8 ms·

Chrome is the new IE

97 points by Jarred 11y ago

matthewmacleod 11y ago
I struggle to think of how an article could be more wrong. It's just nonsense. All browsers - Chrome, Safari, IE/Edge and Firefox are constantly adding new features, improving performance, and fixing bugs. Obviously they have different priorities, but this is just nothing like the age of IE.
dmoy 11y ago
Chrome as the new IE seems like a stretch without mentioning Firefox.
- pseudosavant 11y ago
  Firefox can't be the new IE. It doesn't have the market share that IE did, even still does, have.
  - dmoy 11y ago
    Sorry you misunderstand me. I didn't mean that Firefox is the new IE, but rather that it's difficult for anything to be the new IE, because of the choice now available. Chrome, Firefox, IE, and safari all now have reasonable market share. The article is for some reason ignoring all but two browsers.
rocky1138 11y ago
"Chrome is unfortunately contributing to the web’s bad reputation by caring more about developers than end-users." Actually, this is my favourite part about it. It's fast and it has its priorities in the right spot: me, as a developer. If you don't like Chrome, well, then don't use Chrome :) Another point I would like to make is Apple's ridiculous refusal to allow anything other than Safari on the App Store. I feel that this is holding back the web more than anything, at the moment.
- charlieegan3 11y ago
  > I feel that this is holding back the web more than anything, at the moment. Perhaps a little exaggerated? Sure, it'd be nice if Apple were a little more welcoming to products from other vendors that are in the same market as their own but personally I feel isn't such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. If the MAS was the only way to get software on Apple computers (as the app store on is on iOS where chrome is available) it'd be another matter.
  - dasmoth 11y ago
    iOS Chrome doesn't use the Blink renderer. Similarly, iOS Firefox. While it's great to have some choice, from a developer's point of view these browsers aren't especially interesting.
  - atomi 11y ago
    It is a little exaggerated, although completely true in part to some extent. :/
    - pvinis 11y ago
      your statement is so neutral, i could easily use it as a comment on any opionion ever. even your own.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Apple's not exactly in the browser market. It's not competition to anything they sell. > iOS where chrome is available That is a chrome shell for the safari engine. Not actual chrome.
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  There are legitimate reasons for not allowing non-webkit browsers. The biggest one that comes to mind is security; because of the vast complexity of web engines, the moment Apple allows a third party engine in is also the moment that they can no longer keep control of web-based holes. The security of millions of handsets, many of which belong to individuals with zero tech savvy, suddenly falls into the hands of third parties. This is a serious problem. The other problem is that given their track record on the desktop, Google and Mozilla are highly unlikely to prioritize battery life the way Apple does, and if Chrome or Firefox cuts into someone's battery in a big way they're more likely to point fingers at iOS and Apple than at third party vendors. It's the same problem that Flash on iOS presented except not quite as severe.
paradox95 11y ago
On any platform other than iOS, Safari is the 3rd best browser on its best day. Just because something is pretty, doesn't make it good. This guy is clearly a student of the Jony Ive school of thought.
- sosborn 11y ago
  > Just because something is pretty, doesn't make it good. I understand that you are taking a shot a Apple's focus on design, but what part of Safari makes you think they sacrificed function for form? If you don't like Safari then give some detailed insight on why that is. A comment like that would move the discussion forward and be interesting.
- massysett 11y ago
  Chrome on OS X destroys my battery so I use Safari, no matter how much new shiny Chrome supports. 3rd best by what measure?
disbelief 11y ago
That's one hell of a clickbait title. In order for any browser to be "the new IE", developers would have to hate it and dread developing for it/supporting it. Ask any web developer today which browser is their favourite, go-to browser for development. This statement holds absolutely no water. Secondly, the author cherry picks a couple things that haven't been implemented in Chrome, glossing over the fact that Chrome tends to support way more features than any other browser on the market, and is more often than not the first and the best implementor of web standards. A quick perusal of caniuse.com or the support matrices on MDN will drive this point home (honourable mention to Firefox).
- ubertaco 11y ago
  > In order for any browser to be "the new IE", developers would have to hate it and dread developing for it/supporting it. Oh, so Safari then?
eatsfoobars 11y ago
A response from a Google engineer working on Chrome: https://medium.com/@slightlylate/cards-on-the-table-i-m-an-engineer-on-chrome-caveat-emptor-etc-etc-ec0f9dae26b7#.hiy6h2ivg https://medium.com/@slightlylate/cards-on-the-table-i-m-an-e...
- ac29 11y ago
  Great response. A couple key points: -The author was comparing an unreleased version of Safari to Chrome Stable. Comparing stable-to-stable would be more fair, and when comparing the unreleased Safari to Chrome Dev or Canary, some of their complaints are moot. -Apple only has to support 2 platforms and a limited amount of hardware. Google supports 4+ platforms and a huge variety of hardware. That means things like GPU rasterization take longer to ship.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    Apple has to support 4 different GPU manufacturers, in fact. And Chrome isn't using the native Direct2D on Windows, which would have made this easier: rather they chose to reinvent it with Ganesh. Ganesh is OpenGL only (also Vulkan) instead of using native Direct3D. I don't think the cross-platform burden is that much higher for Chrome in this specific area.
    - kjksf 11y ago
      That's hardly accurate summary of the situation. Chrome uses Skia, a 2D rendering library. Skia uses Direct2D (DirectWrite) on Windows for font rendering (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/src/ports/SkTypeface_win_dw.cpp https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/src/ports/SkTypef...) Skia has a GPU backend that uses OpenGL where that's native. On Windows, those OpenGL calls are translated to DirectX with a very sophisticated OpenGL translator called Angle (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/gyp/angle.gyp https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/gyp/angle.gyp) Therefore Chrome does use DirectX on Windows, via translation layer from OpenGL. Saying that Chrome i.e. in this context Skia, doesn't use Direct2D for rendering is like saying "On Windows Chrome doesn't use native Chakra JavaScript engine". Skia IS Direct2D, except it's cross-platform and being improved by Google literally every day (https://github.com/google/skia/commits/master https://github.com/google/skia/commits/master). It makes engineering sense for Google to have their own, cross-platform, high-performance 2d rendering engine instead of a thin layer of whatever the common-denominator they could implement on top of 2d functionality provided by the OS.
egeozcan 11y ago
I find it interesting that the author himself accepts (or doesn't oppose, to be more correct) that the title is linkbait[0]. [0]: https://twitter.com/bdc/status/626200664520044544 https://twitter.com/bdc/status/626200664520044544
Bahamut 11y ago
This is a pretty terrible article. It asserts the point that Google is doing a disservice by focusing on things that improve developer productivity, but doesn't even entertain the idea that reducing the overhead on more technical matters allow developers to focus more on UX. The author should come back when Safari fixes some of its blatant issues/missing features that directly impact being able to improve UX.
- 0x4a42 11y ago
  Well the author is UI designer. I guess that says a lot.
quandrum 11y ago
As a web developer, this article is almost exactly opposite of the truth. Safari is the new IE to me, and he reinforces my point. His example is that Safari opts not to implement web standards in favor of those things that make Apple specific websites better. This is the exact behavior that created the stimga of Microsoft's IE. We need more standards and collaboration and less browser vendors working to create their own specific experiences.
- frik 11y ago
  IE 11 is the new IE 6.
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  Can't agree with this. Safari definitely tends to lag behind the other browsers in terms of implementing more recent standards, but that's just nothing like the situation was back in IE 6 times.
  - rocky1138 11y ago
    Have you ever tried to embed a webm into a webpage? iOS devices will hide the website then play the video in full-screen.
    - makecheck 11y ago
      In fairness, wouldn’t that have less to do with custom behavior and more to do with the limited size of a phone’s screen? Seems that Apple is just trying to avoid ridiculous scaling and making a reasonable judgment call.
      - rocky1138 11y ago
        It's unreasonable since <video> is a standard embedded media tag from w3c. If the user wants to see the video in full-screen they can click the full-screen icon in the player.
BlakePetersen 11y ago
A more buttery web doesn't necessarily equate to a more bettery web ;P
rpgmaker 11y ago
Chrome is the "new IE" but for a whole different set of reasons than what the author mentions in the piece. It seems that a lot of designers aren't testing their designs against other browsers other than Chrome. I routinely find pieces of web pages that don't look (or work) as they are supposed to but they work once I perform the same action in Chrome. It's ridiculous.
riffic 11y ago
Browser monocultures are bad.
bricss 11y ago
Hell yeah!!
iamleppert 11y ago
I'm a full time engineer on the web and I don't really agree with this. I much prefer working with Chrome than any other browser. Even IE edge (supposedly Microsoft's fresh start) doesn't have all the full support for various features as Chrome does -- just head over to look at the comparison tables at caniuse (ex: http://caniuse.com/#search=blend-mode http://caniuse.com/#search=blend-mode). And the developer experience in other browsers (save for maybe Firefox) are vastly inferior to Chrome's dev tools. Firebug in firefox used to be the best, but even with Mozilla's new efforts at the developer edition of Firefox, the experience is still poor. Lack of correct support for sourcemaps, performance, and general UI polish of their tools are still lacking. Another point I feel should be made is that IE still doesn't have a native Max OS or Linux release. This is an embarrassment to Microsoft, and its why I still don't take anything they do seriously on the web. If you're going to create a new browser, you should at least make it accessible to most of the devs -- many of whom don't even use your OS anymore. Chrome also has a few very useful projects, such as Chromium, node webkit and Electron (what slack uses). Where is this kind of support from the other browser vendors? Why doesn't Apple have a fully integrated native browser development envrionment for Safari? Why did Mozilla's FireFox OS die on the vine and why haven't they come up with something like Electron? The executives and senior technical leadership at these projects and companies should be embarrassed.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > doesn't have all the full support for various features as Chrome does But isn’t that exactly what IE did? Embrace the standards, Extend the standards with their custom things – be they ActiveX, Silverlight, or NaCl Extinguish the competition.
  - ubertaco 11y ago
    Yeah? And what "custom extensions" does Chrome push? NaCl is almost dead, to be replaced by the standard WebAssembly. Everything else is a standard ES2015 spec that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox have implemented (to varying degrees) and Safari has thus far failed to implement.
    - 11y ago
SixSigma 11y ago
Just two web browsers, surely some mistake
S4M 11y ago
Concerning web pages, HN seems to be split into two sides: one side wants to use the newest shiny stuff to make shiny apps while the other wants to have simple pages that are loading fast. The OP blatantly seems on the first side, and I am on the second one. > The web deserves efficient, innovative, delightful experiences, and Chrome is holding the web back by making it hard (if not impossible) to create them. Nope, the web deserves pages that are loading fast, and don't require a new hardware that the majority of the viewers don't have to be read properly. Also, OP works at Stripe, I see no need to add "position:sticky", "backdrop-filter", or "scroll-snap-type" (not sure I know what those are) to a page that does payment processing.
jonathanoliver 11y ago
One big problem I had with IE was the update cycle. Whereas Chrome (and subsequently other browsers) updated every six weeks or so, non-technical Windows users just had whatever the OS installed by default, e.g. IE6, etc. So while Chrome might does have quirks and issues, the frequent update cycle compensates for it.
vilmosi 11y ago
The author should read the response from Chrome.
killwhitey 11y ago
>Mobile Safari can easily handle, say, a Photos.app-like interface with a translucent navigation bar, native-like swipe gestures and smooth animations. Chrome handles none of this. No position:sticky, no backdrop-filter, no scroll-snap-type It's interesting that the things he lists as Safari having only work via a -webkit vendor prefix.
- om2 11y ago
  These features are all standards track but not final, much like the features that people praise Chrome for having that are not in Safari. Chrome's policy is not to prefix when they ship a feature to everyone, even if the spec is not finalized yet. Safari's policy has been to prefix in such a situation but there is consideration of changing it.
lucid00 11y ago
The "Safari is the new IE" article was about them being slow to adopt APIs and the yearly release cycle attached to OS updates. This is about visuals and UI based APIs that can be polyfilled. They matter but not as much as stuff like WebRTC and Service Workers IMO. Google can fix these problems with updates and polyfills. Apple can't do that. Some iOS and Mac OS users will at some point be left out. Nothing in this article matter that much "position:sticky, no backdrop-filter, no scroll-snap-type, gradients" they're useful, but not critical. Doubt we'll see apps that aren't possible without these. They just make the experience nicer, they don't make products happen though. Meanwhile on the Chrome end we've got web apps like Emojoy (https://jakearchibald-gcm.appspot.com/ https://jakearchibald-gcm.appspot.com/), Offline Wikipedia (https://wiki-offline.jakearchibald.com/ https://wiki-offline.jakearchibald.com/), Instant.io (https://instant.io/ https://instant.io/), PeerCloud (https://peercloud.io/ https://peercloud.io/) and even Facebook (http://Facebook.com/ http://Facebook.com/) all providing features and services in Chrome (WebRTC, Service Workers, Background Sync) that can't be polyfilled or will have to provide a far lesser experience in Safari because it lacks even a way to polyfill these features (only things I can think of are AppCache and WebSockets which don't get the job done for these services).

97 points by Jarred 11y ago

I struggle to think of how an article could be more wrong. It's just nonsense. All browsers - Chrome, Safari, IE/Edge and Firefox are constantly adding new features, improving performance, and fixing bugs. Obviously they have different priorities, but this is just nothing like the age of IE.

dmoy 11y ago

Chrome as the new IE seems like a stretch without mentioning Firefox.

pseudosavant 11y ago
Firefox can't be the new IE. It doesn't have the market share that IE did, even still does, have.
- dmoy 11y ago
  Sorry you misunderstand me. I didn't mean that Firefox is the new IE, but rather that it's difficult for anything to be the new IE, because of the choice now available. Chrome, Firefox, IE, and safari all now have reasonable market share. The article is for some reason ignoring all but two browsers.

rocky1138 11y ago

"Chrome is unfortunately contributing to the web’s bad reputation by caring more about developers than end-users." Actually, this is my favourite part about it. It's fast and it has its priorities in the right spot: me, as a developer. If you don't like Chrome, well, then don't use Chrome :) Another point I would like to make is Apple's ridiculous refusal to allow anything other than Safari on the App Store. I feel that this is holding back the web more than anything, at the moment.

charlieegan3 11y ago
> I feel that this is holding back the web more than anything, at the moment. Perhaps a little exaggerated? Sure, it'd be nice if Apple were a little more welcoming to products from other vendors that are in the same market as their own but personally I feel isn't such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. If the MAS was the only way to get software on Apple computers (as the app store on is on iOS where chrome is available) it'd be another matter.
- dasmoth 11y ago
  iOS Chrome doesn't use the Blink renderer. Similarly, iOS Firefox. While it's great to have some choice, from a developer's point of view these browsers aren't especially interesting.
- atomi 11y ago
  It is a little exaggerated, although completely true in part to some extent. :/
  - pvinis 11y ago
    your statement is so neutral, i could easily use it as a comment on any opionion ever. even your own.
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  Apple's not exactly in the browser market. It's not competition to anything they sell. > iOS where chrome is available That is a chrome shell for the safari engine. Not actual chrome.
kitsunesoba 11y ago
There are legitimate reasons for not allowing non-webkit browsers. The biggest one that comes to mind is security; because of the vast complexity of web engines, the moment Apple allows a third party engine in is also the moment that they can no longer keep control of web-based holes. The security of millions of handsets, many of which belong to individuals with zero tech savvy, suddenly falls into the hands of third parties. This is a serious problem. The other problem is that given their track record on the desktop, Google and Mozilla are highly unlikely to prioritize battery life the way Apple does, and if Chrome or Firefox cuts into someone's battery in a big way they're more likely to point fingers at iOS and Apple than at third party vendors. It's the same problem that Flash on iOS presented except not quite as severe.

paradox95 11y ago

On any platform other than iOS, Safari is the 3rd best browser on its best day. Just because something is pretty, doesn't make it good. This guy is clearly a student of the Jony Ive school of thought.

sosborn 11y ago
> Just because something is pretty, doesn't make it good. I understand that you are taking a shot a Apple's focus on design, but what part of Safari makes you think they sacrificed function for form? If you don't like Safari then give some detailed insight on why that is. A comment like that would move the discussion forward and be interesting.
massysett 11y ago
Chrome on OS X destroys my battery so I use Safari, no matter how much new shiny Chrome supports. 3rd best by what measure?

disbelief 11y ago

That's one hell of a clickbait title. In order for any browser to be "the new IE", developers would have to hate it and dread developing for it/supporting it. Ask any web developer today which browser is their favourite, go-to browser for development. This statement holds absolutely no water. Secondly, the author cherry picks a couple things that haven't been implemented in Chrome, glossing over the fact that Chrome tends to support way more features than any other browser on the market, and is more often than not the first and the best implementor of web standards. A quick perusal of caniuse.com or the support matrices on MDN will drive this point home (honourable mention to Firefox).

ubertaco 11y ago
> In order for any browser to be "the new IE", developers would have to hate it and dread developing for it/supporting it. Oh, so Safari then?

eatsfoobars 11y ago

A response from a Google engineer working on Chrome: https://medium.com/@slightlylate/cards-on-the-table-i-m-an-engineer-on-chrome-caveat-emptor-etc-etc-ec0f9dae26b7#.hiy6h2ivg https://medium.com/@slightlylate/cards-on-the-table-i-m-an-e...

ac29 11y ago
Great response. A couple key points: -The author was comparing an unreleased version of Safari to Chrome Stable. Comparing stable-to-stable would be more fair, and when comparing the unreleased Safari to Chrome Dev or Canary, some of their complaints are moot. -Apple only has to support 2 platforms and a limited amount of hardware. Google supports 4+ platforms and a huge variety of hardware. That means things like GPU rasterization take longer to ship.
- pcwalton 11y ago
  Apple has to support 4 different GPU manufacturers, in fact. And Chrome isn't using the native Direct2D on Windows, which would have made this easier: rather they chose to reinvent it with Ganesh. Ganesh is OpenGL only (also Vulkan) instead of using native Direct3D. I don't think the cross-platform burden is that much higher for Chrome in this specific area.
  - kjksf 11y ago
    That's hardly accurate summary of the situation. Chrome uses Skia, a 2D rendering library. Skia uses Direct2D (DirectWrite) on Windows for font rendering (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/src/ports/SkTypeface_win_dw.cpp https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/src/ports/SkTypef...) Skia has a GPU backend that uses OpenGL where that's native. On Windows, those OpenGL calls are translated to DirectX with a very sophisticated OpenGL translator called Angle (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/gyp/angle.gyp https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/gyp/angle.gyp) Therefore Chrome does use DirectX on Windows, via translation layer from OpenGL. Saying that Chrome i.e. in this context Skia, doesn't use Direct2D for rendering is like saying "On Windows Chrome doesn't use native Chakra JavaScript engine". Skia IS Direct2D, except it's cross-platform and being improved by Google literally every day (https://github.com/google/skia/commits/master https://github.com/google/skia/commits/master). It makes engineering sense for Google to have their own, cross-platform, high-performance 2d rendering engine instead of a thin layer of whatever the common-denominator they could implement on top of 2d functionality provided by the OS.

egeozcan 11y ago

I find it interesting that the author himself accepts (or doesn't oppose, to be more correct) that the title is linkbait[0]. [0]: https://twitter.com/bdc/status/626200664520044544 https://twitter.com/bdc/status/626200664520044544

Bahamut 11y ago

This is a pretty terrible article. It asserts the point that Google is doing a disservice by focusing on things that improve developer productivity, but doesn't even entertain the idea that reducing the overhead on more technical matters allow developers to focus more on UX. The author should come back when Safari fixes some of its blatant issues/missing features that directly impact being able to improve UX.

0x4a42 11y ago
Well the author is UI designer. I guess that says a lot.

quandrum 11y ago

As a web developer, this article is almost exactly opposite of the truth. Safari is the new IE to me, and he reinforces my point. His example is that Safari opts not to implement web standards in favor of those things that make Apple specific websites better. This is the exact behavior that created the stimga of Microsoft's IE. We need more standards and collaboration and less browser vendors working to create their own specific experiences.

frik 11y ago
IE 11 is the new IE 6.
matthewmacleod 11y ago
Can't agree with this. Safari definitely tends to lag behind the other browsers in terms of implementing more recent standards, but that's just nothing like the situation was back in IE 6 times.
- rocky1138 11y ago
  Have you ever tried to embed a webm into a webpage? iOS devices will hide the website then play the video in full-screen.
  - makecheck 11y ago
    In fairness, wouldn’t that have less to do with custom behavior and more to do with the limited size of a phone’s screen? Seems that Apple is just trying to avoid ridiculous scaling and making a reasonable judgment call.
    - rocky1138 11y ago
      It's unreasonable since <video> is a standard embedded media tag from w3c. If the user wants to see the video in full-screen they can click the full-screen icon in the player.

BlakePetersen 11y ago

A more buttery web doesn't necessarily equate to a more bettery web ;P

rpgmaker 11y ago

Chrome is the "new IE" but for a whole different set of reasons than what the author mentions in the piece. It seems that a lot of designers aren't testing their designs against other browsers other than Chrome. I routinely find pieces of web pages that don't look (or work) as they are supposed to but they work once I perform the same action in Chrome. It's ridiculous.

riffic 11y ago

Browser monocultures are bad.

bricss 11y ago

Hell yeah!!

iamleppert 11y ago

I'm a full time engineer on the web and I don't really agree with this. I much prefer working with Chrome than any other browser. Even IE edge (supposedly Microsoft's fresh start) doesn't have all the full support for various features as Chrome does -- just head over to look at the comparison tables at caniuse (ex: http://caniuse.com/#search=blend-mode http://caniuse.com/#search=blend-mode). And the developer experience in other browsers (save for maybe Firefox) are vastly inferior to Chrome's dev tools. Firebug in firefox used to be the best, but even with Mozilla's new efforts at the developer edition of Firefox, the experience is still poor. Lack of correct support for sourcemaps, performance, and general UI polish of their tools are still lacking. Another point I feel should be made is that IE still doesn't have a native Max OS or Linux release. This is an embarrassment to Microsoft, and its why I still don't take anything they do seriously on the web. If you're going to create a new browser, you should at least make it accessible to most of the devs -- many of whom don't even use your OS anymore. Chrome also has a few very useful projects, such as Chromium, node webkit and Electron (what slack uses). Where is this kind of support from the other browser vendors? Why doesn't Apple have a fully integrated native browser development envrionment for Safari? Why did Mozilla's FireFox OS die on the vine and why haven't they come up with something like Electron? The executives and senior technical leadership at these projects and companies should be embarrassed.

kuschku 11y ago
> doesn't have all the full support for various features as Chrome does But isn’t that exactly what IE did? Embrace the standards, Extend the standards with their custom things – be they ActiveX, Silverlight, or NaCl Extinguish the competition.
- ubertaco 11y ago
  Yeah? And what "custom extensions" does Chrome push? NaCl is almost dead, to be replaced by the standard WebAssembly. Everything else is a standard ES2015 spec that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox have implemented (to varying degrees) and Safari has thus far failed to implement.
  - 11y ago

SixSigma 11y ago

Just two web browsers, surely some mistake

S4M 11y ago

Concerning web pages, HN seems to be split into two sides: one side wants to use the newest shiny stuff to make shiny apps while the other wants to have simple pages that are loading fast. The OP blatantly seems on the first side, and I am on the second one. > The web deserves efficient, innovative, delightful experiences, and Chrome is holding the web back by making it hard (if not impossible) to create them. Nope, the web deserves pages that are loading fast, and don't require a new hardware that the majority of the viewers don't have to be read properly. Also, OP works at Stripe, I see no need to add "position:sticky", "backdrop-filter", or "scroll-snap-type" (not sure I know what those are) to a page that does payment processing.

jonathanoliver 11y ago

One big problem I had with IE was the update cycle. Whereas Chrome (and subsequently other browsers) updated every six weeks or so, non-technical Windows users just had whatever the OS installed by default, e.g. IE6, etc. So while Chrome might does have quirks and issues, the frequent update cycle compensates for it.

vilmosi 11y ago

The author should read the response from Chrome.

killwhitey 11y ago

>Mobile Safari can easily handle, say, a Photos.app-like interface with a translucent navigation bar, native-like swipe gestures and smooth animations. Chrome handles none of this. No position:sticky, no backdrop-filter, no scroll-snap-type It's interesting that the things he lists as Safari having only work via a -webkit vendor prefix.

om2 11y ago
These features are all standards track but not final, much like the features that people praise Chrome for having that are not in Safari. Chrome's policy is not to prefix when they ship a feature to everyone, even if the spec is not finalized yet. Safari's policy has been to prefix in such a situation but there is consideration of changing it.

lucid00 11y ago

The "Safari is the new IE" article was about them being slow to adopt APIs and the yearly release cycle attached to OS updates. This is about visuals and UI based APIs that can be polyfilled. They matter but not as much as stuff like WebRTC and Service Workers IMO. Google can fix these problems with updates and polyfills. Apple can't do that. Some iOS and Mac OS users will at some point be left out. Nothing in this article matter that much "position:sticky, no backdrop-filter, no scroll-snap-type, gradients" they're useful, but not critical. Doubt we'll see apps that aren't possible without these. They just make the experience nicer, they don't make products happen though. Meanwhile on the Chrome end we've got web apps like Emojoy (https://jakearchibald-gcm.appspot.com/ https://jakearchibald-gcm.appspot.com/), Offline Wikipedia (https://wiki-offline.jakearchibald.com/ https://wiki-offline.jakearchibald.com/), Instant.io (https://instant.io/ https://instant.io/), PeerCloud (https://peercloud.io/ https://peercloud.io/) and even Facebook (http://Facebook.com/ http://Facebook.com/) all providing features and services in Chrome (WebRTC, Service Workers, Background Sync) that can't be polyfilled or will have to provide a far lesser experience in Safari because it lacks even a way to polyfill these features (only things I can think of are AppCache and WebSockets which don't get the job done for these services).