8 ms·

> Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping Firefox in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a distant, but still alive, third. And slowl

> Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping Firefox in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a distant, but still alive, third. And slowly falling further behind. If we're talking about the dwindling user base then yes, but if it's about falling behind technologically then it's Safari that is a distant third. Safari is the new Internet Explorer. Everyone has to support it due to its user base (which is most likely why you don't see many sites breaking under it), but at least from my own experience it's the most feature incomplete, buggy browser out there, and it takes the most amount of work to support. It's now a regular occurrence for me that I test something in Chromium and Firefox, and it works on both, but it's broken on Safari.

wongarsu 5y ago
And just like Internet Explorer, you need a specific operating system to even test against Safari. Just that it's even worse, considering the relative market shares of Windows vs Mac (outside of Silicon Valley startups)
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  You can test on other WebKit browsers, but yeah that is not a perfect replacement.
  - gosukiwi 5y ago
    Or use BrowserStack, but it's really slow and not free
  - bwindels 5y ago
    Gnome web has proven a great replacement for me, to reproduce safari specific bugs.
- eitland 5y ago
  > And just like Internet Explorer, you need a specific operating system to even test against Safari. That's actually the only good reason I've seen for why Safari is the new IE. Chrome however is the new IE. I'll explain: - IE was technologically somewhat superior at its time, just like Chrome is now. - Only that when the competition was truly crushed, Microsoft couldn't justify spending money on it anymore. - The same will happen with Chrome as well only this time they will manage to find resources to kill adblocking first. ... for our safety, of course
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    Manifest v3 is a year away currently, so not much time left
  - kinjba11 5y ago
    I prefer to see Safari as the new IE: - On the most popular consumer operating system in the United States by numbers (iOS), it is the default browser, which is.. - furthest behind in supporting web standards. It is easy to theorize that Apple has no incentive to improve Safari given how lucrative.. - the App Store is. Apple is under antitrust scrutiny (see Epic vs. Apple), similar how Microsoft was under antitrust scrutiny due to IE integration into Windows. iOS goes further than Windows did in that iOS forces all browsers to use the same underlying browser engine. * https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states... * https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ * https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fomine3 5y ago
    IMO this is most plausible reason call Safari is the new IE: - Safari is the last browser that major upgrade is done by OS upgrade (for iOS/iPad OS)
arp242 5y ago
It's never been clear to me what "web standards" actually cause all these difficulties in the first place. A lot of the foundational stuff hasn't actually changed all that much. As an experiment, I downloaded Opera 12.16 from 2013 (the last Presto-based version), and it works better than you'd might expect. The biggest issue is that lots of https requests fail because it only supports outdated versions (it does support TLS 1.1 and 1.2 in the settings, disabled by default, but enabling that doesn't seem to have much effect). There are a few things that don't render correct: cnn.com because of incomplete flexbox support, as well as some stuff their CSS minimizer does that Opera doesn't seem to like. GitHub doesn't really work correct mostly because CSS variables aren't recognized (it does render mostly okay, just without colours and such), and the JS doesn't work as Opera doesn't support const. I couldn't test stuff like gmail, fastmail, slack, etc. due to the TLS issues, and various other sites I tested all run in to JS problems because of const, arrow functions, and similar small issues. It's certainly not usable, but overall, it's not bad for an 8 year old browser with a long-dead rendering engine. Maybe I'll run a proxy to fix the TLS issues and filter out some of the basic JS issues and see what happens then. I will say, it's slow. This is also an issue with fairly simple sites, like HN, old.reddit.com, lobste.rs, etc. Not sure what's up with that, I think it's related to network requests, as it significantly speeds up when stuff's cached. Clearly it needs significant work to be useful, but from the look of things I expect that actually, it would be an entirely doable project by a not-too-large dev team to bring Presto up to at least Safari-level in a reasonable amount of time.
dmitriid 5y ago
> Safari is the new Internet Explorer. It's not. > but if it's about falling behind technologically then it's Safari that is a distant third. You mean, Safari and FF are very close to each other, and Chrome is running away with chrome-only non-standards: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
- qshaman 5y ago
  Agree, people love to hate on Apple products for no reason.
qshaman 5y ago
this reads as wishful thinking , in which universe is safari 3rd technologically speaking? what technology does Chrome or Firefox have that Safari doesn't? Safari performance in MacOS is better than Chrome and Firefox. Can you provide any data?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
KirillPanov 5y ago
> it's the most feature incomplete And I am eternally grateful to Apple for this. Somebody has to push back against the web-standard-of-the-week insanity. Like WebPartitionEditor, WebUSB, WebBootloader and WebSSH. Google's not pushing back. Mozilla's not pushing back. Thank you, Apple. Keep pushing. Push harder.
- kinjba11 5y ago
  Do you have a problem with BigInt? fetch? Push notifications for PWAs? Dozens of other useful web technologies used by millions of apps? Is that "web-standard-of-the-week-insanity"? I agree not all standards are great. But they're *standards*. As in, you really should, because everyone else agreed it was a good idea. The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea. It's not that Safari doesn't get these features - it gets them years later than the competition. The problem with these big companies (Google is bad as well) is that they're too big to fail. If they don't like something, then the standard isn't their standard. * https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    >The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea. But this isn't what happens. Safari is pretty good at standards (they do support BigInt and fetch). What actually happens is Google "proposes" a standard, pushes it to Chrome, then goads Mozilla and Apple into adopting it. Half of the time web developers cry about Safari not adopting Standards its because they want to adopt a experimental API that Google pushed
    - kinjba11 5y ago
      > Safari is pretty good at standards (they do support BigInt and fetch) That is why I say "Safari gets them years later". For example: Chrome 42, released April 2015, supported fetch. Safari 10, released March 2017, supported fetch. Nearly two years after Chrome and Firefox. * https://webkit.org/blog/7477/new-web-features-in-safari-10-1/ https://webkit.org/blog/7477/new-web-features-in-safari-10-1... * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API#browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API#b...
tarsinge 5y ago
It's the third only if you compare to Chrome experimental APIs, that Firefox devs feel pressured to implement too. When people say it's the new IE they are not saying it's IE6 in 2010, but it's IE6 in early 00's. Google thanks to their monopoly on the web as a platform (except for an iOS anomaly in some parts of the US) is now at the extinguish part of the MS playbook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...).

wongarsu 5y ago

And just like Internet Explorer, you need a specific operating system to even test against Safari. Just that it's even worse, considering the relative market shares of Windows vs Mac (outside of Silicon Valley startups)

CameronNemo 5y ago
You can test on other WebKit browsers, but yeah that is not a perfect replacement.
- gosukiwi 5y ago
  Or use BrowserStack, but it's really slow and not free
- bwindels 5y ago
  Gnome web has proven a great replacement for me, to reproduce safari specific bugs.
eitland 5y ago
> And just like Internet Explorer, you need a specific operating system to even test against Safari. That's actually the only good reason I've seen for why Safari is the new IE. Chrome however is the new IE. I'll explain: - IE was technologically somewhat superior at its time, just like Chrome is now. - Only that when the competition was truly crushed, Microsoft couldn't justify spending money on it anymore. - The same will happen with Chrome as well only this time they will manage to find resources to kill adblocking first. ... for our safety, of course
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Manifest v3 is a year away currently, so not much time left
- kinjba11 5y ago
  I prefer to see Safari as the new IE: - On the most popular consumer operating system in the United States by numbers (iOS), it is the default browser, which is.. - furthest behind in supporting web standards. It is easy to theorize that Apple has no incentive to improve Safari given how lucrative.. - the App Store is. Apple is under antitrust scrutiny (see Epic vs. Apple), similar how Microsoft was under antitrust scrutiny due to IE integration into Windows. iOS goes further than Windows did in that iOS forces all browsers to use the same underlying browser engine. * https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states-of-america https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states... * https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ * https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fomine3 5y ago
  IMO this is most plausible reason call Safari is the new IE: - Safari is the last browser that major upgrade is done by OS upgrade (for iOS/iPad OS)

arp242 5y ago

It's never been clear to me what "web standards" actually cause all these difficulties in the first place. A lot of the foundational stuff hasn't actually changed all that much. As an experiment, I downloaded Opera 12.16 from 2013 (the last Presto-based version), and it works better than you'd might expect. The biggest issue is that lots of https requests fail because it only supports outdated versions (it does support TLS 1.1 and 1.2 in the settings, disabled by default, but enabling that doesn't seem to have much effect). There are a few things that don't render correct: cnn.com because of incomplete flexbox support, as well as some stuff their CSS minimizer does that Opera doesn't seem to like. GitHub doesn't really work correct mostly because CSS variables aren't recognized (it does render mostly okay, just without colours and such), and the JS doesn't work as Opera doesn't support const. I couldn't test stuff like gmail, fastmail, slack, etc. due to the TLS issues, and various other sites I tested all run in to JS problems because of const, arrow functions, and similar small issues. It's certainly not usable, but overall, it's not bad for an 8 year old browser with a long-dead rendering engine. Maybe I'll run a proxy to fix the TLS issues and filter out some of the basic JS issues and see what happens then. I will say, it's slow. This is also an issue with fairly simple sites, like HN, old.reddit.com, lobste.rs, etc. Not sure what's up with that, I think it's related to network requests, as it significantly speeds up when stuff's cached. Clearly it needs significant work to be useful, but from the look of things I expect that actually, it would be an entirely doable project by a not-too-large dev team to bring Presto up to at least Safari-level in a reasonable amount of time.

dmitriid 5y ago

> Safari is the new Internet Explorer. It's not. > but if it's about falling behind technologically then it's Safari that is a distant third. You mean, Safari and FF are very close to each other, and Chrome is running away with chrome-only non-standards: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

qshaman 5y ago
Agree, people love to hate on Apple products for no reason.

qshaman 5y ago

this reads as wishful thinking , in which universe is safari 3rd technologically speaking? what technology does Chrome or Firefox have that Safari doesn't? Safari performance in MacOS is better than Chrome and Firefox. Can you provide any data?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

KirillPanov 5y ago

> it's the most feature incomplete And I am eternally grateful to Apple for this. Somebody has to push back against the web-standard-of-the-week insanity. Like WebPartitionEditor, WebUSB, WebBootloader and WebSSH. Google's not pushing back. Mozilla's not pushing back. Thank you, Apple. Keep pushing. Push harder.

kinjba11 5y ago
Do you have a problem with BigInt? fetch? Push notifications for PWAs? Dozens of other useful web technologies used by millions of apps? Is that "web-standard-of-the-week-insanity"? I agree not all standards are great. But they're *standards*. As in, you really should, because everyone else agreed it was a good idea. The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea. It's not that Safari doesn't get these features - it gets them years later than the competition. The problem with these big companies (Google is bad as well) is that they're too big to fail. If they don't like something, then the standard isn't their standard. * https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea. But this isn't what happens. Safari is pretty good at standards (they do support BigInt and fetch). What actually happens is Google "proposes" a standard, pushes it to Chrome, then goads Mozilla and Apple into adopting it. Half of the time web developers cry about Safari not adopting Standards its because they want to adopt a experimental API that Google pushed
  - kinjba11 5y ago
    > Safari is pretty good at standards (they do support BigInt and fetch) That is why I say "Safari gets them years later". For example: Chrome 42, released April 2015, supported fetch. Safari 10, released March 2017, supported fetch. Nearly two years after Chrome and Firefox. * https://webkit.org/blog/7477/new-web-features-in-safari-10-1/ https://webkit.org/blog/7477/new-web-features-in-safari-10-1... * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API#browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API#b...

tarsinge 5y ago

It's the third only if you compare to Chrome experimental APIs, that Firefox devs feel pressured to implement too. When people say it's the new IE they are not saying it's IE6 in 2010, but it's IE6 in early 00's. Google thanks to their monopoly on the web as a platform (except for an iOS anomaly in some parts of the US) is now at the extinguish part of the MS playbook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...).