11 ms·

Safari is the new IE

79 points by abusedmedia 9y ago

zghst 9y ago
A few bugs don't really make Safari the new IE. There will always be bugs and differences with rendering engines, that is the price of competition. However IE was a completely different class of shit sandwich that inflicted horror onto all devs who had to work with it.
- racl101 9y ago
  Agreed. Saying Safari is the new IE is like saying Trump is the new Hitler. Not even close. Just no.
neilalexander 9y ago
Drastic title for an incredibly weak article that barely even bothers to make a case. So Safari has a bug. Why does that warrant immediately labelling it abandonware?
- frozenport 9y ago
  "Safari is the new IE" has been a complaint for many years. The author is providing supporting evidence. Here is an article from 2015 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-becoming-the-new-internet-explorer-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-b...
  - sanbor 9y ago
    As web developer I back this. I didn't hear it before but say that in the office because is the browser that often has weird css bugs. But to be fair Edge also requires some dedication and their update deployment is a nightmare. Their latest stable release was on April but because Windows rolling update strategy some users might be using a 2 year old Edge that doesn't support css variables.
    - frozenport 9y ago
      As a HN reader i'm shocked by the number of downvotes my post recieved. Articles with the title Safari is the New IE routinely recieve dozens of upvotes. Maybe some Apple devs downvoted my post :-)
  - zghst 9y ago
    If anything, these journalist are incredibly misinformed and shallowly invested in the issue (they do love clicks though). There's not a sentence about the power usage of browsers, performance on mobile browsers, the mass amount of APIs that have been added over the past few years, the evolution of JavaScript that is happening in tandem with new features that are being released, not even a sentence about how these APIs are extremely immature and still a WIP; all things that if taken in perspective will highlight the nuances of Safari's strategy of slow adoption. Apple could make a browser that has all these features (where APIs are slow to being adopted on sites that users most use, low impact) or they could keep investing in iOS (where APIs are mass adopted from day one on apps used by hundreds of millions, high impact).
    - bradleyjg 9y ago
      Why is it an either/or? They are the largest company by market cap in the world with more than $8B in profit last quarter. They should be able to handle both.
      - zghst 9y ago
        It is precisely an either/or because it has made $8B in profit last quarter. Apple as a massive company must make thousands, hundreds of thousands of tiny decisions to make it's business more profitable. Investing in iOS attracts more customers and buy in to its products and services. Investing in Safari is not a key differentiator for their business and rivals will be able to easily implement the same features. Apple is smart not to play Google's game. If Apple were to engage in this, the browser now becomes a selling point of the phone. Apple goes from iOS/iPhone company to Safari company. They give away their offering/unique selling point that no other company has, along with their massive advantages as a market leader. Because their tech and business strategy is more developed in this space (browsers), Google can start acquiring customers at a lower cost than Apple without having to differentiate its core product more than the fact that it has more APIs/features. We see Google already does this to a degree, they market their products more on the feature set rather than the mission and brand. Web technologies also inherently support Google's business strategy, the more APIs in the browser, the more data Google can collect on Apple's users, the more advanced targeting they can do to swipe away Apple's customers and collect intelligence on what Apple is up to. Do not be fooled, every time there is an API added to the browser, there are teams of people at Google ready to capitalize on it to help drive profits. It would be a bad, bad bet for Apple to start all of sudden focusing its energies on Safari. As a SWE, it is completely understandable why Apple gives Safari little love, I'm okay with it.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  IE was a totally different situation. With IE you started with no forward motion plus a flawed product with lots of deficiencies, and then evolved to a product with no coherent direction (i.e. IE 7-10). Apple is very consistent with their products: upgrade or else. The only exception really is iTunes, and that's only because not supporting older versions would lead them afoul of merchantability laws for devices. The Apple approach is not great, but at least it's comprehensible. Try certifying any product or configuration with Microsoft -- you have a minimum of 6 versions of Windows 10 alone, not to mention the various Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows server browsers.
- Avernar 9y ago
  Safari is full of bugs and incompatibilities. Every time I develop something for the web it's always "works on Firefox, works on Chrome, works on IE/Edge and works on... Nope! Something broke on safari again." And the thing that bugs me the most about it is that it's tied to the iOS version you have on mobile. Eventually you're prevented from upgrading it because your device doesn't support the new iOS version.
kylec 9y ago
Safari isn't the new IE for one big reason: it's the only rendering engine on iOS, which means if you want to support mobile web, you have to support it, and that won't change anytime soon.
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  It sounds like it is the new IE, except you can't even install another browser.
  - kalefranz 9y ago
    Wasn't this exactly one of the items Microsoft got in trouble for with the European antitrust authorities?
    - johncolanduoni 9y ago
      iOS doesn't have anywhere near the market share that Microsoft had/has on the desktop
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Not just the EU regulators. The US antitrust lawsuit was also about using their desktop OS marketshare, and the bundling of IE with said OS, to drive companies towards using IIS at the server end. Damn it, Microsoft basically coined the expression "Embrace, Extended, Extinguish". Meaning that they embrace some standard, then extend it with MS specific behavior, then extinguish the original standard via creeping incompatibilities.
    - jowiar 9y ago
      Doing something like that is illegal if you have a monopoly. Apple doesn't (or even majority market share).
- ezequiel-garzon 9y ago
  Can't you download other browsers in iOS? In any event, it may not be relevant if most iOS users don't bother.
HugoDaniel 9y ago
meh, desktop Safari is actually a very good browser. It is the fastest of all browsers in macos for a bunch of operations and their support for ES6 features beats all the other browsers (99% in https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ ). Also one could argue that if Apple did not invest so much in WebKit then chrome would have had a harder time achieving its current usage and would probably be a very different browser than what it is today. My 2cents
- maratd 9y ago
  > their support for ES6 features beats all the other browsers This is deceptive. They purposefully do not support critical features that other browsers do support. As a developer, if there's one browser that consistently gives me headaches, it is Safari. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FormData/get#Browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FormData/ge...
  - geocar 9y ago
    As a user, I hate having to open Chrome[1] because of some "critical feature". Honestly, I sometimes wish you "developers" would find some other way to implement your application. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/NcPu5IU.png http://i.imgur.com/NcPu5IU.png
  - zghst 9y ago
    Honestly, there are so many libraries out there that abstract away issues like this. By building an app from scratch, custom rolling logic, you automatically opt-out of the good tools that negate all of the tiny differences in browsers. I've had my share of Safari issues, but over time, the amount of libraries I've co-opted into my dev strategy has helped me bypass the majority of browser issues.
- nolok 9y ago
  I do not know enough about Safari to agree or disagree with your general point, but I find this part to be really irrelevant: > Also one could argue that if Apple did not invest so much in WebKit then chrome would have had a harder time achieving its current usage and would probably be a very different browser than what it is today. The same can be said on an even larger scale about microsoft and IE 5 and 6; that doesn't mean in anyway that years later they were not a pain stopping the web from going forward. In other word, I don't see how that has any impact on the conversation at end (neither for or against the point made). EDIT: Not sure why the downvotes. Apple invested a lot into Safari (and thus webkit which lead to chrome). Doesn't change in any way if Safari is or isn't holding the web back currently, which is why I say it's irrelevant to paren't countering argument. And in fact, we have a previous examples since we lived the same scenario with Microsoft who invested a lot into IE 5/6 (and leading into DHTML, XMLHttpRequest, ...), which then definitely hold the web back. This is, literally, the same argument. I don't see how I can be downvoted for stating that obvious fact unless you think that IE 6 didn't hold the web back after a while.
neoyagami 9y ago
It works the other way arround too. 2 years ago part of a site in production stoped working just because how chrome loaded some js libs at loading time. Ff,safary heck even ie worked ok but chrome.
mozumder 9y ago
Wasn't this "bug" originally meant to reproduce IE behavior for compatibility purposes with IE?
digi_owl 9y ago
I am as weary with Chrome, but for a different reason. While Safari lags, Chrome seems to introduce more and more Chrome-isms onto the web.
- zghst 9y ago
  Web fragmentation, unfortunately is built in to our community, but my hope is that we won't ever see an era of fragmentation like the HTML5 era. I'm okay with Chrome-isms, as long as they're not too radical.
  - pdimitar 9y ago
    I think both you and me would agree that Google aims to make them radical. Just today I changed my Chrome's search engine to DuckDuckGo. Of course, I get periodically politely asked if I am sure that this is my correct search engine setting. <facepalms> As an Eastern European, I'd shut them down the same instant on this basis alone, no questions asked. Shame that we don't run the world. :D An off-topic for sure but the gist is: Google wants to entangle you in their web. They are just much more subtle compared to Microsoft and thus almost nobody notices. So, less Chrome-isms, please.
lukeman 9y ago
The first example seems to work fine in iOS 11, but congrats on the clickbait title.
- ckorhonen 9y ago
  Ditto - the bug appears to have been fixed in Safari 11.
- zghst 9y ago
  To be fair, iOS 11 is only a couple of weeks from being adopted from hundreds millions of people. Our community isn't as proactive in testing against unreleased software as the native iOS community. :disappointed_face:
ddebernardy 9y ago
Anecdotal, but this doesn't match my own experience. When developing for the web I usually develop on Safari. More specifically for a first-gen iPad running Safari Mobile. And then, for whatever reasons, it almost always works on other browsers pretty much as is - the main exceptions being very old devices running ancient versions of IE. (Admittedly I aim to make sites that degrade well and work without JS, so that might be an important caveat in an age of Angular and what have you. Perhaps I'm stuck in y2k and still think a site should render in 0.2s on all but 10+ year old browsers. [Shrugs])
- n42 9y ago
  That is because Safari's feature support is the lowest common denominator of the other browsers. By developing on it you are ensuring you don't use features every other browser but Safari supports.
  - protobuflol 9y ago
    Unless of course you're referring to ES6 support, in which case it has the best support.
    - n42 9y ago
      You're probably right, I only have to deal with CSS inconsistencies since JS tooling largely solves that problem for me these days. Unfortunately tools like CSS prefixer can't solve for everything.
      - protobuflol 9y ago
        Totally. Anecdotally, though, a) firefox diverges further from chrome than safari does and b) the types of CSS flaws don't wven approach the black magic of designing for IE6.
  - ddebernardy 9y ago
    > By developing on it you are ensuring you don't use features every other browser but Sure. But isn't developing against the least common denominator precisely what web development has been all about in the past 20 years or so? Edit: Just to expand on that... Then, there was a laundry list of web shops that were targeting IE first because "more advanced" and complaining about other browsers because they "suck". And it looked wrong to just about everyone else who targeted other browsers because Microsoft. Now, we've a laundry list of web shops that are targeting Chrome first because "more advanced" and complaining about other browsers because they "suck". And for some reason those browsers should all catch-up and fast because Google?
dschu 9y ago
Why not simply just div { height: 100vh } though? No overflow rules on the body needed
0x0 9y ago
This is only going to get worse as newer iOS versions drop support for older hardware, especially iPads. It is doubly concerning since Apple bans browsers from the app store unless they just use the iOS-provided webkit engine for, so these devices are stuck with legacy Mobile Safari versions for the end of time. As more and more modern iDevices become legacy while still being perhaps "powerful enough", I think we will start to see a persistent population of web users similar to the clan of IE6 users that took forever to shake off.
- linopolus 9y ago
  Oh right, of course few years old android phones can still be updated officially (-> by the average user, too), being way better this way.
- CharlesW 9y ago
  > This is only going to get worse as newer iOS versions drop support for older hardware, especially iPads. I don't think that it's fair to say it's going to get worse, in the sense that it's as bad as it's going to get right now. And it's not too bad right now. Apple is quite good about support for older devices. For example, iOS 11 supports 4-year-old devices, and that's even somewhat of a special case since it's dropping 32-bit support. People use iOS devices older than 4 years old, but it's not a huge burden to keep a handful iOS 10 and iOS 9 devices around for development and testing. Certainly, it's a wonderland compared to testing on Android.
jmisavage 9y ago
I fixed his bug by changing the height on panel from 100% to 100vh. No need for extra markup like his fix plus as someone else mention iOS 11 doesn't have this problem and that most likely means the next desktop version will that fix also.
- korm 9y ago
  This is not a fix, on mobile 100vh and 100% are different due to the auto-hiding address bar.
korm 9y ago
Safari is not as bad as IE was compared to other browsers. However, calling it the 'new IE' is accurate if the definition is 'the browser with the worst support of new features and most bugs'. Here is a comparison http://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-10.2/ios-10.3/edge-15/firefox-53/chrome-58.html http://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-10.2/ios-10.3/ed... What is especially frustrating for web devs is that all browsers on iOS are Safari underneath. We have to deal with those weird bugs and missing features the same painful way we dealt with IE, hence the title of the article. Saying that it's not as bad is not the point, IE 11 was also not as bad as IE6, we still had to deal with its quirks.
- pcurve 9y ago
  I don't know if the feature support chart paints the full picture. I think web developer's problem with Safari is more nuanced. It's not so much about whether a feature is implemented or not, as is about 'how' it's implemented.
  - mmastrac 9y ago
    As someone who did extensive browser dev from 2001 onward, that's exactly how it was with IE as well.
- ddebernardy 9y ago
  Safari doesn't compare with how IE was in its heydays. In IE times, it was the majority browser and web shops were complaining that they were developing on less popular platforms (typically Firefox, and Netscape before it) and then ranting about how IE did things differently. Had they developed for IE all along with an aim for compatibility with FF, they'd have done things differently and, in many cases, compatibility wasn't that hard if you targeted lower common denominator - that is, a few earlier versions of each browser. Sure, you'd miss out on the latest browser features, but that's not what web dev was about then. Rather, it was - depending on the shop - about making a site work on all platforms, or about making it work on IE and to hell with other platforms - with great despise from the rest of the community. For some reason, things changed in recent years. Chrome is now dominant, and for whatever reason developing against its latest version has become the new normal, with web shops complaining that other browsers aren't keeping up fast enough, and no echo chamber to counter that discourse by pointing out that "hey, why aren't you targeting older browsers to begin with?" In case it needs reminding, iOS 7 is from 2013 and iOS 5 is still running on 2010 devices. That's only a few years ago. For comparison, we coped with IE6 for well over a decade, and XP (from 2001) only recently got deprecated.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
Luckily, it doesn't have near the numbers IE 6 ever had and it's not something a company would require their employees to use for work applications long after EOL, that was the real pain of IE.
ftxrcc 9y ago
This article barely makes a point for itself. Why is this on HN?
z3t4 9y ago
IE still holds the crown here. Lots of "enterprise" still use IE (not Edge), and IE have not got that much updates lately. That said I've had more issues with Safari then IE.
lexicality 9y ago
I suspect all the people disagreeing with this either A) Are not web developers B) Use macs as their primary development platform C) Have never had a user using iOS 7 complain that your website is entirely broken and not be able to replicate or debug it because every mac in your office is using OSX 10.10 and Apple have jigged it so you can't run an emulator for iOS <9 and everything on the computer (Except iTunes) refuses to believe the iOS 7 device exists when you finally persuade the customer to bring it in to you.
- lexicality 9y ago
  (OTOH at least it has a vague attempt at developer tools - with Samsung Internet you're on your own matey)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
dieulot 9y ago
Here’s an irritating bug that popped on Safari 10.1 (iOS 10.3) that strains the use of CSS variables: You can’t just use a variable to declare a box-shadow’s color opacity, you need an intermediate variable. Demo: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/YxmQdj https://codepen.io/anon/pen/YxmQdj Apple versus Google keeping devices up-to-date is a reversed problem on the web: iOS’s web browser updates only with new OS releases, and they don’t come to all devices. iPhones 5 (and iPads 4) will be stuck with that bug forever. On Android you can use Chrome’s latest version if you’re on ≥ 4.1 and Firefox’s if you’re on 4.0. 99% of Android users are. Even if you’re very aggressive on focusing only on recent browsers for your website, you need to handle Safari bugs for years. Safari is far from being as bad as IE ≤ 8, but it sure is the most annoying browser when you’re targeting only recent ones.
submeta 9y ago
I don't know about the challenges for a web dev. But as a MacOS user I love Safari. It is very fast, it does not drain my battery and it gives me an increadibly streamlimed experience (bookmarks sync across all my Apple devices, I can continue a session that I started on my iOS device on my Mac). Chrome kills my battery. Firefox is way to slow (startup time).
oblib 9y ago
Durn whippersnappers, when I started developing for the web Apple didn't even have a web browser. Personally, I dev on a Mac and use and test with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome and to be fair they're all great. I can deal with little CSS issues but what Safari really needs is Service Worker support.
firefoxd 9y ago
The great things about CSS is that there are many ways to achieve the same result. You just found one incompatible way of doing it.
drcongo 9y ago
Safari won't be the new IE until it has an IT department enforceable compatibility mode which breaks everything forever.
junkculture 9y ago
Safari may be broken but it's not as broken as ie6 was back in the day.

79 points by abusedmedia 9y ago

A few bugs don't really make Safari the new IE. There will always be bugs and differences with rendering engines, that is the price of competition. However IE was a completely different class of shit sandwich that inflicted horror onto all devs who had to work with it.

racl101 9y ago
Agreed. Saying Safari is the new IE is like saying Trump is the new Hitler. Not even close. Just no.

neilalexander 9y ago

Drastic title for an incredibly weak article that barely even bothers to make a case. So Safari has a bug. Why does that warrant immediately labelling it abandonware?

frozenport 9y ago
"Safari is the new IE" has been a complaint for many years. The author is providing supporting evidence. Here is an article from 2015 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-becoming-the-new-internet-explorer-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-b...
- sanbor 9y ago
  As web developer I back this. I didn't hear it before but say that in the office because is the browser that often has weird css bugs. But to be fair Edge also requires some dedication and their update deployment is a nightmare. Their latest stable release was on April but because Windows rolling update strategy some users might be using a 2 year old Edge that doesn't support css variables.
  - frozenport 9y ago
    As a HN reader i'm shocked by the number of downvotes my post recieved. Articles with the title Safari is the New IE routinely recieve dozens of upvotes. Maybe some Apple devs downvoted my post :-)
- zghst 9y ago
  If anything, these journalist are incredibly misinformed and shallowly invested in the issue (they do love clicks though). There's not a sentence about the power usage of browsers, performance on mobile browsers, the mass amount of APIs that have been added over the past few years, the evolution of JavaScript that is happening in tandem with new features that are being released, not even a sentence about how these APIs are extremely immature and still a WIP; all things that if taken in perspective will highlight the nuances of Safari's strategy of slow adoption. Apple could make a browser that has all these features (where APIs are slow to being adopted on sites that users most use, low impact) or they could keep investing in iOS (where APIs are mass adopted from day one on apps used by hundreds of millions, high impact).
  - bradleyjg 9y ago
    Why is it an either/or? They are the largest company by market cap in the world with more than $8B in profit last quarter. They should be able to handle both.
    - zghst 9y ago
      It is precisely an either/or because it has made $8B in profit last quarter. Apple as a massive company must make thousands, hundreds of thousands of tiny decisions to make it's business more profitable. Investing in iOS attracts more customers and buy in to its products and services. Investing in Safari is not a key differentiator for their business and rivals will be able to easily implement the same features. Apple is smart not to play Google's game. If Apple were to engage in this, the browser now becomes a selling point of the phone. Apple goes from iOS/iPhone company to Safari company. They give away their offering/unique selling point that no other company has, along with their massive advantages as a market leader. Because their tech and business strategy is more developed in this space (browsers), Google can start acquiring customers at a lower cost than Apple without having to differentiate its core product more than the fact that it has more APIs/features. We see Google already does this to a degree, they market their products more on the feature set rather than the mission and brand. Web technologies also inherently support Google's business strategy, the more APIs in the browser, the more data Google can collect on Apple's users, the more advanced targeting they can do to swipe away Apple's customers and collect intelligence on what Apple is up to. Do not be fooled, every time there is an API added to the browser, there are teams of people at Google ready to capitalize on it to help drive profits. It would be a bad, bad bet for Apple to start all of sudden focusing its energies on Safari. As a SWE, it is completely understandable why Apple gives Safari little love, I'm okay with it.
Spooky23 9y ago
IE was a totally different situation. With IE you started with no forward motion plus a flawed product with lots of deficiencies, and then evolved to a product with no coherent direction (i.e. IE 7-10). Apple is very consistent with their products: upgrade or else. The only exception really is iTunes, and that's only because not supporting older versions would lead them afoul of merchantability laws for devices. The Apple approach is not great, but at least it's comprehensible. Try certifying any product or configuration with Microsoft -- you have a minimum of 6 versions of Windows 10 alone, not to mention the various Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows server browsers.
Avernar 9y ago
Safari is full of bugs and incompatibilities. Every time I develop something for the web it's always "works on Firefox, works on Chrome, works on IE/Edge and works on... Nope! Something broke on safari again." And the thing that bugs me the most about it is that it's tied to the iOS version you have on mobile. Eventually you're prevented from upgrading it because your device doesn't support the new iOS version.

kylec 9y ago

Safari isn't the new IE for one big reason: it's the only rendering engine on iOS, which means if you want to support mobile web, you have to support it, and that won't change anytime soon.

anotherbrownguy 9y ago
It sounds like it is the new IE, except you can't even install another browser.
- kalefranz 9y ago
  Wasn't this exactly one of the items Microsoft got in trouble for with the European antitrust authorities?
  - johncolanduoni 9y ago
    iOS doesn't have anywhere near the market share that Microsoft had/has on the desktop
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Not just the EU regulators. The US antitrust lawsuit was also about using their desktop OS marketshare, and the bundling of IE with said OS, to drive companies towards using IIS at the server end. Damn it, Microsoft basically coined the expression "Embrace, Extended, Extinguish". Meaning that they embrace some standard, then extend it with MS specific behavior, then extinguish the original standard via creeping incompatibilities.
  - jowiar 9y ago
    Doing something like that is illegal if you have a monopoly. Apple doesn't (or even majority market share).
ezequiel-garzon 9y ago
Can't you download other browsers in iOS? In any event, it may not be relevant if most iOS users don't bother.

HugoDaniel 9y ago

meh, desktop Safari is actually a very good browser. It is the fastest of all browsers in macos for a bunch of operations and their support for ES6 features beats all the other browsers (99% in https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ ). Also one could argue that if Apple did not invest so much in WebKit then chrome would have had a harder time achieving its current usage and would probably be a very different browser than what it is today. My 2cents

maratd 9y ago
> their support for ES6 features beats all the other browsers This is deceptive. They purposefully do not support critical features that other browsers do support. As a developer, if there's one browser that consistently gives me headaches, it is Safari. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FormData/get#Browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FormData/ge...
- geocar 9y ago
  As a user, I hate having to open Chrome[1] because of some "critical feature". Honestly, I sometimes wish you "developers" would find some other way to implement your application. [1]: http://i.imgur.com/NcPu5IU.png http://i.imgur.com/NcPu5IU.png
- zghst 9y ago
  Honestly, there are so many libraries out there that abstract away issues like this. By building an app from scratch, custom rolling logic, you automatically opt-out of the good tools that negate all of the tiny differences in browsers. I've had my share of Safari issues, but over time, the amount of libraries I've co-opted into my dev strategy has helped me bypass the majority of browser issues.
nolok 9y ago
I do not know enough about Safari to agree or disagree with your general point, but I find this part to be really irrelevant: > Also one could argue that if Apple did not invest so much in WebKit then chrome would have had a harder time achieving its current usage and would probably be a very different browser than what it is today. The same can be said on an even larger scale about microsoft and IE 5 and 6; that doesn't mean in anyway that years later they were not a pain stopping the web from going forward. In other word, I don't see how that has any impact on the conversation at end (neither for or against the point made). EDIT: Not sure why the downvotes. Apple invested a lot into Safari (and thus webkit which lead to chrome). Doesn't change in any way if Safari is or isn't holding the web back currently, which is why I say it's irrelevant to paren't countering argument. And in fact, we have a previous examples since we lived the same scenario with Microsoft who invested a lot into IE 5/6 (and leading into DHTML, XMLHttpRequest, ...), which then definitely hold the web back. This is, literally, the same argument. I don't see how I can be downvoted for stating that obvious fact unless you think that IE 6 didn't hold the web back after a while.

neoyagami 9y ago

It works the other way arround too. 2 years ago part of a site in production stoped working just because how chrome loaded some js libs at loading time. Ff,safary heck even ie worked ok but chrome.

mozumder 9y ago

Wasn't this "bug" originally meant to reproduce IE behavior for compatibility purposes with IE?

digi_owl 9y ago

I am as weary with Chrome, but for a different reason. While Safari lags, Chrome seems to introduce more and more Chrome-isms onto the web.

zghst 9y ago
Web fragmentation, unfortunately is built in to our community, but my hope is that we won't ever see an era of fragmentation like the HTML5 era. I'm okay with Chrome-isms, as long as they're not too radical.
- pdimitar 9y ago
  I think both you and me would agree that Google aims to make them radical. Just today I changed my Chrome's search engine to DuckDuckGo. Of course, I get periodically politely asked if I am sure that this is my correct search engine setting. <facepalms> As an Eastern European, I'd shut them down the same instant on this basis alone, no questions asked. Shame that we don't run the world. :D An off-topic for sure but the gist is: Google wants to entangle you in their web. They are just much more subtle compared to Microsoft and thus almost nobody notices. So, less Chrome-isms, please.

lukeman 9y ago

The first example seems to work fine in iOS 11, but congrats on the clickbait title.

ckorhonen 9y ago
Ditto - the bug appears to have been fixed in Safari 11.
zghst 9y ago
To be fair, iOS 11 is only a couple of weeks from being adopted from hundreds millions of people. Our community isn't as proactive in testing against unreleased software as the native iOS community. :disappointed_face:

ddebernardy 9y ago

Anecdotal, but this doesn't match my own experience. When developing for the web I usually develop on Safari. More specifically for a first-gen iPad running Safari Mobile. And then, for whatever reasons, it almost always works on other browsers pretty much as is - the main exceptions being very old devices running ancient versions of IE. (Admittedly I aim to make sites that degrade well and work without JS, so that might be an important caveat in an age of Angular and what have you. Perhaps I'm stuck in y2k and still think a site should render in 0.2s on all but 10+ year old browsers. [Shrugs])

n42 9y ago
That is because Safari's feature support is the lowest common denominator of the other browsers. By developing on it you are ensuring you don't use features every other browser but Safari supports.
- protobuflol 9y ago
  Unless of course you're referring to ES6 support, in which case it has the best support.
  - n42 9y ago
    You're probably right, I only have to deal with CSS inconsistencies since JS tooling largely solves that problem for me these days. Unfortunately tools like CSS prefixer can't solve for everything.
    - protobuflol 9y ago
      Totally. Anecdotally, though, a) firefox diverges further from chrome than safari does and b) the types of CSS flaws don't wven approach the black magic of designing for IE6.
- ddebernardy 9y ago
  > By developing on it you are ensuring you don't use features every other browser but Sure. But isn't developing against the least common denominator precisely what web development has been all about in the past 20 years or so? Edit: Just to expand on that... Then, there was a laundry list of web shops that were targeting IE first because "more advanced" and complaining about other browsers because they "suck". And it looked wrong to just about everyone else who targeted other browsers because Microsoft. Now, we've a laundry list of web shops that are targeting Chrome first because "more advanced" and complaining about other browsers because they "suck". And for some reason those browsers should all catch-up and fast because Google?

dschu 9y ago

Why not simply just div { height: 100vh } though? No overflow rules on the body needed

0x0 9y ago

This is only going to get worse as newer iOS versions drop support for older hardware, especially iPads. It is doubly concerning since Apple bans browsers from the app store unless they just use the iOS-provided webkit engine for, so these devices are stuck with legacy Mobile Safari versions for the end of time. As more and more modern iDevices become legacy while still being perhaps "powerful enough", I think we will start to see a persistent population of web users similar to the clan of IE6 users that took forever to shake off.

linopolus 9y ago
Oh right, of course few years old android phones can still be updated officially (-> by the average user, too), being way better this way.
CharlesW 9y ago
> This is only going to get worse as newer iOS versions drop support for older hardware, especially iPads. I don't think that it's fair to say it's going to get worse, in the sense that it's as bad as it's going to get right now. And it's not too bad right now. Apple is quite good about support for older devices. For example, iOS 11 supports 4-year-old devices, and that's even somewhat of a special case since it's dropping 32-bit support. People use iOS devices older than 4 years old, but it's not a huge burden to keep a handful iOS 10 and iOS 9 devices around for development and testing. Certainly, it's a wonderland compared to testing on Android.

jmisavage 9y ago

I fixed his bug by changing the height on panel from 100% to 100vh. No need for extra markup like his fix plus as someone else mention iOS 11 doesn't have this problem and that most likely means the next desktop version will that fix also.

korm 9y ago
This is not a fix, on mobile 100vh and 100% are different due to the auto-hiding address bar.

korm 9y ago

Safari is not as bad as IE was compared to other browsers. However, calling it the 'new IE' is accurate if the definition is 'the browser with the worst support of new features and most bugs'. Here is a comparison http://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-10.2/ios-10.3/edge-15/firefox-53/chrome-58.html http://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-10.2/ios-10.3/ed... What is especially frustrating for web devs is that all browsers on iOS are Safari underneath. We have to deal with those weird bugs and missing features the same painful way we dealt with IE, hence the title of the article. Saying that it's not as bad is not the point, IE 11 was also not as bad as IE6, we still had to deal with its quirks.

pcurve 9y ago
I don't know if the feature support chart paints the full picture. I think web developer's problem with Safari is more nuanced. It's not so much about whether a feature is implemented or not, as is about 'how' it's implemented.
- mmastrac 9y ago
  As someone who did extensive browser dev from 2001 onward, that's exactly how it was with IE as well.
ddebernardy 9y ago
Safari doesn't compare with how IE was in its heydays. In IE times, it was the majority browser and web shops were complaining that they were developing on less popular platforms (typically Firefox, and Netscape before it) and then ranting about how IE did things differently. Had they developed for IE all along with an aim for compatibility with FF, they'd have done things differently and, in many cases, compatibility wasn't that hard if you targeted lower common denominator - that is, a few earlier versions of each browser. Sure, you'd miss out on the latest browser features, but that's not what web dev was about then. Rather, it was - depending on the shop - about making a site work on all platforms, or about making it work on IE and to hell with other platforms - with great despise from the rest of the community. For some reason, things changed in recent years. Chrome is now dominant, and for whatever reason developing against its latest version has become the new normal, with web shops complaining that other browsers aren't keeping up fast enough, and no echo chamber to counter that discourse by pointing out that "hey, why aren't you targeting older browsers to begin with?" In case it needs reminding, iOS 7 is from 2013 and iOS 5 is still running on 2010 devices. That's only a few years ago. For comparison, we coped with IE6 for well over a decade, and XP (from 2001) only recently got deprecated.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

Luckily, it doesn't have near the numbers IE 6 ever had and it's not something a company would require their employees to use for work applications long after EOL, that was the real pain of IE.

ftxrcc 9y ago

This article barely makes a point for itself. Why is this on HN?

z3t4 9y ago

IE still holds the crown here. Lots of "enterprise" still use IE (not Edge), and IE have not got that much updates lately. That said I've had more issues with Safari then IE.

lexicality 9y ago

I suspect all the people disagreeing with this either A) Are not web developers B) Use macs as their primary development platform C) Have never had a user using iOS 7 complain that your website is entirely broken and not be able to replicate or debug it because every mac in your office is using OSX 10.10 and Apple have jigged it so you can't run an emulator for iOS <9 and everything on the computer (Except iTunes) refuses to believe the iOS 7 device exists when you finally persuade the customer to bring it in to you.

lexicality 9y ago
(OTOH at least it has a vague attempt at developer tools - with Samsung Internet you're on your own matey)
deleted 9y ago
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dieulot 9y ago

Here’s an irritating bug that popped on Safari 10.1 (iOS 10.3) that strains the use of CSS variables: You can’t just use a variable to declare a box-shadow’s color opacity, you need an intermediate variable. Demo: https://codepen.io/anon/pen/YxmQdj https://codepen.io/anon/pen/YxmQdj Apple versus Google keeping devices up-to-date is a reversed problem on the web: iOS’s web browser updates only with new OS releases, and they don’t come to all devices. iPhones 5 (and iPads 4) will be stuck with that bug forever. On Android you can use Chrome’s latest version if you’re on ≥ 4.1 and Firefox’s if you’re on 4.0. 99% of Android users are. Even if you’re very aggressive on focusing only on recent browsers for your website, you need to handle Safari bugs for years. Safari is far from being as bad as IE ≤ 8, but it sure is the most annoying browser when you’re targeting only recent ones.

submeta 9y ago

I don't know about the challenges for a web dev. But as a MacOS user I love Safari. It is very fast, it does not drain my battery and it gives me an increadibly streamlimed experience (bookmarks sync across all my Apple devices, I can continue a session that I started on my iOS device on my Mac). Chrome kills my battery. Firefox is way to slow (startup time).

oblib 9y ago

Durn whippersnappers, when I started developing for the web Apple didn't even have a web browser. Personally, I dev on a Mac and use and test with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome and to be fair they're all great. I can deal with little CSS issues but what Safari really needs is Service Worker support.

firefoxd 9y ago

The great things about CSS is that there are many ways to achieve the same result. You just found one incompatible way of doing it.

drcongo 9y ago

Safari won't be the new IE until it has an IT department enforceable compatibility mode which breaks everything forever.

junkculture 9y ago

Safari may be broken but it's not as broken as ie6 was back in the day.