7 ms·

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well" Well, clearly this person doesn't have much

"Safari ships new features on a much slower cadence, but they’re usually solid and always perform incredibly well" Well, clearly this person doesn't have much experience with web development... The webengine in iOS is the biggest pile of crap I've ever worked with since IE6. "Oh? You want to click this? OK, let's wait for 300 ms just in case you want to double tap to scroll!" "We finally fixed it, no more delay on clicks! Yo Apple, the delay is still there if it runs as standalone, good job..!" "OK, you've added the page to the home screen, now, if you click another URL on the same domain you definitely want it opened in the browser, right? Good guess Apple, that's why I added it.." "Wait, are you saying that if you switch to another app and back again to the standalone site you don't want us to reload the URL that's added to the home screen? You would prefer us to let you continue where you left off, what!?!?" "Oh, so you think momentum scrolling is a good idea? Too bad, we don't support it on elements that overflow, but we do have it elsewhere, have fun! PS we do have an experimental flag to enable it, but then I sure hope you're not using animations with gpu acceleration, cause then we have som nice race condition bugs in store for you, so who knows if scroll will work or not.." Seriously, iOS is the worst of them. Sure Firefox and Chrome often has experimental features with bugs, but both of them are much more "solid" when it comes to features you'll actually use in production. Safari on iOS is the IE6 of today.

amelius 9y ago
This also shows that the architecture of the web is wrong, i.e. to have the browser vendor in control rather than the developers.
EGreg 9y ago
What really sucks is that Apple has TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars in cash, and yet can't be bothered to throw a billion at fixing iOS, iOS safari and MacOS bugs. Its quality really went downhill. I really loved the "it just works" stuff of Apple Past. And I loved the intuitive, skeumorphic interfaces. Now it's all crap and HIDDEN MODES - something Apple always spoke against in its UX manuals. It's sad day that Google and Microsoft have better design than Apple now, and Apple copied them. Steve Jobs would have never let this happen. He would have a whole department funded with several billion dollars just to make Apple products the most user friendly on the planet. And he would have Siri be a Star-Trek-like voice platform by now.
- brians 9y ago
  What reduction in bug rate should we expect for each, day, $100M invested?
  - foobarz 9y ago
    Back in time, Microsoft invested heavily in program analysis to fix those hideous BSODs due to broken third-party drivers. It was very successful. Apple's problem is simpler as they own the code, and bugs are likely to come from understaffed engineering.
    - connorelsea 9y ago
      Apple's self-contained platform, huge sums of money, and massive upgrade adoption rates would make it very easy for them to ship modern software. They for some reason choose not to
      - threeseed 9y ago
        iOS and OSX isn't modern software ? I am curious about the qualities an operating system needs to be deemed "modern".
        connorelsea 9y ago
        I personally love iOS and macOS and use them both daily. Though there are facets of both that I think could easily be improved given Apple's position. Off the top of my head - A. Slow development cycles on Safari (they're getting better, but still) while simultaneously blocking competitors on iOS B. A number of embarrassing security failures on macOS recently C. A lack of focus on macOS (Probably the cause of B)
  - VikingCoder 9y ago
    I can't tell you how many more meters per second you will get if you push harder on the gas... But I can tell you that pushing harder on the gas is likely to get you where you're going quicker. Do we really need to discuss exact m/s before you're willing to push harder on the frickin gas?
kuon 9y ago
I discovered that having an onScroll event handler on a div with overflow and -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch resulted into weird visual artifacts under certain conditions. And no, I don't want to override native scroll (which is often a bad idea), I want to react to the scroll.
tpush 9y ago
Given this it's really a shame that Apple does not allow other browser engines on iOS. Would be a prime opportunity for competition to raise the overall quality level.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Looks like a case for anti trust, just like microsoft had with IE.
  - jen20 9y ago
    Why? iOS has by most measures less than 50% of the market.
    - connorelsea 9y ago
      Even with a low market share Apple could still theoretically be engaging in practices that are anti-consumer, such as disallowing the use of other browser engines. Though, afaik, Apple does not stoop to the levels of Amazon, who removed the Twitch app from Roku platform for absolutely no reason other than to line their pockets with more cash.
      - joshred 9y ago
        Before they purchased it?
        connorelsea 9y ago
        Nah, after - to make it a "Fire TV Exclusive" app http://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-roku/ http://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-r...
      - baddox 9y ago
        Aren’t anticompetitive and anti-consumer two completely separate things?
abritinthebay 9y ago
Based on this you either never had to work with IE6 compatibility, or you have a really bad memory. Not least most of what you mention (other than the 300ms delay) is OS level anyhow.
- tracker1 9y ago
  I worked with IE6 both as it became the defacto standard browser everywhere, and for the years it took Mozilla Phoenix^wFirebird^wFirefox to take hold as the defining force, and then Chrome coming to dominate. When IE6 came out it was kind of a breath of fresh air... it allowed for a lot of things, and the v4 browsers finally fell off the map. IE 5.0.0 had some hideous bugs on stamped CDs (Office 2000, Windows 2000) that I had to work around for a couple years. IE6 corrected many of them. Now as things progressed, IE6 became a boat anchor for a long time.. and IE7/8/9 though relatively current at release fell behind very quickly. IE10-11 were also rans in my opinion, and I'm glad most people get to ignore them now. Nothing compares to dealing with IE4 + NN4 issues... it was truly painful and I'll take what we have today over either. Most people aren't dealing with most of the newer browser features... but for those that are, it can be bad. Safari is the worst actor in the bunch, and they are emphatically not rock solid on that front.
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    People do forget that IE was legitimately a good browser for quite a while - starting around IE3 it really did quite well. Plus I'll take IE4 + NN4 issues vs IE6/7/8 issues in 20-freaking-14 (or beyond, argh). IE9 at least fixed a lot. At least the early IE vs NN stuff was fast to change and interesting. IE6 issues were the exact opposite :(
    - LoSboccacc 9y ago
      The real explorer issue was that xp refused to die for the longest time. When those browser came out they were kinda fine in context, they got lot of hate a decade later when the world moved onto new standard but you still had 10%+ users living in the past
throwaway284534 9y ago
Here here. The author clearly hasn't worked with Apple's implementation of Audio Context either. Granted the bar is pretty low compared to Chrome, but wow! What a mess. Safari consistently has latency and bit rate issues when playing even the smallest files.
- booleandilemma 9y ago
  Actually it’s “hear hear”. This comment has been up for 3 hours already, I’m surprised I’m the first word nazi to correct it :)
  - gmfawcett 9y ago
    If we're being pedantic, there ought to be a comma between those "hears". :)
  - userbinator 9y ago
    "Hear, hear" on a comment about Audio Context? ;-)
asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
I've been saying Safari is the new IE, they still can't even manage to properly implement flexbox spec and I've had a handful of rendering bugs to report on super basic things like scrolling a page with fixed elements (that's another thing fixed by using a hack to kick in GPU rendering). Edge is actually much better. I've been using Macs for 20 years and I can't believe I'm to the point where I'm using a Microsoft IDE and praising their web browser over Apple's.
Waterluvian 9y ago
Oh so you want a large canvas on an iPad? No, F you. That might impact performance so we restrict it.
- threeseed 9y ago
  Some of the iPads have a very limited amount of memory e.g. 1GB. I think users would be expecting Apple to curtail your ability to crash or hang the browser.
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    I can crash the mobile safari just fine all is needed is lot of overflowing images in a transformed div What I really hate is that when safari shits itself the message to the user is “there was a problem with the web page so it was reloaded” so we get old iphone users complaining to us when their lame browser crashed. That and iframes getting resized to full height ignoring css directives completely... we have a lot of our codebase that are workaround just for ios
starik36 9y ago
I disagree. The IE6 of today is IE11, not Safari. Just look caniuse.come for practically any modern feature. It either requires you to pollute your code base with polyfills or doesn't work at all. Every day bring another fun barrier. Today it was Promises (https://caniuse.com/#search=promise https://caniuse.com/#search=promise), tomorrow, I am sure, it'll be something else.
- Mayzie 9y ago
  Except IE11 is 4 years old and no longer has any feature development. Use Edge.
  - starik36 9y ago
    Nearly all IE11 visits to my sites are from Windows 7 and 8.
gurkendoktor 9y ago
Most of your complaints are related to how iOS handles web apps that you've saved to the home screen, which is a feature that is completely orthogonal to Apple's rendering engine. I agree that iOS home screen apps are in a pretty bad state, but Google is also discontinuing Chrome Apps and that doesn't make Chrome a worse HTML renderer.
SZJX 9y ago
Exactly. I find Safari extremely unpleasant to use in many cases. Firefox Beta on Android at least makes me feel much better.

amelius 9y ago

This also shows that the architecture of the web is wrong, i.e. to have the browser vendor in control rather than the developers.

EGreg 9y ago

What really sucks is that Apple has TENS OF BILLIONS of dollars in cash, and yet can't be bothered to throw a billion at fixing iOS, iOS safari and MacOS bugs. Its quality really went downhill. I really loved the "it just works" stuff of Apple Past. And I loved the intuitive, skeumorphic interfaces. Now it's all crap and HIDDEN MODES - something Apple always spoke against in its UX manuals. It's sad day that Google and Microsoft have better design than Apple now, and Apple copied them. Steve Jobs would have never let this happen. He would have a whole department funded with several billion dollars just to make Apple products the most user friendly on the planet. And he would have Siri be a Star-Trek-like voice platform by now.

brians 9y ago
What reduction in bug rate should we expect for each, day, $100M invested?
- foobarz 9y ago
  Back in time, Microsoft invested heavily in program analysis to fix those hideous BSODs due to broken third-party drivers. It was very successful. Apple's problem is simpler as they own the code, and bugs are likely to come from understaffed engineering.
  - connorelsea 9y ago
    Apple's self-contained platform, huge sums of money, and massive upgrade adoption rates would make it very easy for them to ship modern software. They for some reason choose not to
    - threeseed 9y ago
      iOS and OSX isn't modern software ? I am curious about the qualities an operating system needs to be deemed "modern".
      - connorelsea 9y ago
        I personally love iOS and macOS and use them both daily. Though there are facets of both that I think could easily be improved given Apple's position. Off the top of my head - A. Slow development cycles on Safari (they're getting better, but still) while simultaneously blocking competitors on iOS B. A number of embarrassing security failures on macOS recently C. A lack of focus on macOS (Probably the cause of B)
- VikingCoder 9y ago
  I can't tell you how many more meters per second you will get if you push harder on the gas... But I can tell you that pushing harder on the gas is likely to get you where you're going quicker. Do we really need to discuss exact m/s before you're willing to push harder on the frickin gas?

kuon 9y ago

I discovered that having an onScroll event handler on a div with overflow and -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch resulted into weird visual artifacts under certain conditions. And no, I don't want to override native scroll (which is often a bad idea), I want to react to the scroll.

tpush 9y ago

Given this it's really a shame that Apple does not allow other browser engines on iOS. Would be a prime opportunity for competition to raise the overall quality level.

user5994461 9y ago
Looks like a case for anti trust, just like microsoft had with IE.
- jen20 9y ago
  Why? iOS has by most measures less than 50% of the market.
  - connorelsea 9y ago
    Even with a low market share Apple could still theoretically be engaging in practices that are anti-consumer, such as disallowing the use of other browser engines. Though, afaik, Apple does not stoop to the levels of Amazon, who removed the Twitch app from Roku platform for absolutely no reason other than to line their pockets with more cash.
    - joshred 9y ago
      Before they purchased it?
      - connorelsea 9y ago
        Nah, after - to make it a "Fire TV Exclusive" app http://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-roku/ http://www.cordcuttersnews.com/amazon-pulls-twitch-channel-r...
    - baddox 9y ago
      Aren’t anticompetitive and anti-consumer two completely separate things?

abritinthebay 9y ago

Based on this you either never had to work with IE6 compatibility, or you have a really bad memory. Not least most of what you mention (other than the 300ms delay) is OS level anyhow.

tracker1 9y ago
I worked with IE6 both as it became the defacto standard browser everywhere, and for the years it took Mozilla Phoenix^wFirebird^wFirefox to take hold as the defining force, and then Chrome coming to dominate. When IE6 came out it was kind of a breath of fresh air... it allowed for a lot of things, and the v4 browsers finally fell off the map. IE 5.0.0 had some hideous bugs on stamped CDs (Office 2000, Windows 2000) that I had to work around for a couple years. IE6 corrected many of them. Now as things progressed, IE6 became a boat anchor for a long time.. and IE7/8/9 though relatively current at release fell behind very quickly. IE10-11 were also rans in my opinion, and I'm glad most people get to ignore them now. Nothing compares to dealing with IE4 + NN4 issues... it was truly painful and I'll take what we have today over either. Most people aren't dealing with most of the newer browser features... but for those that are, it can be bad. Safari is the worst actor in the bunch, and they are emphatically not rock solid on that front.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  People do forget that IE was legitimately a good browser for quite a while - starting around IE3 it really did quite well. Plus I'll take IE4 + NN4 issues vs IE6/7/8 issues in 20-freaking-14 (or beyond, argh). IE9 at least fixed a lot. At least the early IE vs NN stuff was fast to change and interesting. IE6 issues were the exact opposite :(
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    The real explorer issue was that xp refused to die for the longest time. When those browser came out they were kinda fine in context, they got lot of hate a decade later when the world moved onto new standard but you still had 10%+ users living in the past

throwaway284534 9y ago

Here here. The author clearly hasn't worked with Apple's implementation of Audio Context either. Granted the bar is pretty low compared to Chrome, but wow! What a mess. Safari consistently has latency and bit rate issues when playing even the smallest files.

booleandilemma 9y ago
Actually it’s “hear hear”. This comment has been up for 3 hours already, I’m surprised I’m the first word nazi to correct it :)
- gmfawcett 9y ago
  If we're being pedantic, there ought to be a comma between those "hears". :)
- userbinator 9y ago
  "Hear, hear" on a comment about Audio Context? ;-)

asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago

I've been saying Safari is the new IE, they still can't even manage to properly implement flexbox spec and I've had a handful of rendering bugs to report on super basic things like scrolling a page with fixed elements (that's another thing fixed by using a hack to kick in GPU rendering). Edge is actually much better. I've been using Macs for 20 years and I can't believe I'm to the point where I'm using a Microsoft IDE and praising their web browser over Apple's.

Waterluvian 9y ago

Oh so you want a large canvas on an iPad? No, F you. That might impact performance so we restrict it.

threeseed 9y ago
Some of the iPads have a very limited amount of memory e.g. 1GB. I think users would be expecting Apple to curtail your ability to crash or hang the browser.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  I can crash the mobile safari just fine all is needed is lot of overflowing images in a transformed div What I really hate is that when safari shits itself the message to the user is “there was a problem with the web page so it was reloaded” so we get old iphone users complaining to us when their lame browser crashed. That and iframes getting resized to full height ignoring css directives completely... we have a lot of our codebase that are workaround just for ios

starik36 9y ago

I disagree. The IE6 of today is IE11, not Safari. Just look caniuse.come for practically any modern feature. It either requires you to pollute your code base with polyfills or doesn't work at all. Every day bring another fun barrier. Today it was Promises (https://caniuse.com/#search=promise https://caniuse.com/#search=promise), tomorrow, I am sure, it'll be something else.

Mayzie 9y ago
Except IE11 is 4 years old and no longer has any feature development. Use Edge.
- starik36 9y ago
  Nearly all IE11 visits to my sites are from Windows 7 and 8.

gurkendoktor 9y ago

Most of your complaints are related to how iOS handles web apps that you've saved to the home screen, which is a feature that is completely orthogonal to Apple's rendering engine. I agree that iOS home screen apps are in a pretty bad state, but Google is also discontinuing Chrome Apps and that doesn't make Chrome a worse HTML renderer.

SZJX 9y ago

Exactly. I find Safari extremely unpleasant to use in many cases. Firefox Beta on Android at least makes me feel much better.