3 ms·

I'm not that big on Google criticism. I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I f

by dgb23 6y ago

I'm not that big on Google criticism. I dislike targeted advertising, because I find it useless. I like context advertising much more: When I browse X then I find ads related to X sometimes useful. I use some of their products like gmail and drive sometimes. But for browsing and searching I use Firefox and DDG. But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing. This issue is different from the things we criticize about Google. They neither restrict me as a user nor as a developer. I can avoid using their stuff and I can avoid aggressively targeted ads (in fact they have a psychologically negative impact on me). As for personal sites and blogs: I still very much read personal blogs. The quality (whatever that means, but you know...) of articles on those is generally much higher than on medium/dev.to or whatever platform. In fact there is so much good content on small/personal sites, that I don't have time to read it all.

mistersquid 6y ago
> But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. This sentiment is inexact and incorrect. MS/IE was a problem once it achieved market dominance. Safari has never achieved such dominance. More accurate is a comparison using Netscape 1.x-4.x and MSIE =< 6. Allow me to explain. Prior to MSIE dominating with IE 6, MS was engaged in its campaign to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Netscape. This is similar to where Google Chrome is now. Google Chrome rolls in not-yet-ratified web "standards" before anyone, including Safari, has a chance to respond. Thereby, Google Chrome increasingly establishes its dominance. Safari is in the position of Netscape, with a codebase that is increasingly perceived as inadequate when compared to Google Chrome. Of course, such a comparison can only go so far. My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements ratified standards, something that takes time. Google Chrome, on the other hand, bakes in anything and everything to secure its advantage in the browser market, just as MS did with IE when Netscape was still around. Once Netscape died, MSIE 6 was the problem.
- dgb23 6y ago
  First of all thank you for relativising my one-sided comment. Let me clarify what I mean a bit. I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past. My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it. With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse. With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this. This particular statement seems questionable: > My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time. In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring. Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it. > In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. Agreed 100%! My earlier comment was in the context of macOS and might have been very different had I also considered iOS/iPadOS. iOS and iPadOS are restrictive and mobile Safari somewhat slows innovation. Your objections regarding mobile Safari's deficiencies are worth considering. Thank you. I also agree Apple does this to protect the iOS App platform (I might just say "iOS platform"). Reasonable arguments exist about why Apple's lock on mobile Safari is good and why it is bad. (I personally think Apple could do better here, but I am not knowledgeable enough to comment further.)
oscargrouch 6y ago
A parent comment is calling Chrome/Blink as IE6, but for the is evident that is actually Apple (yes, the whole of Apple) the new IE6 force. The IE6 concept i think is now something that transcends just the browser, because it describes very well a trick to maintain market dominance. Once you get into a position of platform control, as Microsoft did in the IE6 days, together with Windows.. and note here how you have to circle around the whole platform, not just the browser to get the whole picture. To maintain your control, you keep others from telling what the next steps for that particular platform should be. So its clear to me that its Apple with its OS market share that through Safari will try everything they can to stop the Web to become a competing platform to their "kits". And in their case, this strategy is more clear, when they dont let any other browser engine to be used except the one they control and will never let to become a competing platform to their own app kit. Because they know that once developers create more multi-platform apps, their distinction as something different, unique and better starts to vanish. They will play the card of security, and about how they are thinking in they users well-being (and this is whats Apple does best). And of course that "for the sake of security" will be also right, because more features means more ways to exploit. So this is a 'joker card' that they can always use to resort to some excuse their users will believe. Chrome for instance also use a trick, but its the total reverse of 'IE6', they put in a lot of features, and with this 'platform bloat' its pretty hard for the others engines to follow, requiring a lot of engineering and money to keep playing this expensive and exhaustive game, People complaining about Blink here, didn't see that other players let go the infernal mission to keep their web engines in sync with the "modern standards" that are mostly proposed by Google, and where almost only them have the engineering and money resources to spend in this "platform bloat" game.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
>But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing. Whatever Apple is doing with Safari, it seems much more resource efficient than Chrome on OS X. (Firefox is somewhere in the middle). Chrome can become unusable under a normal load, while Safari almost never does no matter how much I abuse it. Safari seems to hibernate background windows and tabs much better. If the tradeoff for accomplishing that resource efficiency is not supporting all of the edge case features Google puts in its browsers, I'm ok with that. It's nice to have that option.

by dgb23 6y ago

mistersquid 6y ago

> But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. This sentiment is inexact and incorrect. MS/IE was a problem once it achieved market dominance. Safari has never achieved such dominance. More accurate is a comparison using Netscape 1.x-4.x and MSIE =< 6. Allow me to explain. Prior to MSIE dominating with IE 6, MS was engaged in its campaign to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" Netscape. This is similar to where Google Chrome is now. Google Chrome rolls in not-yet-ratified web "standards" before anyone, including Safari, has a chance to respond. Thereby, Google Chrome increasingly establishes its dominance. Safari is in the position of Netscape, with a codebase that is increasingly perceived as inadequate when compared to Google Chrome. Of course, such a comparison can only go so far. My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements ratified standards, something that takes time. Google Chrome, on the other hand, bakes in anything and everything to secure its advantage in the browser market, just as MS did with IE when Netscape was still around. Once Netscape died, MSIE 6 was the problem.

dgb23 6y ago
First of all thank you for relativising my one-sided comment. Let me clarify what I mean a bit. I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past. My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it. With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse. With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this. This particular statement seems questionable: > My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time. In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring. Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it. > In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. Agreed 100%! My earlier comment was in the context of macOS and might have been very different had I also considered iOS/iPadOS. iOS and iPadOS are restrictive and mobile Safari somewhat slows innovation. Your objections regarding mobile Safari's deficiencies are worth considering. Thank you. I also agree Apple does this to protect the iOS App platform (I might just say "iOS platform"). Reasonable arguments exist about why Apple's lock on mobile Safari is good and why it is bad. (I personally think Apple could do better here, but I am not knowledgeable enough to comment further.)

oscargrouch 6y ago

A parent comment is calling Chrome/Blink as IE6, but for the is evident that is actually Apple (yes, the whole of Apple) the new IE6 force. The IE6 concept i think is now something that transcends just the browser, because it describes very well a trick to maintain market dominance. Once you get into a position of platform control, as Microsoft did in the IE6 days, together with Windows.. and note here how you have to circle around the whole platform, not just the browser to get the whole picture. To maintain your control, you keep others from telling what the next steps for that particular platform should be. So its clear to me that its Apple with its OS market share that through Safari will try everything they can to stop the Web to become a competing platform to their "kits". And in their case, this strategy is more clear, when they dont let any other browser engine to be used except the one they control and will never let to become a competing platform to their own app kit. Because they know that once developers create more multi-platform apps, their distinction as something different, unique and better starts to vanish. They will play the card of security, and about how they are thinking in they users well-being (and this is whats Apple does best). And of course that "for the sake of security" will be also right, because more features means more ways to exploit. So this is a 'joker card' that they can always use to resort to some excuse their users will believe. Chrome for instance also use a trick, but its the total reverse of 'IE6', they put in a lot of features, and with this 'platform bloat' its pretty hard for the others engines to follow, requiring a lot of engineering and money to keep playing this expensive and exhaustive game, People complaining about Blink here, didn't see that other players let go the infernal mission to keep their web engines in sync with the "modern standards" that are mostly proposed by Google, and where almost only them have the engineering and money resources to spend in this "platform bloat" game.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

>But as a web-dev I dislike Apple/Safari. They have become MS/IE 2.0. My not so generous assumption is that they try to restrict the web to make their app platform more appealing. Whatever Apple is doing with Safari, it seems much more resource efficient than Chrome on OS X. (Firefox is somewhere in the middle). Chrome can become unusable under a normal load, while Safari almost never does no matter how much I abuse it. Safari seems to hibernate background windows and tabs much better. If the tradeoff for accomplishing that resource efficiency is not supporting all of the edge case features Google puts in its browsers, I'm ok with that. It's nice to have that option.