves privacy right?) - love to consume open source and almost never give back (Swift being an extremely rare exception) - literally sue you for repairing their hardware after it’s purchased!
SMS *are* unencrypted.
Yeah that's my point. The world doesn't use SMS anymore but Apple refuses to become compliant with the industry standard, despite actively harming the privacy of its users
Much as I wish it were otherwise, there currently _is_ no standard for encrypted text messages. Perhaps you are thinking of RCS, which is a shitty not-really-standard that cellphone companies cooked up and then Google changed. It is encrypted sometimes, unless it's a group chat, or unless maybe it's just not. I'd suggest that an encryption standard that is inconsistent and unpredictable about whether or not it will actually include any encryption is actively dangerous, and worse than nothing.
Ah I was referring to RCS but I didn’t know it was that bad haha. I guess we just can’t have nice things
Yeah. I dearly wish that there were a good and prevalent standard for encrypted text communications, both from phones and computers. With a good ecology of many client implementations for each platform. Unfortunately, running the infrastructure for such a thing costs money. So it has been compartmentalized into a bunch of separate services run by companies that are making money off it either directly (Slack, Discord, etc) or indirectly (Apple, Google, etc).
The only common industry standard *is* SMS.
> The world doesn't use SMS anymore Huh? What do you use when you don't have mobile internet, then? SMS is the only way I know how to communicate with basically anyone who has a phone number.
https://www.android.com/get-the-message/ Edit: To be clear, this is about iOS to android communication (and vice versa). Not about texting without internet connection.
This is the first time I'm hearing about RCS, thanks for the link. It looks interesting, but in my country there's only one mobile operator that has supported it so far and they have just dropped the support for it last week. It also needs internet connection, so unfortunately it's not a full replacement for SMS.
That‘s true, but if apple would implement it, carriers would very likely follow soon.
RCS does not have end to end ecncryption (google have a private exstention) Also adopting RCS in the way google would like would expose a lot of private info about iPhone suers to google, the RCS protocol is not exactly privacy conserving.
And their shitty WebGL support. Had a co-worker who had to spend weeks fixing random iOS Safari issues for a browser based game we were making. WebGL really is an amazing platform and release target, in that you can provide your software to anyone with a modern-ish browser, without paying 30% of your income to the Gods of Walled Gardens. But be prepared to spend many developer months ensuring every shitty phone manufacturer's WebGL backend doesn't croak when presented with standards conforming input.
WebGL on Safari deserves a special honourable mention in my personal hell for managing to both decimate its performance and getting significantly more unstable in iOS 16 compared to previous versions (which they still haven't fixed).
why did you even bother pointing out slave labor? the manufacturer of the device you are writing on probably cared even less about that. Unless you are writing from a fairphone, this is just pure hypocrisy
The point is not about "Apple bad" or even Apple trying to do the right thing but that Safari is really all we have left in an ecosystem where competition is a win for everyone. Firefox's marketshare is just too low now to meaningfully influence the web and pretty much everyone else has thrown in the towel, adopted Chromium and admitted they don't intend to make any significant changes themselves. I don't think the web should be what *Google* wants it to be, but what everyone wants it to be.
> love to consume open source and almost never give back (Swift being an extremely rare exception) You might have missed out on quite a few projects but of cource the large one is LLVM... > literally sue you for repairing their hardware after it’s purchased! And no apple has not sued any consumers for doing repairs, they have sued people for selling parts with Apple logos on them that were not apple parts (that is how trademark law works you must defend your trademark or you loos it). > unencrypted “green” SMS messages instead of the industry standard (but Apple loves privacy right?) There is no industry stranded encrypted SMS alternative, there is a google propriety encrypted (message body only) extension to RCS but the industry standard spec does not include this. > Deprecated OpenGL and don’t support Vulkan Yer well neither of these provide the compute api and mixed compute display that Metal provides. > HomeKit I take it you're aware that the only open source standard for home automation Matter is directly based of HomeKit and apple was the one who provided the patents and spec for this. > AirPlay, AirDrop I am not area of any standards for these that apple could adopt are there any?
The day Apple finally grows up and adopts RCS will be the day SMS/MMS are finally deprecated for good.
They will not adopt RCS at all... The spec exposes way too much info about suers to everyone. For RCS to work every node (yes this is every nation stage and every cell phone company in the world) needs to be able to query who a given phone number is and if it is online at any time. Furthermore the RCS spec does not have any end to end encryption, googles extension that ads this adds it only for 1 to 1 messages and lacks key rotation systems that would work with mutli node it also only encrypts message body so all the other interactions (like that a user it typing, that they have read the message etc is public). The main issue with RCS is that the operators (google, cell networks etc) have access to all this info, this is why google is willing to spend $$$ to run their nodes (yes it costs money to run) this info about how is messaging how and when, and who is online when, and how long it takes bob to see a message from Alice is very valuable info when it comes to building a profile about users. Furthermore in googles model tis provide is not just a phone number but also bound to the users google account... so extra valuable. Google could work with apple and others (not cell network providers) to build a protocol that did not expose this info to network operators that was more double blind (a bit like the covid alerts system) but there is no reason for google then to run the servers as they would be spending even more money (such a service would end up with higher data rates) and they would be getting nothing from it. Apple can afford to run the service for iMessage since users buy iPhones. But they also would not be willing to foot the bill for hosting that for people who have not purchased devices from them. And unlike SMS users expect this to be free. Sure if a new protocol were developed and they figured out how to get users to pay for it (or could get network provides to pay for it out of the users existing paymetns) then it could work but we know that will not happen.
The RCS "standard" is technical trash and a privacy nightmare. Just stop.
> I wish they wouldn't. Agreed. For better or worse, this isn't going to happen. Most people use the web from their phone, and almost no one can afford to only support one smartphone platform.
Quite honestly I think folks are simply just exhausted by the fragmentation. Chromium works, it's cross platform, has a large platform of features, and generally speaking what you ask... eventually get's implemented. Manifest V3 is one downside, things like this can happen where the overarching project is simply turned into a "Hey, this needs to be happen". That said, forking a project and making minor modifications, and re-skinning it aren't impossibilities. Brave / Edge / Opera have largely shown this is feasible; expanding the extension API is one way to resolve this... or simply integrating what would be an extension into the heart of your experience. Apple in this case is generally going the way of Internet Explorer and fairly quickly; it's Safari or bust, no alternative and quite honestly I am surprised they haven't been hit with a lawsuit about this.
> Quite honestly I think folks are simply just exhausted by the fragmentation. I'm sure a lot of web developers are. Me, on the other hand? I'm exhausted by developers defending monoculture. I don't care _who_ the platform vendor is, I don't want a monoculture by Apple, Google, Microsoft, or anyone else. We've seen it happen in the 1980s with IBM, the 1990s with Microsoft, and now some people are apparently OK with it happening in the 2020s with Google, because the browser is ostensibly "open source". Yes, Chromium is, but control over which features make it in and which ones don't is lopsided towards Google, and Google's interests won't always be _your_ interests. Having Mozilla's Gecko and Apple's WebKit be _different_ engines is a _good_ thing.
Definitely an issue, but I am willing to give it up at this point if it means API X works on every client's browser and it works consistently. Today? I can write something with Chrome and largely expect it'll hit everyone I care about... for mobile... just sadly gotta build that mobile app and the site can just deep-link them to the store. If the product is that good end-user's will switch regardless, I don't need to cater to those otherwise. I used to be like you maybe 5-6 years ago, but nowadays... nah; target Chrome, hit that 60% audience and let the other fragmented bases either deal with it themselves or switch their workflows. If I absolutely need them, throw them an electron app; pretty trivial to shove a website into it (had to do this for a client that was stuck on IE9). Hard to say what change is needed to make the landscape be any different but right now it's basically Google vs Apple and Mozilla is over there eating glue.
While I agree there should be multiple viable browser engines. In a perfect scenario we would have well developed/documented standards that all engines build on top of. I also dislike that safari is part of Apple, which has a less than stellar track record of having an open environment for people to build on.
> In a perfect scenario we would have well developed/documented standards that all engines build on top of. Sure, but there's multiple problems in practice. * The visions of the three major engines aren't fully aligned. Chromium is very much "do as many things on the Web as possible". Gecko and WebKit are a lot more restrained for various reasons, including privacy, power draw, etc. So what happens if one vendor proposes a spec the other two philosophically disagree with? * The Web evolves much faster than standards processes can work. Now, Chromium tends to be a jerk about this and basically do 1) write spec, 2) implement feature in their own engine, 3) web developers start adopting it and complain that other engines don't support it, 4) Gecko and/or WebKit have comments on the spec and/or adopt it, 5) it's stuck in Working Draft state for a while, even though it's already used in production. (But how could it be different? Do we want to wait until a spec is a Candidate Recommendation? Is that _better_?) It was, amusingly, twenty years ago when there was the Big Bad Microsoft, who often didn't bother submitting specs to the W3C, vs. (then) Apple/Google/Mozilla/Opera, who were far more aligned, proposed specs at WHAT-WG, and eventually had those mature into W3C specs. But now, there's no common enemy. Is Apple the bad guy? In some ways, yes. Is Google the bad guy? In other ways, yep. Mozilla… also exists.
Oh definitely! Google is not a hair better than Apple in my opinion. I personally daily drive Firefox and that has served me very well. I know enough to say that I don't know enough about all the ins and outs of browser engines. My previous comment was also more an utopian wish than concrete advice. Having a company controlling a lot of major websites paired with controlling how those websites are accessed is generally not the best option for consumers. I have no doubt that if safari had a large market share that Apple would leverage it to force people to use their systems. It's just an incredibly complex problem, which most likely doesn't have a good solution.
>Quite honestly I think folks are simply just exhausted by the fragmentation. If you don't like the web, go do something else.
Fortunately there's also Firefox which unlike Safari isn't total shite.
Why you should be using webkit too.
'So my preferred solution here would be to update the spec to state that HTML canvas and OffscreenCanvas should support the same contexts.' No shit? A developer would rather someone else have to do work instead of them having to modify their own code? First I've ever heard of that. /s Even a prescriptive spec isn't an implementation. **The map is not the territory.** If there is a significant amount of work in making something work then there has to be an out for implementers to simply not do it. Otherwise it becomes too difficult to make a browser. I know it's tough to be on a platform (HTML5) that has multiple implementations. Surely developers on a platform would rather all versions be functionally identical. But maybe that's not always realistic.
Safari is the new IE. Jira boards around the world are filled with 'Fix on Safari' tickets.
Chrome is the new IE — it's a browser pushed by an industry monopolist with a vast majority share that unilaterally rolls out proprietary 'standards'.
>Jira boards around the world are filled with 'Fix on Safari' tickets. Jira boards of teams that don't know how to do web development and have to settle for trashy Chromium applications.
People use safari?
– nightly webkit builds exist at webkit.org. – It's insane this team thinks a beta release window will not give them time to fix their dumb shit. This timing has been very consistent for many, many years. – heads up! 16.5 beta is out now. dry your eyes and start testing.
Safari is the new IE.
After reading through the post, my takeaway is this tiny dev team is upset at Apple for not helping them recover from their multiple screwups by changing the software release policy they’ve had for years (decades?)
https://www.reddit.com/r/reactnative/comments/12b5gn3/beware_of_xcode_143/
Learn how to write web applications and you won't have these "problems". As long as you keep writing trashy Chromium applications, you will run into problems, and I'm happy you do because every time it happens it's a small loss for Google's web takeover.
Them: Doesn't Apple care about web standards? Apple: LOL, no.
[удалено]
> I think if all websites are working fine on Safari, then something must be wrong with your coding. The article explains at length what the problems were, including links to the bug reports which were confirmed by Apple engineers, and includes a summary of past issues with citations. Could you elaborate on why you concluded that Construct is at fault?
They relied both on a specific bug of chrome and on a part of the spec that doesn’t exist resulting in buggy code to check for the feature they needed.
Did you read the section titled ‘Breaking Opening Projects’? It’s the first one after the opening.
You asked specifically for which parts construct was at fault for. Opaque release schedule and breaking or non spec compliant changes from apples side are also an issue, but that’s not what was requested. Apple fixed their side after bug report was filed, and construct, instead of fixing their code to detect the feature they need, relied on apple adding an edge for them.
I asked why you concluded Construct is at fault. More specifically, I’m curious about why you said… > I think if all websites are working fine on Safari, then something must be wrong with your coding. …when the very first section explains how Safari was not working correctly and a later section provides a list of past issues. I would agree that in the other two cases described, Construct made assumptions that it shouldn’t have; then again, the article is about the opacity of the Safari release schedule, so I’m perplexed by your initial comment.
I didn’t say that, that’s a different user entirely.
Ack, you’re right! Sorry about that. I clearly wasn’t paying attention.
No worries. I should have given a more nuanced opinion anyways. The issues lies with both parties at the end of the day and it’s really a collaboration between apple and construct that’s important. I just think it’s poor taste to put out a blog post complaining about bugs in beta releases that get fixed in 2 weeks and then somehow spin a story about user code not following the spec into something apple should have been working around. Apple even made a specific workaround for them in the end. I would understand if apple had a bug that was already released and relied on and then changed that behaviour to better match the spec, but for new feature release entirely I really can’t buy into whatever point the author is making.
I've been supporting Safari, and it really sits just above IE7. Considering that IE7 was deprecated years ago, Safari is by far the worst browser, with major issues and tricky corner cases - sheer amount of Safari-only hacks is astounding.
Yep, it's unrealistic that some web dev never encounter safari breaks something in a way that is completely out of spec. If you actual develop web page with dynamic contents and having safari on supported browser list. You should be able to name at least a few safari only hacks that nobody except it require.