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> Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today. This is

> Because IE was seriously outdated, lacking support for cutting-edge web APIs and technologies enabling the modern websites and web apps we use today. This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. The biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features. It would “fix” missing tags, that would then be broken on every standards compliant browser, had active x, and had an absolutely insane amount of security bugs. Mobile safari ain’t the IE of the modern day. It’s just fucking not. I’m sorry. Chrome is closer to IE than Safari because of market share AND developers developing exclusively for it forgetting anything and everything else. Does mobile safari still suck? Sure. But we don’t need to call it IE or constantly drone on with comparisons to IE. Let something suck in its own unique and shitty way, please.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Thank you. I have no idea what these people are talking about. They obviously didn't actually do development back then. > Apple took years to finally add WebRTC support to Safari, far enough behind Chrome and Firefox that it practically became a running joke among developers and even industry observers. Really? Because no one I know uses WebRTC and would rather use ffmpeg and sockets to do serious work like that over a desktop application. > But at the same time, the lack of support for key web technologies and APIs has been both perplexing and annoying at the same time. Yeah, what we all need is Web Bluetooth.
- roca 5y ago
  Lots of sites use WebRTC for video and audio calls. Google Meet, Discord, Slack for example. On desktop it's far more secure to use those in-browser than via desktop apps.
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Yeah, and those all suck up my RAM. Color me nonplussed that WebKit doesn't follow in Chromium's footsteps.
    - jhanschoo 5y ago
      I don't see how that's an argument for not supporting WebRTC...
    - roca 5y ago
      Feel free to not use those apps. But a lot of people do want to use them.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - onion2k 5y ago
      The criticism was that "no one uses WebRTC", not that WebRTC was inefficient. Clearly millions of people do use it, so you aren't refuting the point in any way. Perhaps if Apple had supported WebRTC earlier their engineers could have influenced the way it works to make it better. That's the main problem with ignoring standards in an org the size of Apple - you don't get to contribute to them. I don't mind that Safari runs behind the other browsers because progressive enhancement enables me to deal with that. I do mind that Apple are failing to be a meaningful part of moving the web forwards, and are basically letting Google do whatever they like.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >Clearly millions of people do use it, so you aren't refuting the point in any way. Are forced to use it. And millions more would be forced to use it if Safari handed it on a plate as well...
        onion2k 5y ago
        The overwhelming majority don't know, or really care, that they're using it. People don't care about tech. They care about what they see. User complaints will never be "WebRTC is bad!". They'll be things like "Google Meet kills my phone battery!", or "Teams doesn't work on my iPhone!". The solution to those complaints is usually to make the underlying tech better rather than chuck it out entirely and use something else.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  When people say that Safari is like IE they aren't talking about 20 years ago when IE was dominant in its prime, they are talking about the geriatric IE era when it was an also-ran that you had to support but didn't implement modern features such as flexbox properly etc.
- veeti 5y ago
  Literally hundreds of millions of people are going to make calls through Teams/Slack/Zoom & WebRTC today alone, grandpa.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Apple took years to finally add WebRTC support to Safari, far enough behind Chrome and Firefox "Far behind Chrome" should never be used in a sentence. Ever. Chrome releases up to 40 new "standard" features once every two months, many of them are just internal Chrome APIs with a "standards spec" in the form of a draft. Specifically for WebRTC. It was shipped in Chrome 23, in May 2012. Guess what? Here's the timeline: - In 2010 Google buys a company called Global IP solutions with some proprietary tech - In May 2011 it opensources this tech - In October 2011 publishes the draft spec - Just 7 months later ships it enabled by default in Chrome Do you know when the final stable spec arrived? In May 2018, full seven years later after Chrome enabled it by default. That's why Safari had it implemented since September 2017, because the spec was finally in a proper shape. No idea why Firefox rushed headlong into it though.
  - rektide 5y ago
    how do specs get to 1.0? browsers heed the call to implement & do so. they work through what it takes to improve & finalize the spec. your timeline, to me, indicates less that the spec was rushed & bad, and more that it took apple 5 years to get off their hostage taking kick & finally face the music & do what should have been done years ago, which is implement. once apple did start to implent, 1.0 came soon after: because that is how specs work. companies implement, they find what's not right, & they improve, then make a 1.0. I would definitely be interested in a changes over time review of webrtc. my feeling is that the core ideas & protocols were largely stable, but needed tweaking & elaboration, needed conformance suites elaborated. I could be wrong. this is in contrast to something like spdy, which evolved seemingly a good number of times in major ways, before ultimately getting parlayed into quic+http3.
growup12345 5y ago
Cool down Mr. Cook. We will buy your overpriced sweatshop artifacts.
mrtksn 5y ago
I suspect that developers are simply angry with Apple for not letting them to fiddle with the latest stuff that Google is experimenting with. Chrome is the new IE but with better manners if you consider the non standard Chrome specific stuff that makes websites to work only in Chrome. Developers hated IE for not being standart, you had to write two versions of your CSS, you had to make your code accommodate the Box model differences(is the border included in the width of your DIV?) and bugs just to make the UI properly display a standart compliant HTML and CSS. You had to deal with JScript, Microsoft's JavaScript that is mostly the same but not exactly. Due to the marketshare, Microsoft was able to push its own non-standart technology and pushed people to use IE if they don't want to be left out. This is very similar to what Google is doing with Chrome, sabotaging FF through popular Google properties like YouTube[0] and leaving out features if you are not using Chrome. Apple may not be perfect but Google is not the "good guy" here. [0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
- oaiey 5y ago
  We are not angry about the lack of toys. We are angry about not having the possibility of using PWA as an app model. PWA are useless without Apple's support. My case was a WebBluetooth based download of data from a web page. Now I have to maintain two apps. Thanks.
  - rimliu 5y ago
    PWAs are useless.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    Yes, and from users perspective I don't care. I find in eerie having the browser being an App platform. Chrome and Android are very dominant platforms, if it is something groundbreaking that can be done in that model it would be done in Android and Chrome and Apple will adopt it. Google is not an underdog.
    - Leherenn 5y ago
shkkmo 5y ago
> The biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features. This depends entirely on what decade you focus on. There was a significant period of time where even the "cutting edge" version of IE was the furthest behind on implementing new standards. When you combine that with the way IE handled updates and versions, older versions of IE created huge problems for developers. So there is an era of IE that is very similar to Safari today.
pupppet 5y ago
>This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. After developing during the IE 5.5/6 years there's no way I'm giving you a pass in calling IE cutting edge.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  IE was the blunt and dangerous cutting edge because you haven't thought to buy a new knife yet
- alwillis 5y ago
  At the time IE 6 was released, it was the best browser available. The problem was Microsoft acted is they had “won” and stopped updating it for years, where it calcified and became the hot mess we all knew and disliked.
  - prox 5y ago
    That I never got. You are a market leader and you just stop whatever you are doing? How did that happen? Arguably the biggest mistake of MS.
    - dangrossman 5y ago
      IE6 was wrapping up development when the US government sued to break up the whole company for giving it away with Windows. Perhaps not a coincidence they stopped work then?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - techsupporter 5y ago
      At the time, and perhaps still today but greatly lessened, Microsoft was used to both becoming the victor by crushing the opposition and then staying the victor because no one dared take a second swing. Anyone else who thought about challenging usually thought against and then went and carved out a quiet niche elsewhere. Besides, nobody got promoted at Microsoft for staying the course and making incremental improvements. Once there were no more balls to be knocked out of the park, developers moved elsewhere to buff up reviews and get bullet points for major projects.
speedgoose 5y ago
I call Safari the new IE because like IE, Safari requires specific code and workarounds for itself quite often. Unlike Chrome or Firefox. You also need an iOs device and a Mac to debug Safari, like you did need a windows computer to debug IE.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
The analogy is simple: back in the day devs got sick of IE because it was the one thing holding them back. You can make a site, easily, that looked beautiful on all the other major browsers, but because IE was outdated when it came to standards support, you had to basically spent all your time fighting with it. Safari serves that role today. There are tons of things I'd love to do but can't because they're not supported on iOS Safari.
- blub 5y ago
  Back then there were many browsers and many actors involved in developing web standards. It was justified to criticise laggards. Nowadays the Microsoft browser, Opera and others are just Chrome skins. Google is pushing various drafts and essentially dictating web standards and then even when a browser like Firefox does support those Google flavoured standards, it still gets blocked outright on new Google products or gets a limited feature set on existing ones. Or it gets hobbled by Google oopsies. Why would anyone want to play in such a rigged game...
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Yet I don't have a problem supporting Firefox, or honestly even desktop Safari for the most part. It is specifically iOS Safari that is being deliberately held back by Apple to protect their App Store monopoly.
- wwarek 5y ago
  100% that, happens regularly. The most recent case being lack of `scrollIntoView` options[0], so smooth animations work everywhere but Safari. You have to go and hack/implement that manually just for Safari. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/scrollIntoView https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/scr...
- veeti 5y ago
  It's always fun when some bog standard 2010 flexbox layout works perfectly in every modern browser until someone on an old iPhone tries it. Android has its own update woes to say the least, but at least Chrome receives evergreen updates through the Play Store. Why can't Apple do the same?
FractalHQ 5y ago
== != === If every analogy was held up to this level of scrutiny, we wouldn’t have analogies. Something can be similar in nature without being an exact equivalence. Like many others have started- it’s common these days for devs to create modern apps that work on modern browsers but break in weird ways on Safari. That’s enough of a similarity for the analogy to convey the idea. Web-P / WebGL support aside- Safari often fails to render complex SVG animations for obscure reasons. It can’t even render a hex-based CSS radial-gradient that looks the same as it does on Chromium or Gecko. It’s really bad, and Apple benefits from that. They are holding the web back as IE once did in the past.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Shouldn't that be == !== === if we're talking about our analogies with JavaScript? Though maybe I just proved your point about missing the forest for the trees :-P
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Brendan Eich doesn't understand equality.
    - throwawayswede 5y ago
      What does that mean?
      - tempodox 5y ago
        Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript.
      - DonHopkins 5y ago
        It means Brendan Eich is opposed to same sex marriage: Brendan doesn't believe that same sex couples should have equal rights as opposite sex couples. There's something about equality that deeply disturbs and confuses Brendan, so much that he donated a large amount of money to the cause of tearing apart families by destroying legally married loving couple's existing same sex marriages in California, while Brendan and his own opposite-sex wife enjoyed all the benefits of marriage themselves. Brendan Eich believes that his own marriage is greater than, not equal to, same sex marriages of lesser people.
bmn__ 5y ago
> IE was cutting edge until Firefox. I was there. I call bullshit. Competitors like Opera and IE for Mac (a completely different codebase and product) could do alpha-transparent images in the background, CSS sibling selectors, display:table-* and dozens more. For a few fortunate Web developers who were strong willed enough to heed the call from Alistapart to standards compliant code, we were able to circumvent the lack of "cutting edge" features – typically already published years ago – by employing HTC <http://enwp.org/HTML_Components http://enwp.org/HTML_Components> and hiding this from other browsers with conditional comments. Nowadays this would be called a polyfill. The reality is that IE suffered immense neglect.
- mongol 5y ago
  Exactly. In order to call something cutting edge, it should be sharp. IE was frustratingly dull.
- jalfresi 5y ago
  I recall having an orange iMac on my desk specifically for testing because IE5.5 on the Mac was the most standards compliant browser on the market. Cant remember the exact year, but it was pre-millenium I think.
DonHopkins 5y ago
Is it fair to say that Safari is Apple Maps Bad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E&ab_channel=DameshKwanti https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E&ab_channel=Dames...
phist_mcgee 5y ago
Anyone remember mobile safari's CSS 100vh 'feature'? https://medium.com/rbi-tech/safaris-100vh-problem-3412e6f13716 https://medium.com/rbi-tech/safaris-100vh-problem-3412e6f137...
- SauciestGNU 5y ago
  Yeah, I hadn't needed to target safari as a supported platform until I was building a public facing website (as opposed to intranet tooling), and this was an amazingly frustrating feature to work around. Solidified my hatred for safari, that's for sure.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
some1else 5y ago
I disagree. The article author is likely referring to the period when IE version 6 was the major browser on the market (from 2001 to 2009), a time many of us fondly remember as the web development ice age. It absolutely did lack features present in other browsers, such as SVG support, transparent PNG support, the full scope of CSS 2.1, countless standard JavaScript APIs (remember jQuery), etc. Rendering bugs added insult to injury, but the lack of features was real. Microsoft didn't release IE7 until 2006.
throwawayswede 5y ago
Mobile Safari still has a bug in web audio when connecting an analyser node with a mediaelement (where freq array is blank all the time) that's been reported afaik since 2015 if not earlier. Mobile safari might not be the IE of the modern day, but the lack of support for core standards and focus on random shitty features (like hiding full urls in address bar) is akin to how M$ managed IE.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features Biggest problem with Internet Explorer was it was slow. That's largely the result of the weird shit you mention. But if Microsoft had kept IE fast, it would have denied the field to Chrome.
trissylegs 5y ago
Could coin it Reductio ad IErum
908B64B197 5y ago
Was IE outdated or was it the version the laziest IT department/sysadmin kept deploying that was old? I remember someone telling me they couldn't use anything else other than IE6 at a non-tech job years after it was deprecated and at least two major versions behind.
blooalien 5y ago
> Chrome is closer to IE than Safari because of market share AND developers developing exclusively for it forgetting anything and everything else. ^^^ This! Yes, exactly! ^^^ I'd have thought the world had learned it's lesson with developing websites exclusively for IE, but apparently not. When you develop a website to make use of a single browser and break in (m)any others, you're purposely attacking the way the Web works. It's all designed around standards for a reason.
bastawhiz 5y ago
> IE was cutting edge until Firefox. The biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features. This is completely incorrect. IE lacked CSS2, it lacked proper PNG support, it lacked HTML5 tag support for ages, its DOM implementation was missing functions for the DOM spec that it implemented, it lacked SVG support entirely, it didn't have meaningful developer tools (no, the browser toolbar didn't count because it crashed so much) until IE7... The list goes on. It's simply revisionist to say that IE wasn't missing features. It was nowhere close to the cutting edge, even when its releases were cut. IE lacked just as much as it got wrong, even at the time.
manigandham 5y ago
Both stories are correct. IE was far ahead of its time in the beginning, bringing us advancements like XmlHttpRequest which set the stage for websites to become webapps. Eventually though the entire team behind it was disbanded and dissolved into other divisions, which let the technical debt accumulate into the eventual mess. What made it so bad is that web technologies started to progress faster and faster, constantly building pressure on IE to adapt, but it just couldn't be made to work across all of the integrations with Windows, plugins like ActiveX, historic compatibility promises, enterprise policies, and newer rendering stacks used by Firefox and Chrome. Perhaps they should've retired several years earlier or brought out Edge sooner, but the IE story has both a terrific rise and a crazy fall.
ksec 5y ago
It seems strange ( and fascinating ) everyone have different memories of IE days. My problem with IE was mostly with its ( lack of ) development. >IE was cutting edge until Firefox It was cutting edge for IE 5, and IE6 only fixes some of IE 5.5 issues. Remember this was the early days and there were thousands of low hanging fruit. It wasn't even standard complaint problem, ( as much as I would like to write one piece of DHTML code that work across all browser ) like many here have stated M$ decided to do it differently and I actually would not have a problem with that if their version was actually better ( Some features were indeed better ). But they stopped. IE 5.5 was already a relatively small changes from IE 5 which was the really big release. And IE 5 if I remember correctly was before 2000. I would not have been so pissed about IE if M$ at least release some update. It wasn't until security issues got so serious did they decide to move their ass to do something. So from my point of view, Safari in this case, despite their slow release cycle, is still trillions times better than IE. I would normally have stood up for Safari on PWA and Safari as IE issues, but the pain of App Store lead me to change stance. And to add insult to injury they even claim PWA as an alternative to Native Apps in the trial. Apple used to have a very coherent strategy and message, even to the way how things are being discussed in court. Now it is a pile of mess.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Thank you. I have no idea what these people are talking about. They obviously didn't actually do development back then. > Apple took years to finally add WebRTC support to Safari, far enough behind Chrome and Firefox that it practically became a running joke among developers and even industry observers. Really? Because no one I know uses WebRTC and would rather use ffmpeg and sockets to do serious work like that over a desktop application. > But at the same time, the lack of support for key web technologies and APIs has been both perplexing and annoying at the same time. Yeah, what we all need is Web Bluetooth.

roca 5y ago
Lots of sites use WebRTC for video and audio calls. Google Meet, Discord, Slack for example. On desktop it's far more secure to use those in-browser than via desktop apps.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Yeah, and those all suck up my RAM. Color me nonplussed that WebKit doesn't follow in Chromium's footsteps.
  - jhanschoo 5y ago
    I don't see how that's an argument for not supporting WebRTC...
  - roca 5y ago
    Feel free to not use those apps. But a lot of people do want to use them.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - onion2k 5y ago
    The criticism was that "no one uses WebRTC", not that WebRTC was inefficient. Clearly millions of people do use it, so you aren't refuting the point in any way. Perhaps if Apple had supported WebRTC earlier their engineers could have influenced the way it works to make it better. That's the main problem with ignoring standards in an org the size of Apple - you don't get to contribute to them. I don't mind that Safari runs behind the other browsers because progressive enhancement enables me to deal with that. I do mind that Apple are failing to be a meaningful part of moving the web forwards, and are basically letting Google do whatever they like.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >Clearly millions of people do use it, so you aren't refuting the point in any way. Are forced to use it. And millions more would be forced to use it if Safari handed it on a plate as well...
      - onion2k 5y ago
        The overwhelming majority don't know, or really care, that they're using it. People don't care about tech. They care about what they see. User complaints will never be "WebRTC is bad!". They'll be things like "Google Meet kills my phone battery!", or "Teams doesn't work on my iPhone!". The solution to those complaints is usually to make the underlying tech better rather than chuck it out entirely and use something else.
zarzavat 5y ago
When people say that Safari is like IE they aren't talking about 20 years ago when IE was dominant in its prime, they are talking about the geriatric IE era when it was an also-ran that you had to support but didn't implement modern features such as flexbox properly etc.
veeti 5y ago
Literally hundreds of millions of people are going to make calls through Teams/Slack/Zoom & WebRTC today alone, grandpa.
dmitriid 5y ago
> Apple took years to finally add WebRTC support to Safari, far enough behind Chrome and Firefox "Far behind Chrome" should never be used in a sentence. Ever. Chrome releases up to 40 new "standard" features once every two months, many of them are just internal Chrome APIs with a "standards spec" in the form of a draft. Specifically for WebRTC. It was shipped in Chrome 23, in May 2012. Guess what? Here's the timeline: - In 2010 Google buys a company called Global IP solutions with some proprietary tech - In May 2011 it opensources this tech - In October 2011 publishes the draft spec - Just 7 months later ships it enabled by default in Chrome Do you know when the final stable spec arrived? In May 2018, full seven years later after Chrome enabled it by default. That's why Safari had it implemented since September 2017, because the spec was finally in a proper shape. No idea why Firefox rushed headlong into it though.
- rektide 5y ago
  how do specs get to 1.0? browsers heed the call to implement & do so. they work through what it takes to improve & finalize the spec. your timeline, to me, indicates less that the spec was rushed & bad, and more that it took apple 5 years to get off their hostage taking kick & finally face the music & do what should have been done years ago, which is implement. once apple did start to implent, 1.0 came soon after: because that is how specs work. companies implement, they find what's not right, & they improve, then make a 1.0. I would definitely be interested in a changes over time review of webrtc. my feeling is that the core ideas & protocols were largely stable, but needed tweaking & elaboration, needed conformance suites elaborated. I could be wrong. this is in contrast to something like spdy, which evolved seemingly a good number of times in major ways, before ultimately getting parlayed into quic+http3.

growup12345 5y ago

Cool down Mr. Cook. We will buy your overpriced sweatshop artifacts.

mrtksn 5y ago

I suspect that developers are simply angry with Apple for not letting them to fiddle with the latest stuff that Google is experimenting with. Chrome is the new IE but with better manners if you consider the non standard Chrome specific stuff that makes websites to work only in Chrome. Developers hated IE for not being standart, you had to write two versions of your CSS, you had to make your code accommodate the Box model differences(is the border included in the width of your DIV?) and bugs just to make the UI properly display a standart compliant HTML and CSS. You had to deal with JScript, Microsoft's JavaScript that is mostly the same but not exactly. Due to the marketshare, Microsoft was able to push its own non-standart technology and pushed people to use IE if they don't want to be left out. This is very similar to what Google is doing with Chrome, sabotaging FF through popular Google properties like YouTube[0] and leaving out features if you are not using Chrome. Apple may not be perfect but Google is not the "good guy" here. [0]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has-sabotaged-firefox-for-years/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

oaiey 5y ago
We are not angry about the lack of toys. We are angry about not having the possibility of using PWA as an app model. PWA are useless without Apple's support. My case was a WebBluetooth based download of data from a web page. Now I have to maintain two apps. Thanks.
- rimliu 5y ago
  PWAs are useless.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Yes, and from users perspective I don't care. I find in eerie having the browser being an App platform. Chrome and Android are very dominant platforms, if it is something groundbreaking that can be done in that model it would be done in Android and Chrome and Apple will adopt it. Google is not an underdog.
  - Leherenn 5y ago

shkkmo 5y ago

> The biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features. This depends entirely on what decade you focus on. There was a significant period of time where even the "cutting edge" version of IE was the furthest behind on implementing new standards. When you combine that with the way IE handled updates and versions, older versions of IE created huge problems for developers. So there is an era of IE that is very similar to Safari today.

pupppet 5y ago

>This is just false, or at best only half of the story to make a false equivalence. IE was cutting edge until Firefox. After developing during the IE 5.5/6 years there's no way I'm giving you a pass in calling IE cutting edge.

skhr0680 5y ago
IE was the blunt and dangerous cutting edge because you haven't thought to buy a new knife yet
alwillis 5y ago
At the time IE 6 was released, it was the best browser available. The problem was Microsoft acted is they had “won” and stopped updating it for years, where it calcified and became the hot mess we all knew and disliked.
- prox 5y ago
  That I never got. You are a market leader and you just stop whatever you are doing? How did that happen? Arguably the biggest mistake of MS.
  - dangrossman 5y ago
    IE6 was wrapping up development when the US government sued to break up the whole company for giving it away with Windows. Perhaps not a coincidence they stopped work then?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - techsupporter 5y ago
    At the time, and perhaps still today but greatly lessened, Microsoft was used to both becoming the victor by crushing the opposition and then staying the victor because no one dared take a second swing. Anyone else who thought about challenging usually thought against and then went and carved out a quiet niche elsewhere. Besides, nobody got promoted at Microsoft for staying the course and making incremental improvements. Once there were no more balls to be knocked out of the park, developers moved elsewhere to buff up reviews and get bullet points for major projects.

speedgoose 5y ago

I call Safari the new IE because like IE, Safari requires specific code and workarounds for itself quite often. Unlike Chrome or Firefox. You also need an iOs device and a Mac to debug Safari, like you did need a windows computer to debug IE.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

The analogy is simple: back in the day devs got sick of IE because it was the one thing holding them back. You can make a site, easily, that looked beautiful on all the other major browsers, but because IE was outdated when it came to standards support, you had to basically spent all your time fighting with it. Safari serves that role today. There are tons of things I'd love to do but can't because they're not supported on iOS Safari.

blub 5y ago
Back then there were many browsers and many actors involved in developing web standards. It was justified to criticise laggards. Nowadays the Microsoft browser, Opera and others are just Chrome skins. Google is pushing various drafts and essentially dictating web standards and then even when a browser like Firefox does support those Google flavoured standards, it still gets blocked outright on new Google products or gets a limited feature set on existing ones. Or it gets hobbled by Google oopsies. Why would anyone want to play in such a rigged game...
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Yet I don't have a problem supporting Firefox, or honestly even desktop Safari for the most part. It is specifically iOS Safari that is being deliberately held back by Apple to protect their App Store monopoly.
wwarek 5y ago
100% that, happens regularly. The most recent case being lack of `scrollIntoView` options[0], so smooth animations work everywhere but Safari. You have to go and hack/implement that manually just for Safari. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/scrollIntoView https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/scr...
veeti 5y ago
It's always fun when some bog standard 2010 flexbox layout works perfectly in every modern browser until someone on an old iPhone tries it. Android has its own update woes to say the least, but at least Chrome receives evergreen updates through the Play Store. Why can't Apple do the same?

FractalHQ 5y ago

== != === If every analogy was held up to this level of scrutiny, we wouldn’t have analogies. Something can be similar in nature without being an exact equivalence. Like many others have started- it’s common these days for devs to create modern apps that work on modern browsers but break in weird ways on Safari. That’s enough of a similarity for the analogy to convey the idea. Web-P / WebGL support aside- Safari often fails to render complex SVG animations for obscure reasons. It can’t even render a hex-based CSS radial-gradient that looks the same as it does on Chromium or Gecko. It’s really bad, and Apple benefits from that. They are holding the web back as IE once did in the past.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Shouldn't that be == !== === if we're talking about our analogies with JavaScript? Though maybe I just proved your point about missing the forest for the trees :-P
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Brendan Eich doesn't understand equality.
  - throwawayswede 5y ago
    What does that mean?
    - tempodox 5y ago
      Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript.
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      It means Brendan Eich is opposed to same sex marriage: Brendan doesn't believe that same sex couples should have equal rights as opposite sex couples. There's something about equality that deeply disturbs and confuses Brendan, so much that he donated a large amount of money to the cause of tearing apart families by destroying legally married loving couple's existing same sex marriages in California, while Brendan and his own opposite-sex wife enjoyed all the benefits of marriage themselves. Brendan Eich believes that his own marriage is greater than, not equal to, same sex marriages of lesser people.

bmn__ 5y ago

> IE was cutting edge until Firefox. I was there. I call bullshit. Competitors like Opera and IE for Mac (a completely different codebase and product) could do alpha-transparent images in the background, CSS sibling selectors, display:table-* and dozens more. For a few fortunate Web developers who were strong willed enough to heed the call from Alistapart to standards compliant code, we were able to circumvent the lack of "cutting edge" features – typically already published years ago – by employing HTC <http://enwp.org/HTML_Components http://enwp.org/HTML_Components> and hiding this from other browsers with conditional comments. Nowadays this would be called a polyfill. The reality is that IE suffered immense neglect.

mongol 5y ago
Exactly. In order to call something cutting edge, it should be sharp. IE was frustratingly dull.
jalfresi 5y ago
I recall having an orange iMac on my desk specifically for testing because IE5.5 on the Mac was the most standards compliant browser on the market. Cant remember the exact year, but it was pre-millenium I think.

DonHopkins 5y ago

Is it fair to say that Safari is Apple Maps Bad? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E&ab_channel=DameshKwanti https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E&ab_channel=Dames...

phist_mcgee 5y ago

Anyone remember mobile safari's CSS 100vh 'feature'? https://medium.com/rbi-tech/safaris-100vh-problem-3412e6f13716 https://medium.com/rbi-tech/safaris-100vh-problem-3412e6f137...

SauciestGNU 5y ago
Yeah, I hadn't needed to target safari as a supported platform until I was building a public facing website (as opposed to intranet tooling), and this was an amazingly frustrating feature to work around. Solidified my hatred for safari, that's for sure.

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some1else 5y ago

I disagree. The article author is likely referring to the period when IE version 6 was the major browser on the market (from 2001 to 2009), a time many of us fondly remember as the web development ice age. It absolutely did lack features present in other browsers, such as SVG support, transparent PNG support, the full scope of CSS 2.1, countless standard JavaScript APIs (remember jQuery), etc. Rendering bugs added insult to injury, but the lack of features was real. Microsoft didn't release IE7 until 2006.

throwawayswede 5y ago

Mobile Safari still has a bug in web audio when connecting an analyser node with a mediaelement (where freq array is blank all the time) that's been reported afaik since 2015 if not earlier. Mobile safari might not be the IE of the modern day, but the lack of support for core standards and focus on random shitty features (like hiding full urls in address bar) is akin to how M$ managed IE.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features Biggest problem with Internet Explorer was it was slow. That's largely the result of the weird shit you mention. But if Microsoft had kept IE fast, it would have denied the field to Chrome.

trissylegs 5y ago

Could coin it Reductio ad IErum

908B64B197 5y ago

Was IE outdated or was it the version the laziest IT department/sysadmin kept deploying that was old? I remember someone telling me they couldn't use anything else other than IE6 at a non-tech job years after it was deprecated and at least two major versions behind.

blooalien 5y ago

> Chrome is closer to IE than Safari because of market share AND developers developing exclusively for it forgetting anything and everything else. ^^^ This! Yes, exactly! ^^^ I'd have thought the world had learned it's lesson with developing websites exclusively for IE, but apparently not. When you develop a website to make use of a single browser and break in (m)any others, you're purposely attacking the way the Web works. It's all designed around standards for a reason.

bastawhiz 5y ago

> IE was cutting edge until Firefox. The biggest problem with IE was all the insanely weird shit it did, not missing features. This is completely incorrect. IE lacked CSS2, it lacked proper PNG support, it lacked HTML5 tag support for ages, its DOM implementation was missing functions for the DOM spec that it implemented, it lacked SVG support entirely, it didn't have meaningful developer tools (no, the browser toolbar didn't count because it crashed so much) until IE7... The list goes on. It's simply revisionist to say that IE wasn't missing features. It was nowhere close to the cutting edge, even when its releases were cut. IE lacked just as much as it got wrong, even at the time.

manigandham 5y ago

Both stories are correct. IE was far ahead of its time in the beginning, bringing us advancements like XmlHttpRequest which set the stage for websites to become webapps. Eventually though the entire team behind it was disbanded and dissolved into other divisions, which let the technical debt accumulate into the eventual mess. What made it so bad is that web technologies started to progress faster and faster, constantly building pressure on IE to adapt, but it just couldn't be made to work across all of the integrations with Windows, plugins like ActiveX, historic compatibility promises, enterprise policies, and newer rendering stacks used by Firefox and Chrome. Perhaps they should've retired several years earlier or brought out Edge sooner, but the IE story has both a terrific rise and a crazy fall.

ksec 5y ago

It seems strange ( and fascinating ) everyone have different memories of IE days. My problem with IE was mostly with its ( lack of ) development. >IE was cutting edge until Firefox It was cutting edge for IE 5, and IE6 only fixes some of IE 5.5 issues. Remember this was the early days and there were thousands of low hanging fruit. It wasn't even standard complaint problem, ( as much as I would like to write one piece of DHTML code that work across all browser ) like many here have stated M$ decided to do it differently and I actually would not have a problem with that if their version was actually better ( Some features were indeed better ). But they stopped. IE 5.5 was already a relatively small changes from IE 5 which was the really big release. And IE 5 if I remember correctly was before 2000. I would not have been so pissed about IE if M$ at least release some update. It wasn't until security issues got so serious did they decide to move their ass to do something. So from my point of view, Safari in this case, despite their slow release cycle, is still trillions times better than IE. I would normally have stood up for Safari on PWA and Safari as IE issues, but the pain of App Store lead me to change stance. And to add insult to injury they even claim PWA as an alternative to Native Apps in the trial. Apple used to have a very coherent strategy and message, even to the way how things are being discussed in court. Now it is a pile of mess.