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"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well." I really don't agree at all with this, Safa

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well." I really don't agree at all with this, Safari is the new Internet explorer ... https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/ https://www.safari-is-the-new-ie.com/

Angostura 9y ago
That's a fairly uninformative site. It makes a claim and does nothing to back it up.
- appdrag 9y ago
  you are right, check those links instead then :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed-safari-is-the-new-internet-explorer/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed... http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-becoming-the-new-internet-explorer-2015-7 http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-be...
elsurudo 9y ago
Ehh, I use Safari as my main browser (it feels more "native" than Chrome & FF, has seemingly lower CPU usage than Chrome, and is WAY better for the battery), and I rarely suffer for it. Once in a while there is a site that does something fancy that requires Chrome, but it is rare.
- squeaky-clean 9y ago
  Same experience here. Safari is my daily driver for casual browsing because it feels smoothest and integrates well with the OS, iPhone, etc. The only times I can remember it being a problem are when I see a bleeding edge tech demo posted somewhere like HN.
  - soperj 9y ago
    flexbox isn't a bleeding edge technology, and it's supposed to work properly on safari, but it really doesn't. Annoying as hell, and garbage on their organization to be honest.
    - stephenr 9y ago
      Have you submitted a bug report about it?
      - soperj 9y ago
        There have been bug reports submitted for years. Still not fixed.
        stephenr 9y ago
        Caniuse reports some issues with < v10, but nothing currently?
    - squeaky-clean 9y ago
      I just Googled a few flexbox demos and had no issues viewing them or playing with them on Safari. Care to share an example that fails on Safari? Also seems it's been supported for a while? https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
- kitsunesoba 9y ago
  Precisely this. It’s not that the WebKit/Safari team doesn’t implement new features/standards (they usually do), it’s just on a different schedule. I don’t know anybody on the Safari team but I suspect that they prioritize very differently than the Chrome team does. One is all about impressing web developers with the latest and greatest where the other is more interested in having resource efficient implementations.
cakeface 9y ago
I sometimes feel like Chrome is the new Internet Explorer too! There have been a number of GSuite features from Google that don't work on Firefox. Google Hangouts for one! Also on that list was U2F auth and some others. Here we have Google products that only work on the Google browser. What does that sound like? Maybe Microsoft and all their ActiveX IE shenanigans in the past! The moral of the story, which I think the article highlighted very well, is that the web platform is based on standards. Build to the standards. If you don't like the standards, advocate for new ones! It's hard work but it's how we got where we are and how we will continue to have a web 100 years from now.
- jrs95 9y ago
  YouTube seems to be broken on Edge half the time. I don’t think they even test for it.
- wrs 9y ago
  That is backwards. Nearly everything in the web platform began as a proprietary extension, including JavaScript and XHR. Standardizing something that has never been used in real life is a bad idea. Convincing the other browser vendors to implement your new idea is usually impossible. So insisting that only standards ever be used would result in no progress at all.
- joshuamorton 9y ago
  >Google Hangouts for one! I believe this now works on FF, according to an HN post yesterday. >If you don't like the standards, advocate for new ones! I think the problem with this is it means that I can't provide something useful until the standards body updates, which could be a cadence of years. In that timeframe, a competitor will break the standard.
  - jklinger410 9y ago
    Hangouts calls didn't work for me today on FF. Possibly fixed on beta channel? This would really help me switch.
rubyn00bie 9y ago
No and I think your opinion is harmful. IE literally refused to implement standards, rendered broken dom elements, allowed for proprietary native extensions and had many different apis for them. They had 90% of the market share and no other viable platforms. This meant developers built things which exploited these broken features causing huge compatibility issues when they aren’t (every other browser). A simple lack of features didn’t make IE... IE. Safari is a pain in the ass but it sure as fuck ain’t no internet explorer. I think Chrome is propagating lazy developers who think everyone uses their browser. Which means things only work in Chrome and no where else. It’s not as bad as the IE situation yet and hopefully it won’t be with Firefox kicking ass again.
- connorelsea 9y ago
  Chrome is implementing a standard that pretty much all other modern browsers are also implementing. For example, service workers - implemented by Chrome initially and pretty heavily integrated into Android/PWAs - but Firefox and Safari are also shipping this feature currently. And also most features, such as service workers, can be effectively used with progressive enhancement, still providing a working experience to the user when they are using an older browser. Most sites I've seen that say "Must be used in Chrome" or whatever really have no reason to do that. There is more nuance to the progression of the modern web platform than the OP article gives off.
  - RobertRoberts 9y ago
    Sorry, the op is right. Safari IS the new IE. Service workers is one of the most egregious failures on their part. And I believe it's been done on purpose. With service workers you get full control over building your JS based app, something Apple does not want, they want everyone to got through their store. Considering that the only way (moving forward) to create an offline JS app now is through service workers, and Apple is just starting to get it working, _maybe_ for the next version of Safari. https://caniuse.com/#search=service%20workers https://caniuse.com/#search=service%20workers What does this mean? It means that it may take one or two more _years_ of _hardware_ updates to get iOS users able to use a javascript feature in their browser. As far as I know, iOS and Safari are knitted together like MS did to Windows and IE. Try and get a new version of Safari that doesn't match with the version of iOS you are running. I could go on about the state of local storage and other HTML5 debacles on Safari, but it's total loser and I am only going to make myself upset.
davidmurdoch 9y ago
Having just spent more time fixing quirks in an HTML layout in iOS Safari than I had to in IE 9, I wholeheartedly agree with you.
osrec 9y ago
As an example, anyone remember the glaring indexedDB and flexbox bugs in Safari?!
- Klathmon 9y ago
  That's my issue. I've basically learned (as a developer) to not use any new features in Safari until the version after they come out. IndexedDB was broken so badly it literally wouldn't work, flexbox is much better now, but I wouldn't have called it "supported" by safari for a while, and now while their WebRTC APIs work, they are really flakey and have a lot of extra "restrictions" tacked on that aren't really explained anywhere (like they won't work in a WebView, or if the page is bookmarked on the homescreen). I like what they are trying to do, and I absolutely think there is a place for a browser that is fast, low resource usage, and more stable, even if it means it's single platform, slower to add features, and doesn't have as many customization options. But Safari is falling short of their goals while still having those downsides and on one platform is the only browser that is allowed.
ebbv 9y ago
Anyone who says this doesn't remember what made IE notorious back in the day. None of the browsers now are anything like that. Apple's approach with Safari is exactly what the author of the linked article said; they are slower to implement standards. When they do, I usually have no problems with them at all.
csydas 9y ago
This doesn't really refute what the author is saying; the main thrust behind the website and the blog post the site references is that Safari doesn't adopt new features Chrome does, which is basically the exact thing which the author of the article we're commenting on is saying is a bad position to take. I have no horse in this race, since I like Safari when I'm on Apple products and I will happily use Chrome or Firefox or IE/Edge depending on what's available, but I agree with the author of the primary article here; we shouldn't put one browser up on a pedestal just because of release cycles or cool projects it does and let it dictate how the web should look and behave.
jarjoura 9y ago
Yet, what Safari is, is competition. Also let's not forget that it gave the world WebKit and broke us free from the trap that was Flash.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  >> Also let's not forget that it gave the world WebKit And let's not forget that WebKit started as a fork of KHTML and KJS.
JohnBooty 9y ago
Chrome is the new IE. Chrome ships new features fast, and some of them are very cool. Because of course! "Embrace, extend, extinguish" doesn't work unless the "extend" part is full of shiny, delicious candy. And platform makers can make lots and lots of shiny candy when freed from pesky things like standards. It's hard to believe we're having this discussion again. Did we learn nothing from Internet Explorer 6? IE6 damn near ruined the web because it had 95% market share, was objectively terrible, and it encouraged lock-in with its nonstandard behavior and "convenient" proprietary features. Now, of course Chrome isn't terrible like IE6. And that's both good and dangerous ...because Microsoft might have "won" if IE6 was any good at all. Luckily, IE6 was so terrible that Mozilla was able to win back a sizeable enough portion of the web with a far superior product, and FF's market share was big enough that people had to start paying attention to web standards again. No such savior in the form of a "far superior product" is likely to exist this time around. Chrome's pretty darn nice, and as long as it doesn't suck as bad as IE6, we'll never see a direct competitor that eclipses Chrome in the way that FF1.0 surpassed the god-awful IE6. That means we, the developers, are the only thing between an open web and a dangerous Google monoculture. Support web standards, not proprietary lock-in. Develop for the web, not for Chrome. Stick to the standards and it's pretty easy. And fun.
- Arcsech 9y ago
  Chrome is 100% the IE. They blatantly ignore standards, the most obvious of which is their treatment of autocomplete=off in forms[1]. They broke the ability to disable autocomplete, and since then have been intentionally breaking workarounds people find to actually turn off autocomplete. This has been a major pain in the butt at work. Before you yell at me about password managers or whatever, we don't use this on our login form: We make an app that collects some sensitive data that it is very pointless to autocomplete, and we've had user complaints about this very issue, but there's nothing we can do about it because Google unilaterally decided they know better than us. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22694173 https://stackoverflow.com/a/22694173 (make sure to read the comments!)
  - kuschku 9y ago
    > They blatantly ignore standards, the most obvious of which is their treatment of autocomplete=off in forms[1]. They broke the ability to disable autocomplete, and since then have been intentionally breaking workarounds people find to actually turn off autocomplete. This has been a major pain in the butt at work. My solution to that is simple. I have a microservice that tells my services how to get autocomplete=off automatically. This microservice determines the required values and ids by scraping the search box on google.com every hour, and extracting the values of the tag matching input[name=q]. That way I can fully automate autocomplete=off, and ensure it works.

Angostura 9y ago

That's a fairly uninformative site. It makes a claim and does nothing to back it up.

appdrag 9y ago
you are right, check those links instead then :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12051267 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed-safari-is-the-new-internet-explorer/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/op-ed... http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-becoming-the-new-internet-explorer-2015-7 http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-safari-web-browser-is-be...

elsurudo 9y ago

Ehh, I use Safari as my main browser (it feels more "native" than Chrome & FF, has seemingly lower CPU usage than Chrome, and is WAY better for the battery), and I rarely suffer for it. Once in a while there is a site that does something fancy that requires Chrome, but it is rare.

squeaky-clean 9y ago
Same experience here. Safari is my daily driver for casual browsing because it feels smoothest and integrates well with the OS, iPhone, etc. The only times I can remember it being a problem are when I see a bleeding edge tech demo posted somewhere like HN.
- soperj 9y ago
  flexbox isn't a bleeding edge technology, and it's supposed to work properly on safari, but it really doesn't. Annoying as hell, and garbage on their organization to be honest.
  - stephenr 9y ago
    Have you submitted a bug report about it?
    - soperj 9y ago
      There have been bug reports submitted for years. Still not fixed.
      - stephenr 9y ago
        Caniuse reports some issues with < v10, but nothing currently?
  - squeaky-clean 9y ago
    I just Googled a few flexbox demos and had no issues viewing them or playing with them on Safari. Care to share an example that fails on Safari? Also seems it's been supported for a while? https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
kitsunesoba 9y ago
Precisely this. It’s not that the WebKit/Safari team doesn’t implement new features/standards (they usually do), it’s just on a different schedule. I don’t know anybody on the Safari team but I suspect that they prioritize very differently than the Chrome team does. One is all about impressing web developers with the latest and greatest where the other is more interested in having resource efficient implementations.

cakeface 9y ago

I sometimes feel like Chrome is the new Internet Explorer too! There have been a number of GSuite features from Google that don't work on Firefox. Google Hangouts for one! Also on that list was U2F auth and some others. Here we have Google products that only work on the Google browser. What does that sound like? Maybe Microsoft and all their ActiveX IE shenanigans in the past! The moral of the story, which I think the article highlighted very well, is that the web platform is based on standards. Build to the standards. If you don't like the standards, advocate for new ones! It's hard work but it's how we got where we are and how we will continue to have a web 100 years from now.

jrs95 9y ago
YouTube seems to be broken on Edge half the time. I don’t think they even test for it.
wrs 9y ago
That is backwards. Nearly everything in the web platform began as a proprietary extension, including JavaScript and XHR. Standardizing something that has never been used in real life is a bad idea. Convincing the other browser vendors to implement your new idea is usually impossible. So insisting that only standards ever be used would result in no progress at all.
joshuamorton 9y ago
>Google Hangouts for one! I believe this now works on FF, according to an HN post yesterday. >If you don't like the standards, advocate for new ones! I think the problem with this is it means that I can't provide something useful until the standards body updates, which could be a cadence of years. In that timeframe, a competitor will break the standard.
- jklinger410 9y ago
  Hangouts calls didn't work for me today on FF. Possibly fixed on beta channel? This would really help me switch.

rubyn00bie 9y ago

No and I think your opinion is harmful. IE literally refused to implement standards, rendered broken dom elements, allowed for proprietary native extensions and had many different apis for them. They had 90% of the market share and no other viable platforms. This meant developers built things which exploited these broken features causing huge compatibility issues when they aren’t (every other browser). A simple lack of features didn’t make IE... IE. Safari is a pain in the ass but it sure as fuck ain’t no internet explorer. I think Chrome is propagating lazy developers who think everyone uses their browser. Which means things only work in Chrome and no where else. It’s not as bad as the IE situation yet and hopefully it won’t be with Firefox kicking ass again.

connorelsea 9y ago
Chrome is implementing a standard that pretty much all other modern browsers are also implementing. For example, service workers - implemented by Chrome initially and pretty heavily integrated into Android/PWAs - but Firefox and Safari are also shipping this feature currently. And also most features, such as service workers, can be effectively used with progressive enhancement, still providing a working experience to the user when they are using an older browser. Most sites I've seen that say "Must be used in Chrome" or whatever really have no reason to do that. There is more nuance to the progression of the modern web platform than the OP article gives off.
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  Sorry, the op is right. Safari IS the new IE. Service workers is one of the most egregious failures on their part. And I believe it's been done on purpose. With service workers you get full control over building your JS based app, something Apple does not want, they want everyone to got through their store. Considering that the only way (moving forward) to create an offline JS app now is through service workers, and Apple is just starting to get it working, _maybe_ for the next version of Safari. https://caniuse.com/#search=service%20workers https://caniuse.com/#search=service%20workers What does this mean? It means that it may take one or two more _years_ of _hardware_ updates to get iOS users able to use a javascript feature in their browser. As far as I know, iOS and Safari are knitted together like MS did to Windows and IE. Try and get a new version of Safari that doesn't match with the version of iOS you are running. I could go on about the state of local storage and other HTML5 debacles on Safari, but it's total loser and I am only going to make myself upset.

davidmurdoch 9y ago

Having just spent more time fixing quirks in an HTML layout in iOS Safari than I had to in IE 9, I wholeheartedly agree with you.

osrec 9y ago

As an example, anyone remember the glaring indexedDB and flexbox bugs in Safari?!

Klathmon 9y ago
That's my issue. I've basically learned (as a developer) to not use any new features in Safari until the version after they come out. IndexedDB was broken so badly it literally wouldn't work, flexbox is much better now, but I wouldn't have called it "supported" by safari for a while, and now while their WebRTC APIs work, they are really flakey and have a lot of extra "restrictions" tacked on that aren't really explained anywhere (like they won't work in a WebView, or if the page is bookmarked on the homescreen). I like what they are trying to do, and I absolutely think there is a place for a browser that is fast, low resource usage, and more stable, even if it means it's single platform, slower to add features, and doesn't have as many customization options. But Safari is falling short of their goals while still having those downsides and on one platform is the only browser that is allowed.

ebbv 9y ago

Anyone who says this doesn't remember what made IE notorious back in the day. None of the browsers now are anything like that. Apple's approach with Safari is exactly what the author of the linked article said; they are slower to implement standards. When they do, I usually have no problems with them at all.

csydas 9y ago

This doesn't really refute what the author is saying; the main thrust behind the website and the blog post the site references is that Safari doesn't adopt new features Chrome does, which is basically the exact thing which the author of the article we're commenting on is saying is a bad position to take. I have no horse in this race, since I like Safari when I'm on Apple products and I will happily use Chrome or Firefox or IE/Edge depending on what's available, but I agree with the author of the primary article here; we shouldn't put one browser up on a pedestal just because of release cycles or cool projects it does and let it dictate how the web should look and behave.

jarjoura 9y ago

Yet, what Safari is, is competition. Also let's not forget that it gave the world WebKit and broke us free from the trap that was Flash.

slantyyz 9y ago
>> Also let's not forget that it gave the world WebKit And let's not forget that WebKit started as a fork of KHTML and KJS.

JohnBooty 9y ago

Chrome is the new IE. Chrome ships new features fast, and some of them are very cool. Because of course! "Embrace, extend, extinguish" doesn't work unless the "extend" part is full of shiny, delicious candy. And platform makers can make lots and lots of shiny candy when freed from pesky things like standards. It's hard to believe we're having this discussion again. Did we learn nothing from Internet Explorer 6? IE6 damn near ruined the web because it had 95% market share, was objectively terrible, and it encouraged lock-in with its nonstandard behavior and "convenient" proprietary features. Now, of course Chrome isn't terrible like IE6. And that's both good and dangerous ...because Microsoft might have "won" if IE6 was any good at all. Luckily, IE6 was so terrible that Mozilla was able to win back a sizeable enough portion of the web with a far superior product, and FF's market share was big enough that people had to start paying attention to web standards again. No such savior in the form of a "far superior product" is likely to exist this time around. Chrome's pretty darn nice, and as long as it doesn't suck as bad as IE6, we'll never see a direct competitor that eclipses Chrome in the way that FF1.0 surpassed the god-awful IE6. That means we, the developers, are the only thing between an open web and a dangerous Google monoculture. Support web standards, not proprietary lock-in. Develop for the web, not for Chrome. Stick to the standards and it's pretty easy. And fun.

Arcsech 9y ago
Chrome is 100% the IE. They blatantly ignore standards, the most obvious of which is their treatment of autocomplete=off in forms[1]. They broke the ability to disable autocomplete, and since then have been intentionally breaking workarounds people find to actually turn off autocomplete. This has been a major pain in the butt at work. Before you yell at me about password managers or whatever, we don't use this on our login form: We make an app that collects some sensitive data that it is very pointless to autocomplete, and we've had user complaints about this very issue, but there's nothing we can do about it because Google unilaterally decided they know better than us. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22694173 https://stackoverflow.com/a/22694173 (make sure to read the comments!)
- kuschku 9y ago
  > They blatantly ignore standards, the most obvious of which is their treatment of autocomplete=off in forms[1]. They broke the ability to disable autocomplete, and since then have been intentionally breaking workarounds people find to actually turn off autocomplete. This has been a major pain in the butt at work. My solution to that is simple. I have a microservice that tells my services how to get autocomplete=off automatically. This microservice determines the required values and ids by scraping the search box on google.com every hour, and extracting the values of the tag matching input[name=q]. That way I can fully automate autocomplete=off, and ensure it works.