7 ms·

Safari 9.1

56 points by bpierre 11y ago

therealmarv 11y ago
Great, the Safari 9.1 GestureEvent for desktop PCs is completely different on how Chrome https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=289887 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=289887 http://jsbin.com/cuxopid/1/edit?html,css,js,output http://jsbin.com/cuxopid/1/edit?html,css,js,output and IE are handling pinch to zoom gestures with trackpads on desktops. Gestures on desktop like pinch to zoom is now a total mess. Where is W3C or WHATWG on this? Pinch to zoom is now on Firefox: None (there was an attempt in the past) Chrome: it's mousewheel+ctrl IE: it's mousewheel+ctrl Safari: shiny new GestureEvent
0x006A 11y ago
Still no WebRTC support?
- M4v3R 11y ago
  Nope, but it's "In Development" [1] [1] https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webrtc https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webrtc
legulere 11y ago
I guess gesture events on OS X will be quite useful for online maps (openstreetmap, google maps)
- therealmarv 11y ago
  no it's a new standard. Chrome and IE already support it on Google Maps because a pinch to zoom is ctrl+mousekey for them. And now Safari has introduced a new standard. This is nuts. Why is there a W3C? Everybody is doing it differently.
- 0x0 11y ago
  I wonder if it will break sites that assume window.gestureStart => ios device
grumblestumble 11y ago
A point release every n months is utterly useless for on-the-ground web developers. Safari needs to move to the Firefox/Chrome deployment model if it wants to remain at all relevant.
- schrodinger 11y ago
  Or remain the only browser (at least rendering engine) on iOS…
- IBM 11y ago
  I think it will remain relevant anyway as long as people keep using it.
  - andybak 11y ago
    You sound almost happy about the fact we have a new IE6 in our midst.
    - cmyr 11y ago
      You sorely misremember IE6.
      - andybak 11y ago
        No. I remember IE6 very well. I remember when it was the most capable browser by far and I sat in an office full of developers cursing Netscape 4. I remember when IE 4.5 was the best browser for the Mac. I remember when Safari was a strange newcomer. I also remember many years passing when IE6 stuck around like an unwelcome fart and we all hoped and prayed that it would die so we could move on. Rapid silent updates are the best thing that happened to the web for both the user and for developers. Chrome has many serious issues but it's update cycle isn't one of them.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    Or as long as Apple keeps enforcing the "Safari Engine Only" rules on iOS. I think a lot of people would consider switching if Chrome for iOS was legitimate Chrome (rather than a Chrome UI with a Safari engine).
sksixk 11y ago
t.co links will now open properly in safari
- lazyjones 11y ago
  only a few days after I discovered that a simple /etc/hosts entry fixes this problem...
carlesfe 11y ago
Let's hope they fixed the bug where WindowServer hangs up randomly after closing a Youtube tab. It's an incredibly annoying bug that's forcing me to reboot every 2-3 days. I don't browse Youtube on Safari, but as soon as there is a website with an embedded video, boom it goes :(
- joemi 11y ago
  Is this a common bug? Were you seeing it in some kind of developer release, perhaps? I've never had that happen to me, and I browse Youtube in Safari every single day.
- newman314 11y ago
  Is this the same bug where things randomly stop rendering properly if lots of tabs are open? I find that I'm having to close a whole bunch of tabs in order to get pages to properly render. It'll work for a while then stop working again. Really quite annoying.
andrewstuart 11y ago
I was forced to stop using Safari on my iPhone 5 because it became unusably slow after loading only a handful of simultaneous tabs. The changes came after one of the Apple updates and after that I had to switch to Chrome for iPhone.
- Longhanks 11y ago
  But due to the nature of closed iOS, Chrome on iOS uses the same engine as Safari...
  - joshschreuder 11y ago
    Indeed. Up until recently, Chrome for iOS was actually a lot slower than Safari as it was yet to switch to WKWebView from UIWebView. Doing so yielded much better performance: https://blog.chromium.org/2016/01/a-faster-more-stable-chrome-on-ios.html https://blog.chromium.org/2016/01/a-faster-more-stable-chrom...
shogun21 11y ago
Safari is the new Internet Explorer. That was my experience trying to grapple with its weird, non-standards-compliant implementation of HTML5 required fields.
- JoBrad 11y ago
  With the caveat that it's basically only on iOS and OS X.
  - kevincox 11y ago
    Exactly, Microsoft provides IE VMs that I can use to ensure my sites work on IE. For Safari? I guess I'll just have to pray.
- mstade 11y ago
  I disagree – Chrome is the new IE. Why? It's simple: your analogy focuses on being non-standard, but actually misses the most important bit which is control of the market. Chrome is just as much non-standard as Safari, but you wouldn't know because it controls the market. Since ostensibly everyone uses Chrome, it gets to effectively dictate the standards while everyone else plays catch up – Chrome is the de facto standard to which others are held. I'm not saying Chrome is a bad piece of software – it may or may not be but that's beside the point. What I'm saying is that when you and many others complain about browsers not being standards compliant, I'm willing to bet you mean de facto standards compliant – i.e. whatever Chrome dictates. Just like IE used to. IE came up with all sorts of features that became de facto standards and in many cases these days an actual standard – @font-face anyone? Microsoft strong armed everyone else into submission until Google decided enough was enough. But it's not like Google did it out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because their business depended on people having the ability to consume the web. They need the web to be great, because otherwise they couldn't have sold so many ads on: the web. So their products need features, and it just so happens that a lot of us got to benefit as well. Compatibility however, isn't really important. At least not while they control the market. What they say, goes. It'd be very difficult to create a site these days that won't work on Chrome, but it's not uncommon that you find disclaimers around the web say "optimized for Chrome" or worse: sites just not working at all on anything but Chrome. Now they have done, and continue to do a lot to advance the state of the art. But so did IE back in the day. At least until the competition died out. I for one am glad Safari is weird – I only wish there were more weirdos.
constexpr 11y ago
> Displaying a JavaScript dialog—alert, confirm, or prompt—no longer activates the calling tab. This seems like a regression to me. If some page is bugging me then I'd like to know which one it is so I can close it.
- andybak 11y ago
  Modals alerts acting 'app-wide' rather than 'tab-wide' is a truly horrible thing. If there was a subtle indication of a tab showing a modal then it would be acceptable but this is better than the current state-of-affairs.
- ihuman 11y ago
  It's probably so that people can close tabs that are spamming alerts.
- mchahn 11y ago
  > no longer activates the calling tab Not much of an alert, is it.
mwpmaybe 11y ago
For anyone wondering why anybody uses Safari these days, the simple answer (for me, at least) is that it consumes much less CPU and energy on my MacBook Pro than Chrome and Firefox. It can mean an hour or more of battery life when unplugged, and greatly reduced testicle-cooking when plugged. I still use Chrome for development but Safari is my "daily driver" for email, surfing, reading, etc.
- hamhamed 11y ago
  an even simpler answer would be because it is the default browser..
  - mwpmaybe 11y ago
    Okay, maybe I should have written "anybody technical" instead of just "anybody."
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Not just the default browser - the only browser on iOS. Which leads to frustrating issues like webpages you can't read because someone checked in a bit of cide that stuffs up viewport scaling in at webpage that has style="overflow:hidden" in the body tag. In other words, don't try to browse source code in OpenGrok. So you get critical issues that don't get fixed for 3-6 months. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152803 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152803
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- matt4077 11y ago
  It's also well integrated – Preview, the keychain, reading list, twitter links make for an excellent ecosystem. I'd love a Safari with a Chromium rendering engine, though. Except that Webkit is probably quite important to keep Chrome moving as fast as it does.
- dvcrn 11y ago
AJAlabs 11y ago
How does Apple still not have support for WebRTC in Safari?!?
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  It is in development: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142913 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143211 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143211
spankalee 11y ago
The best thing about this release is CSS Variables support: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH10-SW12 https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/General... CSS variables are a great way to do theming and cross-scoped styling for Custom Elements and shadow DOM. Polymer's had a shim for this for a while, but native support is much faster and more flexible.
veidr 11y ago
Please tell me they fixed flexbox rendering? Chrome and FF have had that for a while, while Safari has been buggy/malrenderish.

56 points by bpierre 11y ago

Great, the Safari 9.1 GestureEvent for desktop PCs is completely different on how Chrome https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=289887 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=289887 http://jsbin.com/cuxopid/1/edit?html,css,js,output http://jsbin.com/cuxopid/1/edit?html,css,js,output and IE are handling pinch to zoom gestures with trackpads on desktops. Gestures on desktop like pinch to zoom is now a total mess. Where is W3C or WHATWG on this? Pinch to zoom is now on Firefox: None (there was an attempt in the past) Chrome: it's mousewheel+ctrl IE: it's mousewheel+ctrl Safari: shiny new GestureEvent

0x006A 11y ago

Still no WebRTC support?

M4v3R 11y ago
Nope, but it's "In Development" [1] [1] https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webrtc https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webrtc

legulere 11y ago

I guess gesture events on OS X will be quite useful for online maps (openstreetmap, google maps)

therealmarv 11y ago
no it's a new standard. Chrome and IE already support it on Google Maps because a pinch to zoom is ctrl+mousekey for them. And now Safari has introduced a new standard. This is nuts. Why is there a W3C? Everybody is doing it differently.
0x0 11y ago
I wonder if it will break sites that assume window.gestureStart => ios device

grumblestumble 11y ago

A point release every n months is utterly useless for on-the-ground web developers. Safari needs to move to the Firefox/Chrome deployment model if it wants to remain at all relevant.

schrodinger 11y ago
Or remain the only browser (at least rendering engine) on iOS…
IBM 11y ago
I think it will remain relevant anyway as long as people keep using it.
- andybak 11y ago
  You sound almost happy about the fact we have a new IE6 in our midst.
  - cmyr 11y ago
    You sorely misremember IE6.
    - andybak 11y ago
      No. I remember IE6 very well. I remember when it was the most capable browser by far and I sat in an office full of developers cursing Netscape 4. I remember when IE 4.5 was the best browser for the Mac. I remember when Safari was a strange newcomer. I also remember many years passing when IE6 stuck around like an unwelcome fart and we all hoped and prayed that it would die so we could move on. Rapid silent updates are the best thing that happened to the web for both the user and for developers. Chrome has many serious issues but it's update cycle isn't one of them.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  Or as long as Apple keeps enforcing the "Safari Engine Only" rules on iOS. I think a lot of people would consider switching if Chrome for iOS was legitimate Chrome (rather than a Chrome UI with a Safari engine).

sksixk 11y ago

t.co links will now open properly in safari

lazyjones 11y ago
only a few days after I discovered that a simple /etc/hosts entry fixes this problem...

carlesfe 11y ago

Let's hope they fixed the bug where WindowServer hangs up randomly after closing a Youtube tab. It's an incredibly annoying bug that's forcing me to reboot every 2-3 days. I don't browse Youtube on Safari, but as soon as there is a website with an embedded video, boom it goes :(

joemi 11y ago
Is this a common bug? Were you seeing it in some kind of developer release, perhaps? I've never had that happen to me, and I browse Youtube in Safari every single day.
newman314 11y ago
Is this the same bug where things randomly stop rendering properly if lots of tabs are open? I find that I'm having to close a whole bunch of tabs in order to get pages to properly render. It'll work for a while then stop working again. Really quite annoying.

andrewstuart 11y ago

I was forced to stop using Safari on my iPhone 5 because it became unusably slow after loading only a handful of simultaneous tabs. The changes came after one of the Apple updates and after that I had to switch to Chrome for iPhone.

Longhanks 11y ago
But due to the nature of closed iOS, Chrome on iOS uses the same engine as Safari...
- joshschreuder 11y ago
  Indeed. Up until recently, Chrome for iOS was actually a lot slower than Safari as it was yet to switch to WKWebView from UIWebView. Doing so yielded much better performance: https://blog.chromium.org/2016/01/a-faster-more-stable-chrome-on-ios.html https://blog.chromium.org/2016/01/a-faster-more-stable-chrom...

shogun21 11y ago

Safari is the new Internet Explorer. That was my experience trying to grapple with its weird, non-standards-compliant implementation of HTML5 required fields.

JoBrad 11y ago
With the caveat that it's basically only on iOS and OS X.
- kevincox 11y ago
  Exactly, Microsoft provides IE VMs that I can use to ensure my sites work on IE. For Safari? I guess I'll just have to pray.
mstade 11y ago
I disagree – Chrome is the new IE. Why? It's simple: your analogy focuses on being non-standard, but actually misses the most important bit which is control of the market. Chrome is just as much non-standard as Safari, but you wouldn't know because it controls the market. Since ostensibly everyone uses Chrome, it gets to effectively dictate the standards while everyone else plays catch up – Chrome is the de facto standard to which others are held. I'm not saying Chrome is a bad piece of software – it may or may not be but that's beside the point. What I'm saying is that when you and many others complain about browsers not being standards compliant, I'm willing to bet you mean de facto standards compliant – i.e. whatever Chrome dictates. Just like IE used to. IE came up with all sorts of features that became de facto standards and in many cases these days an actual standard – @font-face anyone? Microsoft strong armed everyone else into submission until Google decided enough was enough. But it's not like Google did it out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because their business depended on people having the ability to consume the web. They need the web to be great, because otherwise they couldn't have sold so many ads on: the web. So their products need features, and it just so happens that a lot of us got to benefit as well. Compatibility however, isn't really important. At least not while they control the market. What they say, goes. It'd be very difficult to create a site these days that won't work on Chrome, but it's not uncommon that you find disclaimers around the web say "optimized for Chrome" or worse: sites just not working at all on anything but Chrome. Now they have done, and continue to do a lot to advance the state of the art. But so did IE back in the day. At least until the competition died out. I for one am glad Safari is weird – I only wish there were more weirdos.

constexpr 11y ago

> Displaying a JavaScript dialog—alert, confirm, or prompt—no longer activates the calling tab. This seems like a regression to me. If some page is bugging me then I'd like to know which one it is so I can close it.

andybak 11y ago
Modals alerts acting 'app-wide' rather than 'tab-wide' is a truly horrible thing. If there was a subtle indication of a tab showing a modal then it would be acceptable but this is better than the current state-of-affairs.
ihuman 11y ago
It's probably so that people can close tabs that are spamming alerts.
mchahn 11y ago
> no longer activates the calling tab Not much of an alert, is it.

mwpmaybe 11y ago

For anyone wondering why anybody uses Safari these days, the simple answer (for me, at least) is that it consumes much less CPU and energy on my MacBook Pro than Chrome and Firefox. It can mean an hour or more of battery life when unplugged, and greatly reduced testicle-cooking when plugged. I still use Chrome for development but Safari is my "daily driver" for email, surfing, reading, etc.

hamhamed 11y ago
an even simpler answer would be because it is the default browser..
- mwpmaybe 11y ago
  Okay, maybe I should have written "anybody technical" instead of just "anybody."
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Not just the default browser - the only browser on iOS. Which leads to frustrating issues like webpages you can't read because someone checked in a bit of cide that stuffs up viewport scaling in at webpage that has style="overflow:hidden" in the body tag. In other words, don't try to browse source code in OpenGrok. So you get critical issues that don't get fixed for 3-6 months. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152803 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152803
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
matt4077 11y ago
It's also well integrated – Preview, the keychain, reading list, twitter links make for an excellent ecosystem. I'd love a Safari with a Chromium rendering engine, though. Except that Webkit is probably quite important to keep Chrome moving as fast as it does.
dvcrn 11y ago

AJAlabs 11y ago

How does Apple still not have support for WebRTC in Safari?!?

cpncrunch 11y ago
It is in development: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142913 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143211 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143211

spankalee 11y ago

The best thing about this release is CSS Variables support: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014305-CH10-SW12 https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/General... CSS variables are a great way to do theming and cross-scoped styling for Custom Elements and shadow DOM. Polymer's had a shim for this for a while, but native support is much faster and more flexible.

veidr 11y ago

Please tell me they fixed flexbox rendering? Chrome and FF have had that for a while, while Safari has been buggy/malrenderish.