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Lately, it feels like more and more news publicly attacking Safari appear in Hacker News. Safari either isn't attacking, protecting or killing the web. It has

Lately, it feels like more and more news publicly attacking Safari appear in Hacker News. Safari either isn't attacking, protecting or killing the web. It has a different purpose. Apple's main objective is to sell services and devices. iPhones, iPads and their accessories. Also, Mac laptops/desktops. As most of us know, they use their Apple Store, with a 30% cut for every transaction to sell their services. If a company doesn't like that they end up in court (Epic vs Apple) or getting special conditions under the table. Safari is another piece of the iOS/macOS ecosystem to browse the web. They don't have any hurry to implement fancy features like Midi, Bluetooth, Notifications, proper PWA support, CSS rules, JavaScript. After all, you should have access to those things if you submit your app to their Store and accept their cut. They implement the features they find interesting or important and that's all. Even the release circle is slower than other browser implementations. Obviously, allowing other engines can hurt their services division and that's why the alternatives use the provided WebKit on iOS as enforced by the ToS. As a user Safari is a bliss, but as a web developer is sometimes a pain. Maybe we should stop supporting Safari on web applications which require non existing APIs with an encouraging message to try Chrome or protest to Apple if you're on iOS.

masterof0 5y ago
This is a good take , instead of "attacking" Safari with clickbaity titles, maybe we can take action and do actual stuff(when possible) like the ones you mention.
vishnugupta 5y ago
> As a user Safari is a bliss Having switched exclusively to safari over last 1 year, I couldn’t agree more. They have nifty features like sms OTP auto fill that make transactions super smooth.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  Chrome on Android has this as well as far as I can tell.
jonas21 5y ago
With a few small tweaks, this comment could have been about Internet Explorer and Microsoft a couple decades ago.
- gnarbarian 5y ago
  Safari is the new IE6 from a web developer perspective.
- kunagi7 5y ago
  Well, with Internet Explorer the problem was simpler and quite worse. It had around 90% of market share at its peak. So Microsoft had a complete monopoly. They stopped caring about Internet Explorer since their business was selling Windows XP licences and PCs with Windows preinstalled. As Safari, IE was an afterthought, a nice thing to have to craft a more complete desktop environment out-of-the-box (like Windows Media Player, Microsoft Works...). Luckily Firefox, Opera (Presto[1]), Safari and Chrome shattered the monopoly in the early 2010s. Safari is just the secondary browser in the ecosystem and pretty much the only relevant after Chrome and its derivatives. This days the duopoly has been achieved by fast pacing new web features and vendor lock-ins instead of grinding browser development to a halt (I lived the days of IE6/7 hell). [1] Dang I miss the good old days of Opera Presto, it was great... Vivaldi is the closest thing and I use it everyday.
  - Leherenn 5y ago
    It had a monopoly, but you could use different browsers. I didn't have to throw away my PC and buy a Mac to install one of the better alternatives. And the market talked: Microsoft, your browser is obsolete, I'm going to use something else. With Apple here, it's different. We have a similar set of question as in the days of yore (Is Google bringing much needed innovation to the web, or are they pushing their own proprietary features to control the web? Is Apple the last sane browser vendor preserving privacy and being user-first or are they purposefully holding back the web to maintain their App Store revenues?) but the ability of the market to answer is stunted by the fact the browser is tied to the hardware. If it happens I am not happy with Apple choice, I have to change my $1000 smartphone, my $400 smartwatch, ... just to use a different browser.
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Yes. Let webapp developers have their Chrome-only "web" (what's left of it anyway), and us others the web we used to love for ... web stuff. As freelancer/WFHer, I'm already using Chromium for the unavoidable Teams, G-whatever-its-called-now, Zoom, or other videochat/collaboration app anyway and can run these as sandboxed Electron app right now just as well. Or even better since these type of apps tend to require frequent updates of both the browser and loaded JavaScript code due to living on the edge of browser APIs, release-early-and-often, ads, "telemetry", or whatever. While on the way out, please advertise script-heavy sites, preferably with an "application/html" media type for content negotiation and/or proper metadata for search engines, to spare me bulk loading tons of JavaScript when accidentally visiting your page just to leave on the spot anyway. It's appalling browsers had to disable basic HTTP features such as caching because everything can and will be used for fingerprinting. AFAIU, both FF and Safari deliberately chose not to implement the worst offenders in WHATWG's JS API landscape for that reason. Worse, any "cure" for fingerprinting is bound to benefit Google even more as the only ones to receive sensor data of each and every contact individuals make with public information. "It's dead, Tim"
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > As freelancer/WFHer, I'm already using Chromium for the unavoidable Teams, G-whatever-its-called-now, Zoom, or other videochat/collaboration app anyway Tangential to the topic: is there any reason you could not use FireFox? I switched a while ago and was pleasantly surprised to discover all web apps work perfectly, including the Zoom webapp and Google apps (these always feel bloated no matter what browser I use).
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    I'm using FF all the time (except on iOS); in fact, right now as I type. I guess the reason I'm using Chromium for videochat and customer/work-related collaboration is so that I can close Chromium when I'm done for good ;) and continue browsing on FF for the stuff I care about with many windows and tabs open. Also, I can just nuke credentials for customer-related access when I no longer need those. Maybe I'm burnt by having FF experienced getting slower over time with script-heavy pages (memory or resource leaks?) in the past, and don't want to loose my browsing sessions? It's a moot point anyway since I don't consider collaboration/videochat apps part of the web, so in the end why not have "web" developers target Chrome if they absolutely want to depend on Google. It'll always be more work to target multiple browsers, and developers/bosses will always find arguments to reduce the effort and suck that is browser development/testing. For me, that isn't what the (extant) web is about; there's a reason that a browser, like an MP3 player, used to be more like a decoder/media player rather than all things to all people. I found that, with few exceptions, quality of content I care about correlates inversely with the amount of JavaScript crap on a page/app.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
so what if keep seeing anti-safari stuff on HN? If it's in the news.... and the audience here happens to align with observations etc. But also, for every 1 Safari post there's 10 other ones hating on Google on the regular, so whatever
smoldesu 5y ago
This is all well and good, but I'm paying a premium to use their products. If the bottom line of your argument boils down to "protest to Apple", then yeah: what do you think people in the comments here are doing? Apple knows how to boil frogs, so you can't act surprised when people start protesting about how warm the water is. I'll happily burn karma to get the point across: Safari is not good enough for my needs, and it's starting to feel like MacOS is also not good enough for my needs. As Mojave continues to lose support in mainline apps, I find myself avoiding my Macbook for most things. Got some photos to process? Eh, I'll do it in Linux. Got code to work on? Who cares, it probably won't run anyways. It's that kind of latent frustration that drives people away from the platform, so people should at least be aware of it.
rektide 5y ago
> Safari is another piece of the iOS/macOS ecosystem to browse the web. They don't have any hurry to implement fancy features like Midi, Bluetooth, Notifications, proper PWA support, CSS rules, JavaScript. what a joke of a post. please. I'm fine with safari apologists, wrong & sorry though I personally find them. but safari is not "another" piece of the iOS experience to interface with the internet. it is the primary & sole means to interface with the net on iOS & apple abuses their monopoly to insure it is the one and onlywans to interface with the web. no other browser engines may run, no one else is permitted to travel the reaches of the internet aside from safari. If safari weren't such a viciously forcibly entrenched force for whatever market share apple has, it wouldn't be such an offensive barge of obsolescence. > As a user Safari is a bliss, but as a web developer is sometimes a pain. what undefended pathetic psuedo-apologia. how this is bliss & good for the user, being locked in to the app store & commercial offerings, is undefined & imo inexplicable. does it just feel good, having a non-threatening experience, knowing your web surfing is ridiculously obsolete, low on features, incompetent, buggy, and slow? it makes you happy to know you have no choice, that there's no way you could use better internet surfing tech even if you wanted to? how is this bliss? > After all, you should have access to those things if you submit your app to their Store and accept their cut. weird weird appeal: tech is only ever any good when it's proprietary & unavailable on the net (because of the crushing grip of the obsolete buggy browser your os enforces as a lower than low standard upon us all).
- kunagi7 5y ago
  Luckily I only use Safari's rendering engine (WebKit) on one iDevice, an iPad. My other devices use either Linux distros (for the last 15 years) or Android. > but safari is not "another" piece of the iOS experience to interface with the internet. it is the primary & sole means to interface with the net on iOS & apple abuses their monopoly to insure it is the one and onlywans to interface with the web. no other browser engines may run, no one else is permitted to travel the reaches of the internet aside from safari. As said below on the same message, WebKit usage is enforced by Apple's ToS. Also, Apple doesn't have any monopoly, they are the small slice of the duopoly (Google and Apple). And yes, a duopoly is also a bad thing. Maybe Epic's lawsuit will bring down the Apple Store strict policies and Blink and Gecko will be finally ported to iOS. > If safari weren't such a viciously forcibly entrenched force for whatever market share apple has, it wouldn't be such an offensive barge of obsolescence. Most of Safari's unimplemented features are drafts pushed by the huge Google Chrome development team at light-speed and only Firefox tries to keep up with that. Microsoft threw the towel and forked Edgium, Opera stopped Presto and also forked, etc. > what undefended pathetic psuedo-apologia. how this is bliss & good for the user, being locked in to the app store & commercial offerings, is undefined & imo inexplicable. does it just feel good, having a non-threatening experience, knowing your web surfing is ridiculously obsolete, low on features, incompetent, buggy, and slow? it makes you happy to know you have no choice, that there's no way you could use better internet surfing tech even if you wanted to? how is this bliss? Most users don't care about this, only the ones which care a bit about their own privacy, spend some time comparing products, etc. Maybe people should be educated about this kind of stuff at schools. And as a user, Safari is fast, the iPad doesn't get hot and the battery lasts quite a lot while browsing. Most websites redirect you to their app (Reddit's ugly approach). > weird weird appeal: tech is only ever any good when it's proprietary & unavailable on the net (because of the crushing grip of the obsolete buggy browser your os enforces as a lower than low standard upon us all). That's Apple appeal since they own the walled garden. Since most people couldn't care less about proprietary vs open source licensing they do whatever they please.
deergomoo 5y ago
> Obviously, allowing other engines can hurt their services division and that's why the alternatives use the provided WebKit on iOS as enforced by the ToS This is almost certainly true now, but the rules predate their big services push. The main thing that prevents other browser engines is: - Apps cannot run arbitrary code. So an emulator that bundles a fixed set of games is fine (providing the copyright is kosher), but an emulator that allows you to supply your own games is not. This of course also rules out executing JavaScript on web pages. - iOS apps cannot mark memory as executable, i.e. no dynamic compilation. This alone would tank the performance of any competing engine even without the above restriction. Lame rules, imo. I understand their origin, but it’s one of many things holding the platform back.

masterof0 5y ago

This is a good take , instead of "attacking" Safari with clickbaity titles, maybe we can take action and do actual stuff(when possible) like the ones you mention.

vishnugupta 5y ago

> As a user Safari is a bliss Having switched exclusively to safari over last 1 year, I couldn’t agree more. They have nifty features like sms OTP auto fill that make transactions super smooth.

cromwellian 5y ago
Chrome on Android has this as well as far as I can tell.

jonas21 5y ago

With a few small tweaks, this comment could have been about Internet Explorer and Microsoft a couple decades ago.

gnarbarian 5y ago
Safari is the new IE6 from a web developer perspective.
kunagi7 5y ago
Well, with Internet Explorer the problem was simpler and quite worse. It had around 90% of market share at its peak. So Microsoft had a complete monopoly. They stopped caring about Internet Explorer since their business was selling Windows XP licences and PCs with Windows preinstalled. As Safari, IE was an afterthought, a nice thing to have to craft a more complete desktop environment out-of-the-box (like Windows Media Player, Microsoft Works...). Luckily Firefox, Opera (Presto[1]), Safari and Chrome shattered the monopoly in the early 2010s. Safari is just the secondary browser in the ecosystem and pretty much the only relevant after Chrome and its derivatives. This days the duopoly has been achieved by fast pacing new web features and vendor lock-ins instead of grinding browser development to a halt (I lived the days of IE6/7 hell). [1] Dang I miss the good old days of Opera Presto, it was great... Vivaldi is the closest thing and I use it everyday.
- Leherenn 5y ago
  It had a monopoly, but you could use different browsers. I didn't have to throw away my PC and buy a Mac to install one of the better alternatives. And the market talked: Microsoft, your browser is obsolete, I'm going to use something else. With Apple here, it's different. We have a similar set of question as in the days of yore (Is Google bringing much needed innovation to the web, or are they pushing their own proprietary features to control the web? Is Apple the last sane browser vendor preserving privacy and being user-first or are they purposefully holding back the web to maintain their App Store revenues?) but the ability of the market to answer is stunted by the fact the browser is tied to the hardware. If it happens I am not happy with Apple choice, I have to change my $1000 smartphone, my $400 smartwatch, ... just to use a different browser.

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Yes. Let webapp developers have their Chrome-only "web" (what's left of it anyway), and us others the web we used to love for ... web stuff. As freelancer/WFHer, I'm already using Chromium for the unavoidable Teams, G-whatever-its-called-now, Zoom, or other videochat/collaboration app anyway and can run these as sandboxed Electron app right now just as well. Or even better since these type of apps tend to require frequent updates of both the browser and loaded JavaScript code due to living on the edge of browser APIs, release-early-and-often, ads, "telemetry", or whatever. While on the way out, please advertise script-heavy sites, preferably with an "application/html" media type for content negotiation and/or proper metadata for search engines, to spare me bulk loading tons of JavaScript when accidentally visiting your page just to leave on the spot anyway. It's appalling browsers had to disable basic HTTP features such as caching because everything can and will be used for fingerprinting. AFAIU, both FF and Safari deliberately chose not to implement the worst offenders in WHATWG's JS API landscape for that reason. Worse, any "cure" for fingerprinting is bound to benefit Google even more as the only ones to receive sensor data of each and every contact individuals make with public information. "It's dead, Tim"

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> As freelancer/WFHer, I'm already using Chromium for the unavoidable Teams, G-whatever-its-called-now, Zoom, or other videochat/collaboration app anyway Tangential to the topic: is there any reason you could not use FireFox? I switched a while ago and was pleasantly surprised to discover all web apps work perfectly, including the Zoom webapp and Google apps (these always feel bloated no matter what browser I use).
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  I'm using FF all the time (except on iOS); in fact, right now as I type. I guess the reason I'm using Chromium for videochat and customer/work-related collaboration is so that I can close Chromium when I'm done for good ;) and continue browsing on FF for the stuff I care about with many windows and tabs open. Also, I can just nuke credentials for customer-related access when I no longer need those. Maybe I'm burnt by having FF experienced getting slower over time with script-heavy pages (memory or resource leaks?) in the past, and don't want to loose my browsing sessions? It's a moot point anyway since I don't consider collaboration/videochat apps part of the web, so in the end why not have "web" developers target Chrome if they absolutely want to depend on Google. It'll always be more work to target multiple browsers, and developers/bosses will always find arguments to reduce the effort and suck that is browser development/testing. For me, that isn't what the (extant) web is about; there's a reason that a browser, like an MP3 player, used to be more like a decoder/media player rather than all things to all people. I found that, with few exceptions, quality of content I care about correlates inversely with the amount of JavaScript crap on a page/app.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

so what if keep seeing anti-safari stuff on HN? If it's in the news.... and the audience here happens to align with observations etc. But also, for every 1 Safari post there's 10 other ones hating on Google on the regular, so whatever

smoldesu 5y ago

This is all well and good, but I'm paying a premium to use their products. If the bottom line of your argument boils down to "protest to Apple", then yeah: what do you think people in the comments here are doing? Apple knows how to boil frogs, so you can't act surprised when people start protesting about how warm the water is. I'll happily burn karma to get the point across: Safari is not good enough for my needs, and it's starting to feel like MacOS is also not good enough for my needs. As Mojave continues to lose support in mainline apps, I find myself avoiding my Macbook for most things. Got some photos to process? Eh, I'll do it in Linux. Got code to work on? Who cares, it probably won't run anyways. It's that kind of latent frustration that drives people away from the platform, so people should at least be aware of it.

rektide 5y ago

> Safari is another piece of the iOS/macOS ecosystem to browse the web. They don't have any hurry to implement fancy features like Midi, Bluetooth, Notifications, proper PWA support, CSS rules, JavaScript. what a joke of a post. please. I'm fine with safari apologists, wrong & sorry though I personally find them. but safari is not "another" piece of the iOS experience to interface with the internet. it is the primary & sole means to interface with the net on iOS & apple abuses their monopoly to insure it is the one and onlywans to interface with the web. no other browser engines may run, no one else is permitted to travel the reaches of the internet aside from safari. If safari weren't such a viciously forcibly entrenched force for whatever market share apple has, it wouldn't be such an offensive barge of obsolescence. > As a user Safari is a bliss, but as a web developer is sometimes a pain. what undefended pathetic psuedo-apologia. how this is bliss & good for the user, being locked in to the app store & commercial offerings, is undefined & imo inexplicable. does it just feel good, having a non-threatening experience, knowing your web surfing is ridiculously obsolete, low on features, incompetent, buggy, and slow? it makes you happy to know you have no choice, that there's no way you could use better internet surfing tech even if you wanted to? how is this bliss? > After all, you should have access to those things if you submit your app to their Store and accept their cut. weird weird appeal: tech is only ever any good when it's proprietary & unavailable on the net (because of the crushing grip of the obsolete buggy browser your os enforces as a lower than low standard upon us all).

kunagi7 5y ago
Luckily I only use Safari's rendering engine (WebKit) on one iDevice, an iPad. My other devices use either Linux distros (for the last 15 years) or Android. > but safari is not "another" piece of the iOS experience to interface with the internet. it is the primary & sole means to interface with the net on iOS & apple abuses their monopoly to insure it is the one and onlywans to interface with the web. no other browser engines may run, no one else is permitted to travel the reaches of the internet aside from safari. As said below on the same message, WebKit usage is enforced by Apple's ToS. Also, Apple doesn't have any monopoly, they are the small slice of the duopoly (Google and Apple). And yes, a duopoly is also a bad thing. Maybe Epic's lawsuit will bring down the Apple Store strict policies and Blink and Gecko will be finally ported to iOS. > If safari weren't such a viciously forcibly entrenched force for whatever market share apple has, it wouldn't be such an offensive barge of obsolescence. Most of Safari's unimplemented features are drafts pushed by the huge Google Chrome development team at light-speed and only Firefox tries to keep up with that. Microsoft threw the towel and forked Edgium, Opera stopped Presto and also forked, etc. > what undefended pathetic psuedo-apologia. how this is bliss & good for the user, being locked in to the app store & commercial offerings, is undefined & imo inexplicable. does it just feel good, having a non-threatening experience, knowing your web surfing is ridiculously obsolete, low on features, incompetent, buggy, and slow? it makes you happy to know you have no choice, that there's no way you could use better internet surfing tech even if you wanted to? how is this bliss? Most users don't care about this, only the ones which care a bit about their own privacy, spend some time comparing products, etc. Maybe people should be educated about this kind of stuff at schools. And as a user, Safari is fast, the iPad doesn't get hot and the battery lasts quite a lot while browsing. Most websites redirect you to their app (Reddit's ugly approach). > weird weird appeal: tech is only ever any good when it's proprietary & unavailable on the net (because of the crushing grip of the obsolete buggy browser your os enforces as a lower than low standard upon us all). That's Apple appeal since they own the walled garden. Since most people couldn't care less about proprietary vs open source licensing they do whatever they please.

deergomoo 5y ago

> Obviously, allowing other engines can hurt their services division and that's why the alternatives use the provided WebKit on iOS as enforced by the ToS This is almost certainly true now, but the rules predate their big services push. The main thing that prevents other browser engines is: - Apps cannot run arbitrary code. So an emulator that bundles a fixed set of games is fine (providing the copyright is kosher), but an emulator that allows you to supply your own games is not. This of course also rules out executing JavaScript on web pages. - iOS apps cannot mark memory as executable, i.e. no dynamic compilation. This alone would tank the performance of any competing engine even without the above restriction. Lame rules, imo. I understand their origin, but it’s one of many things holding the platform back.