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Yes, Safari is the new Opera. Technically superior in many ways but also barely competing. Opera went on to abandon their custom technology in favor of Chrome

Yes, Safari is the new Opera. Technically superior in many ways but also barely competing. Opera went on to abandon their custom technology in favor of Chrome's after losing their dominant position in mobile to Safari and Chrome. As long as the EU doesn't force Apple to accept fair competition on iOS Safari's future looks bright!

favorited 7y ago
IIRC Opera was planning to adopt WebKit – but when Google forked WebKit, Opera went with Blink instead.
robocat 7y ago
Safari is the new IE6, because the version of Safari you have is locked to the version of iOS you have. Features like Pointer Events, visualViewport, ES2017 etc are available on Android 4.4, because Google still updates Chrome on old Android devices. I struggle to support iOS 9 (Safari 9) and I barely support iOS 7, because we have a number of users with old devices and we are not a consumer app so we can't just ignore our users who cannot upgrade their browser. I regularly check caniuse and mdn to see if I can use a useful feature that is in Firefox, Chrome and Edge, and I regularly can't because Safari doesn't support it. Or often I try to use a feature and it is buggy on Safari. Safari is the only browser that regularly breaks our web app (most recently Safari 13 changes for the iPad desktop mode). I also see old versions of Safari in use by some of our MacOS users (presumably because they can't or won't update?) If our users hit a show-stopping bug in any other browser (browser bug or our bug), they can usually try a different browser. But iOS users can only use WebKit, so they are the most vulnerable to serious bugs.
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  I would say you can pretty much aim for iOS 10 or even 11 as a minimum. The number of devices running iOS 7 is quite small. My moms iPad 2 runs iOS 9 and that’s about one of the oldest Idevices going
  - robocat 7y ago
    You can do that if you don't have any poor users, or you don't have to care about them (e.g. many consumer apps). Our clients are businesses, and our users are their employees (from a wide range of backgrounds). The employees must use our web app, and our clients mostly don't get to choose what their employees use. We log how many users are on old browsers, and we try to support users on old browsers if it isn't too costly for us to do so. In my experience, the majority of people using a iPhone 4 or an Android 4.4 device are doing so because they can't afford to update, and they are often otherwise marginalised. I try hard not to give them yet another kick in the teeth for stuff outside their control.

favorited 7y ago

IIRC Opera was planning to adopt WebKit – but when Google forked WebKit, Opera went with Blink instead.

robocat 7y ago

Safari is the new IE6, because the version of Safari you have is locked to the version of iOS you have. Features like Pointer Events, visualViewport, ES2017 etc are available on Android 4.4, because Google still updates Chrome on old Android devices. I struggle to support iOS 9 (Safari 9) and I barely support iOS 7, because we have a number of users with old devices and we are not a consumer app so we can't just ignore our users who cannot upgrade their browser. I regularly check caniuse and mdn to see if I can use a useful feature that is in Firefox, Chrome and Edge, and I regularly can't because Safari doesn't support it. Or often I try to use a feature and it is buggy on Safari. Safari is the only browser that regularly breaks our web app (most recently Safari 13 changes for the iPad desktop mode). I also see old versions of Safari in use by some of our MacOS users (presumably because they can't or won't update?) If our users hit a show-stopping bug in any other browser (browser bug or our bug), they can usually try a different browser. But iOS users can only use WebKit, so they are the most vulnerable to serious bugs.

Synaesthesia 7y ago
I would say you can pretty much aim for iOS 10 or even 11 as a minimum. The number of devices running iOS 7 is quite small. My moms iPad 2 runs iOS 9 and that’s about one of the oldest Idevices going
- robocat 7y ago
  You can do that if you don't have any poor users, or you don't have to care about them (e.g. many consumer apps). Our clients are businesses, and our users are their employees (from a wide range of backgrounds). The employees must use our web app, and our clients mostly don't get to choose what their employees use. We log how many users are on old browsers, and we try to support users on old browsers if it isn't too costly for us to do so. In my experience, the majority of people using a iPhone 4 or an Android 4.4 device are doing so because they can't afford to update, and they are often otherwise marginalised. I try hard not to give them yet another kick in the teeth for stuff outside their control.