4 ms·

OP here. This issue broke the website we've been building: https://wormhole.app https://wormhole.app The vast majority of the time we spend diagnosing and work

by feross 5y ago

OP here. This issue broke the website we've been building: https://wormhole.app https://wormhole.app The vast majority of the time we spend diagnosing and working around browser bugs is devoted to Safari. As an iPhone/Mac user and lover of all things Web, I really, really want Apple to get their act together with Safari. We sadly keep running into issues like this. Here are a few more recent examples: https://twitter.com/feross/status/1386835131780931587 https://twitter.com/feross/status/1386835131780931587 https://twitter.com/feross/status/1392671684419735552 https://twitter.com/feross/status/1392671684419735552 https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464 https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464

the_gipsy 5y ago
Stockholm syndrome
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ksec 5y ago
  There isn't a single Window PC system on the market which I would rate at 80% of current MacBook M1 / iMac has to offer. It is not that people aren't looking for alternative. It is simply Windows PC industry has a lot of catching up to do. Both software and hardware. And its annoying because Apple desperately need some competition. Edit: And their strategic direction / decisions without Steve Jobs are all over the place. Along with their hypercritical PR since 2015.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - uzakov 5y ago
    Dell XPS 15 or Dell XPS 17 - quality build, good specs, has a dedicated GPU, decent price(at least in the USA) good size. Whenever I hear "Windows PC industry has a lot of catching up to do" I always ask what particulars are you missing or not there?
    - martpie 5y ago
      Can you put all that in a 13.3 inches chassis, make barely no noise when compiling hundred of thousand LoCs and reach 20 hours battery life on standard use? Let's compare apples to apples.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - mcny 5y ago
        I think it is unfair to compare apples to apples. Nobody other than Apple has the M1 chip. You should not judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Pick up a recent top of the line desktop processor, possibly an AMD Ryzen 9 or a Threadripper, pair it with an excellent motherboard, power delivery, memory, and storage. Put it in a huge, high airflow case, connect it to a switch (ideally with two Intel based wired Network interfaces) and leave it in the basement. Use key-based authentication to ssh (mosh?) into the desktop. Now your Dell XPS or Thinkpad T series or whatever will run cool and quiet.
        antihero 5y ago
        So instead of a chip, you are spending thousands on an entirely separate machine? We're comparing ability to work at speed and convenience at a specific price point. Apple, for all their flaws, are head and shoulders above the competition at the moment.
        wayneftw 5y ago
        > Apple, for all their flaws, are head and shoulders above the competition at the moment. ...if you can stand using macOS and if you optimize for working in planes, trains, hotels or in meetings. If you only need 16gb of RAM and one external display. If you like touchpads and if all of your preferred hardware works with it. If all of that, then sure. I like hardware and software that just works without getting in my way and let's me do what I want and Apple has never been able to provide that. Heck, you can't even change the mouse pointer color in macOS without buying a third party app (which might stop working next year). No thanks- give me a PC tower, 2-3 displays, an ergonomic keyboard and a 5 button vertical mouse in a quiet room. I'll have Manjaro/XFCE setup and running circles around an M1 with real containers while you're waiting on virtualized containers or investigating which libs won't compile because they're not ready for the M1 yet. When I came back into the office from the pandemic they told me that some guy with an M1 started working with one of our teams and he got laughed out of the office because nothing worked on it. That's head and shoulders?
  - int_19h 5y ago
    It really depends on your perspective. I know several people who won't touch Macs with a ten foot pole, because they consider the UX to be horrible. And they're not even "power users".
    - teen 5y ago
      also useless for gaming
  - jeswin 5y ago
    > There isn't a single Window PC system on the market which I would rate at 80% of current MacBook M1 / iMac has to offer. That's quite subjective. I need at least 32GB of RAM, 4k display, and a real GPU at times. The keyboard on the M1 Mac is inferior to that on a ThinkPad and I generally prefer Linux over macOS.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      I'm looking at the 15" Thinkpad "Performance" lineup [0], but it doesn't looks to me to be on par with the current 15" intel MacBook Pro. Display is better on the MBP, RAM goes the same max amount (64), the GPU seems a tad better on the MBP with the AMD Radeon Pro 5500M. As you say the keyboard feel might be different, but we're really in subjective territory (I used the MBP's new keyboard for a year, and it's now a good laptop keyboard) [0] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/ThinkPad-P1-Gen-3/p/22WS2P1P1N3 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/Thi...
      - adriancr 5y ago
        razer blade 15, 4k oled screen, proper cooling, 32 gb, rtx 3080...
      - jfrunyon 5y ago
        Thinkpad T15g: $2099, 10th gen Intel i7 2.6GHz 6-core, 16GB DDR4, 512GB PCIe, RTX 2070 MBP: $2399, 9th gen Intel i7 2.6GHz 6-core, 16GB, 512GB PCIe, Radeon Pro 5300M (which is not remotely better than the RTX 2070). But hey you get a touch bar for $300+.
    - easton 5y ago
      >keyboard is inferior I think that’s subjective. Worse that the old *20 and older keyboard? Yep. Worse than the current chiclet keyboard? No.
  - nijave 5y ago
    Besides Dell XPS (which I quite like), Lenovo X1 Carbon is also very competitive. Neither are ARM, though Sounds like I've had much better luck with my XPS 13 than the other commenter. Only issue is trackpad but I think it worked fine on Windows and it's just hard to get configured right on Fedora
- tarsinge 5y ago
  Why? As a user Safari is the best browsing experience, lightweight, fast, and with the lowest energy usage.
  - the_gipsy 5y ago
    it's not lightweight if you can't install a real adblocker https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 enjoy your "promoted content"
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I use Wipr, and it sufficiently blocks ads such that I do not notice them. If the trade off for perfect ad blocking to whatever Safari has is a few hours of battery life, I’ll take the battery life.
      - the_gipsy 5y ago
        Everybody says “oh I ignore ads, my brain automatically blocks them out, it doesn’t affect me” but the truth is they do affect you.
  - azangru 5y ago
    > As a user Safari is the best browsing experience So how's the browsing experience on the sites that use IndexedDB now?
dmz73 5y ago
Easy, stop supporting Safari. No-one cares when IE support is dropped (people usually cheer for this) and user needs to download and install another browser. So, stop supporting Safari and concentrate on Chrome (I use Firefox but their market share is even smaller so who cares). If enough people show they don't support Safari, THEN Apple will listen. If you keep complaining about having to support Safari then why would Apple care? Not only are you doing all the work for free, you are paying them money for their devices and software.
- kabes 5y ago
  On iOS you don't have a choice other than Safari (other browsers are just wrappers around safari die to Apple policies). And most of us can't afford to drop iOS support (and most of us aren't even in the position to make that call).
- WA 5y ago
  Chrome has other issues once in a while as well. Ironically, they broke IndexedDB in 2018 when a device had less than 1 GB of available space (which happened surprisingly often in 2018 on Android). A few months ago, Chrome broke all WebView-based apps. Fortunately, they fixed it within a day. The IndexedDb bug was fixed after 6 weeks.
  - pier25 5y ago
    The difference is Apple doesn't care about reported WK bugs. I reported a bug in 2016 and it's still open. Another bug I reported in early 2020 doesn't even have an answer from the team.
- pzo 5y ago
  Any browser on iOS must use safari browser engine (otherwise won't be approved in app store) - the same issue will arise while using Chrome or Firefox on iPhone. Unless you can afford not support iOS/iPadOS users, devs have not choice but complain about bugs.
  - ajuc 5y ago
tofukid 5y ago
What do you need IndexedDB for?
- azangru 5y ago
  In-browser long-term storage.
  - tofukid 5y ago
    Yeah, but of what? Caching the downloaded file? I wouldn’t think encrypted file links would need long term storage of anything. You receive the link, key exchange is derived from key in link, file is downloaded and decrypted on-the-fly.
    - azangru 5y ago
      > Yeah, but of what? As far as I understand Google's recommendation for web developers, of anything [0]. Their position is, avoid localStorage because it's synchronous, use indexedDB because it's asynchronous. So anything you would use localStorage for, Google suggests putting into indexedDB instead. I don't remember whether the browser API was expected to get AsyncLocalStorage like the Node API has, or whether that would change Google's recommendations for developers. [0] - https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/ https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/
      - whoisburbansky 5y ago
        GP’s point is that at first blush it doesn’t seem like the Wormhole app should need any local storage in the first place.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- feross 5y ago
  Wormhole.app uses peer-to-peer transfer to send your files directly from your browser to the recipient, in addition to using cloud hosting. We use WebTorrent behind-the-scenes, so we need random access to the end-to-end encrypted version of the files to satisfy requests from peers. So we try to put the files on disk using Filesystem Access API or IndexedDB, falling back to in-memory if there's not enough storage.
alostpuppy 5y ago
Oh man. I have spent 100s of man hours on indexeddb on safari issues. Feel your pain!
pineconewarrior 5y ago
You could always port the whole thing over to WASM and run it as a spooky blob of code!
- CryZe 5y ago
  WASM still needs IndexedDB (or other storage) to store data in the browser.
  - pineconewarrior 5y ago
    You could serialize the DB in localstorage as yet another mysterious blob of data! But yeah that's not a good idea, really.
mmastrac 5y ago
Safari is the red-headed stepchild of browsers. The dev tools are weird and different, the bugs are obscure and it's pretty much impossible to do anything on it. I love browser diversity but I wouldn't be sad to see it go away.
pier25 5y ago
I've been facing bugs and non standard Safari behaviors for years. I've been reporting bugs to WK for years and none have been solved. Did you know you can't set the dimensions of an iframe in iOS?

by feross 5y ago

the_gipsy 5y ago

Stockholm syndrome

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ksec 5y ago
There isn't a single Window PC system on the market which I would rate at 80% of current MacBook M1 / iMac has to offer. It is not that people aren't looking for alternative. It is simply Windows PC industry has a lot of catching up to do. Both software and hardware. And its annoying because Apple desperately need some competition. Edit: And their strategic direction / decisions without Steve Jobs are all over the place. Along with their hypercritical PR since 2015.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- uzakov 5y ago
  Dell XPS 15 or Dell XPS 17 - quality build, good specs, has a dedicated GPU, decent price(at least in the USA) good size. Whenever I hear "Windows PC industry has a lot of catching up to do" I always ask what particulars are you missing or not there?
  - martpie 5y ago
    Can you put all that in a 13.3 inches chassis, make barely no noise when compiling hundred of thousand LoCs and reach 20 hours battery life on standard use? Let's compare apples to apples.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mcny 5y ago
      I think it is unfair to compare apples to apples. Nobody other than Apple has the M1 chip. You should not judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Pick up a recent top of the line desktop processor, possibly an AMD Ryzen 9 or a Threadripper, pair it with an excellent motherboard, power delivery, memory, and storage. Put it in a huge, high airflow case, connect it to a switch (ideally with two Intel based wired Network interfaces) and leave it in the basement. Use key-based authentication to ssh (mosh?) into the desktop. Now your Dell XPS or Thinkpad T series or whatever will run cool and quiet.
      - antihero 5y ago
        So instead of a chip, you are spending thousands on an entirely separate machine? We're comparing ability to work at speed and convenience at a specific price point. Apple, for all their flaws, are head and shoulders above the competition at the moment.
        wayneftw 5y ago
        > Apple, for all their flaws, are head and shoulders above the competition at the moment. ...if you can stand using macOS and if you optimize for working in planes, trains, hotels or in meetings. If you only need 16gb of RAM and one external display. If you like touchpads and if all of your preferred hardware works with it. If all of that, then sure. I like hardware and software that just works without getting in my way and let's me do what I want and Apple has never been able to provide that. Heck, you can't even change the mouse pointer color in macOS without buying a third party app (which might stop working next year). No thanks- give me a PC tower, 2-3 displays, an ergonomic keyboard and a 5 button vertical mouse in a quiet room. I'll have Manjaro/XFCE setup and running circles around an M1 with real containers while you're waiting on virtualized containers or investigating which libs won't compile because they're not ready for the M1 yet. When I came back into the office from the pandemic they told me that some guy with an M1 started working with one of our teams and he got laughed out of the office because nothing worked on it. That's head and shoulders?
- int_19h 5y ago
  It really depends on your perspective. I know several people who won't touch Macs with a ten foot pole, because they consider the UX to be horrible. And they're not even "power users".
  - teen 5y ago
    also useless for gaming
- jeswin 5y ago
  > There isn't a single Window PC system on the market which I would rate at 80% of current MacBook M1 / iMac has to offer. That's quite subjective. I need at least 32GB of RAM, 4k display, and a real GPU at times. The keyboard on the M1 Mac is inferior to that on a ThinkPad and I generally prefer Linux over macOS.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I'm looking at the 15" Thinkpad "Performance" lineup [0], but it doesn't looks to me to be on par with the current 15" intel MacBook Pro. Display is better on the MBP, RAM goes the same max amount (64), the GPU seems a tad better on the MBP with the AMD Radeon Pro 5500M. As you say the keyboard feel might be different, but we're really in subjective territory (I used the MBP's new keyboard for a year, and it's now a good laptop keyboard) [0] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/ThinkPad-P1-Gen-3/p/22WS2P1P1N3 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-p/Thi...
    - adriancr 5y ago
      razer blade 15, 4k oled screen, proper cooling, 32 gb, rtx 3080...
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      Thinkpad T15g: $2099, 10th gen Intel i7 2.6GHz 6-core, 16GB DDR4, 512GB PCIe, RTX 2070 MBP: $2399, 9th gen Intel i7 2.6GHz 6-core, 16GB, 512GB PCIe, Radeon Pro 5300M (which is not remotely better than the RTX 2070). But hey you get a touch bar for $300+.
  - easton 5y ago
    >keyboard is inferior I think that’s subjective. Worse that the old *20 and older keyboard? Yep. Worse than the current chiclet keyboard? No.
- nijave 5y ago
  Besides Dell XPS (which I quite like), Lenovo X1 Carbon is also very competitive. Neither are ARM, though Sounds like I've had much better luck with my XPS 13 than the other commenter. Only issue is trackpad but I think it worked fine on Windows and it's just hard to get configured right on Fedora
tarsinge 5y ago
Why? As a user Safari is the best browsing experience, lightweight, fast, and with the lowest energy usage.
- the_gipsy 5y ago
  it's not lightweight if you can't install a real adblocker https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158 enjoy your "promoted content"
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I use Wipr, and it sufficiently blocks ads such that I do not notice them. If the trade off for perfect ad blocking to whatever Safari has is a few hours of battery life, I’ll take the battery life.
    - the_gipsy 5y ago
      Everybody says “oh I ignore ads, my brain automatically blocks them out, it doesn’t affect me” but the truth is they do affect you.
- azangru 5y ago
  > As a user Safari is the best browsing experience So how's the browsing experience on the sites that use IndexedDB now?

dmz73 5y ago

Easy, stop supporting Safari. No-one cares when IE support is dropped (people usually cheer for this) and user needs to download and install another browser. So, stop supporting Safari and concentrate on Chrome (I use Firefox but their market share is even smaller so who cares). If enough people show they don't support Safari, THEN Apple will listen. If you keep complaining about having to support Safari then why would Apple care? Not only are you doing all the work for free, you are paying them money for their devices and software.

kabes 5y ago
On iOS you don't have a choice other than Safari (other browsers are just wrappers around safari die to Apple policies). And most of us can't afford to drop iOS support (and most of us aren't even in the position to make that call).
WA 5y ago
Chrome has other issues once in a while as well. Ironically, they broke IndexedDB in 2018 when a device had less than 1 GB of available space (which happened surprisingly often in 2018 on Android). A few months ago, Chrome broke all WebView-based apps. Fortunately, they fixed it within a day. The IndexedDb bug was fixed after 6 weeks.
- pier25 5y ago
  The difference is Apple doesn't care about reported WK bugs. I reported a bug in 2016 and it's still open. Another bug I reported in early 2020 doesn't even have an answer from the team.
pzo 5y ago
Any browser on iOS must use safari browser engine (otherwise won't be approved in app store) - the same issue will arise while using Chrome or Firefox on iPhone. Unless you can afford not support iOS/iPadOS users, devs have not choice but complain about bugs.
- ajuc 5y ago

tofukid 5y ago

What do you need IndexedDB for?

azangru 5y ago
In-browser long-term storage.
- tofukid 5y ago
  Yeah, but of what? Caching the downloaded file? I wouldn’t think encrypted file links would need long term storage of anything. You receive the link, key exchange is derived from key in link, file is downloaded and decrypted on-the-fly.
  - azangru 5y ago
    > Yeah, but of what? As far as I understand Google's recommendation for web developers, of anything [0]. Their position is, avoid localStorage because it's synchronous, use indexedDB because it's asynchronous. So anything you would use localStorage for, Google suggests putting into indexedDB instead. I don't remember whether the browser API was expected to get AsyncLocalStorage like the Node API has, or whether that would change Google's recommendations for developers. [0] - https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/ https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/
    - whoisburbansky 5y ago
      GP’s point is that at first blush it doesn’t seem like the Wormhole app should need any local storage in the first place.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
feross 5y ago
Wormhole.app uses peer-to-peer transfer to send your files directly from your browser to the recipient, in addition to using cloud hosting. We use WebTorrent behind-the-scenes, so we need random access to the end-to-end encrypted version of the files to satisfy requests from peers. So we try to put the files on disk using Filesystem Access API or IndexedDB, falling back to in-memory if there's not enough storage.

alostpuppy 5y ago

Oh man. I have spent 100s of man hours on indexeddb on safari issues. Feel your pain!

pineconewarrior 5y ago

You could always port the whole thing over to WASM and run it as a spooky blob of code!

CryZe 5y ago
WASM still needs IndexedDB (or other storage) to store data in the browser.
- pineconewarrior 5y ago
  You could serialize the DB in localstorage as yet another mysterious blob of data! But yeah that's not a good idea, really.

mmastrac 5y ago

Safari is the red-headed stepchild of browsers. The dev tools are weird and different, the bugs are obscure and it's pretty much impossible to do anything on it. I love browser diversity but I wouldn't be sad to see it go away.

pier25 5y ago

I've been facing bugs and non standard Safari behaviors for years. I've been reporting bugs to WK for years and none have been solved. Did you know you can't set the dimensions of an iframe in iOS?