5 ms·

I encounter random CSS bugs all the time in Chrome, it's just trendy to say Safari is behind the times. Google wants everything to be done in the browser, thei

by syspec 5y ago

I encounter random CSS bugs all the time in Chrome, it's just trendy to say Safari is behind the times. Google wants everything to be done in the browser, their browser, so they can track everything without cookies to sell ads

Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
It's really not just "trendy". Safari is the bane of my existence. On Big Sur, our WebGL app was occassionally sporadically rendering floating objects and black primitives into infinity on our CEOs laptop. On the plus side, our competitor's product didn't work at all. So I guess it's not all bad. In this case, Catalina had worked fine, and upgrading to Monterey fixed the issue. So props to Apple for fixing the problem. However, at the same time, our app worked flawlessly in both Firefox and Chrome running on the same hardware. Granted, it's not as simple as pointing the finger at Safari. The issue was a combination of Safari's behaviour paired with less than perfect graphics drivers. Although, this is just one example. Mobile Safari not supporting full screen APIs on iPhone, but supporting them on iPad is just, well, weird. Is that a conscious effort to cripple the web on iPhone, or could they just not figure out the UX?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I guarantee it's not the latter given Apple's almost infinite resources.
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    Wrong. Apple often just gives up on design work and shits out another obscure, overly complicated, and defective “solution” to simple problems. Try copying some styled text from somewhere and pasting it at the end of a Mail message. Then try to get out of the pasted style and continue typing in “normal” style. Pathetic.
- merrywhether 5y ago
  I actually like that they do this and let me use the UI I know and that will definitely work. 99% your video playback UX is not as good and you mostly want to take over full-screen so you can prevent the user from doing things (you may fall in the 1%, but I’m generalizing so apologies if you’re one of the few exceptions). It’s annoying on the iPad when sites build half-cocked full-screen UIs with buggy custom controls.
  - Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
    As mentioned, our app is WebGL i.e. interactive real-time rendering, not at all video playback. That said, I agree with you on custom video UIs being horrid.
    - merrywhether 5y ago
      Oh neat, and sorry for missing that. I can totally see why you might have valid reasons for that.
mdoms 5y ago
Oh yes it's trendy to criticize Apple but it's not trendy to criticize Google. Honestly I don't know the reality some HN commenters live in.
djbusby 5y ago
I want everything in the browser too - except the ads. And FF isn't keeping up :( WebUSB for example.
- lstodd 5y ago
  WebUSB is insane security-wise. About the only worse thing would be a WebPCIe.
  - maven29 5y ago
    Be careful what you wish for, USB4 supports PCIe tunneling. Looks like we're just a slippery slope away.
  - jabbany 5y ago
    I mean isn't it a lot more manageable than things like PCIe that support DMA. Given the seemingly extensive support for doing emulated USB passthrough/redirection to VMs, I'm assuming people have looked into the security implications to the host.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Don't give them ideas. Also, with Thunderbolt, USB is pretty much just a transport for PCI-e. Edit, here's how Google justifies the existence of WebUSB (https://web.dev/usb/ https://web.dev/usb/): """ Let's see the behavior you could expect with the WebUSB API: 1. Buy a USB device. 2. Plug it into your computer. A notification appears right away, with the right website to go to for this device. 3. Click the notification. The website is there and ready to use! 4. Click to connect and a USB device chooser shows up in Chrome where you can pick your device. """ The goal is to make Chrome the OS. As long as your USB device works on Chrome, who cares about it working on the rest of the system. Absolute madness.
userbinator 5y ago
Except when it's Chrome, it's probably a feature and not a bug. Remember that Google effectively controls the web "standards".
jabbany 5y ago
There's nothing wrong with the browser being the next generation cross-platform execution environment. All the older options for this (Java, Flash etc.) sucked... I would like to see a strong competitor to Chrome someday though... - Firefox still has weird issues occasionally (most recently scroll position randomly jumping sometimes). I still keep it around though because its sane when it comes to standards and will remain sane even if things like HW acceleration are not available. - Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform (might as well be IE6) - Chromium and derivatives aren't distinct enough from Chrome and a lot of the new ones have weird cryptocurrency integrations that just don't feel right. - Is Opera still alive?
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform (might as well be IE6) It's a bit funny, and a bit sad, that this wasn't always so; I rather liked the Windows version of Safari, and IE for UNIX was apparently pretty good.
  - jabbany 5y ago
    Yeah. I don't miss doing web dev in the Win XP days when one had to test everything on IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, etc. but at least there were options back then and things legit ran with different HTML and JS engines. Now it's just Chrome/Chromium and Firefox representing cross-platform browsers, and most other things are platform specific WebKit mods or Chromium reskins...
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform At the moment. Apple has a fairly long history of keeping cross-platform ports alive even if they aren't publicly available (that's why the transitions from 68K->PowerPC->Intel->Apple Silicon have been relatively smooth). I would bet that Apple could roll out a cross-platform Safari in fairly short order, should the powers that be decide that it makes business sense.
  - 5y ago

by syspec 5y ago

Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago

It's really not just "trendy". Safari is the bane of my existence. On Big Sur, our WebGL app was occassionally sporadically rendering floating objects and black primitives into infinity on our CEOs laptop. On the plus side, our competitor's product didn't work at all. So I guess it's not all bad. In this case, Catalina had worked fine, and upgrading to Monterey fixed the issue. So props to Apple for fixing the problem. However, at the same time, our app worked flawlessly in both Firefox and Chrome running on the same hardware. Granted, it's not as simple as pointing the finger at Safari. The issue was a combination of Safari's behaviour paired with less than perfect graphics drivers. Although, this is just one example. Mobile Safari not supporting full screen APIs on iPhone, but supporting them on iPad is just, well, weird. Is that a conscious effort to cripple the web on iPhone, or could they just not figure out the UX?

stjohnswarts 5y ago
I guarantee it's not the latter given Apple's almost infinite resources.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  Wrong. Apple often just gives up on design work and shits out another obscure, overly complicated, and defective “solution” to simple problems. Try copying some styled text from somewhere and pasting it at the end of a Mail message. Then try to get out of the pasted style and continue typing in “normal” style. Pathetic.
merrywhether 5y ago
I actually like that they do this and let me use the UI I know and that will definitely work. 99% your video playback UX is not as good and you mostly want to take over full-screen so you can prevent the user from doing things (you may fall in the 1%, but I’m generalizing so apologies if you’re one of the few exceptions). It’s annoying on the iPad when sites build half-cocked full-screen UIs with buggy custom controls.
- Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
  As mentioned, our app is WebGL i.e. interactive real-time rendering, not at all video playback. That said, I agree with you on custom video UIs being horrid.
  - merrywhether 5y ago
    Oh neat, and sorry for missing that. I can totally see why you might have valid reasons for that.

mdoms 5y ago

Oh yes it's trendy to criticize Apple but it's not trendy to criticize Google. Honestly I don't know the reality some HN commenters live in.

djbusby 5y ago

I want everything in the browser too - except the ads. And FF isn't keeping up :( WebUSB for example.

lstodd 5y ago
WebUSB is insane security-wise. About the only worse thing would be a WebPCIe.
- maven29 5y ago
  Be careful what you wish for, USB4 supports PCIe tunneling. Looks like we're just a slippery slope away.
- jabbany 5y ago
  I mean isn't it a lot more manageable than things like PCIe that support DMA. Given the seemingly extensive support for doing emulated USB passthrough/redirection to VMs, I'm assuming people have looked into the security implications to the host.
- 1_player 5y ago
  Don't give them ideas. Also, with Thunderbolt, USB is pretty much just a transport for PCI-e. Edit, here's how Google justifies the existence of WebUSB (https://web.dev/usb/ https://web.dev/usb/): """ Let's see the behavior you could expect with the WebUSB API: 1. Buy a USB device. 2. Plug it into your computer. A notification appears right away, with the right website to go to for this device. 3. Click the notification. The website is there and ready to use! 4. Click to connect and a USB device chooser shows up in Chrome where you can pick your device. """ The goal is to make Chrome the OS. As long as your USB device works on Chrome, who cares about it working on the rest of the system. Absolute madness.

userbinator 5y ago

Except when it's Chrome, it's probably a feature and not a bug. Remember that Google effectively controls the web "standards".

jabbany 5y ago

There's nothing wrong with the browser being the next generation cross-platform execution environment. All the older options for this (Java, Flash etc.) sucked... I would like to see a strong competitor to Chrome someday though... - Firefox still has weird issues occasionally (most recently scroll position randomly jumping sometimes). I still keep it around though because its sane when it comes to standards and will remain sane even if things like HW acceleration are not available. - Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform (might as well be IE6) - Chromium and derivatives aren't distinct enough from Chrome and a lot of the new ones have weird cryptocurrency integrations that just don't feel right. - Is Opera still alive?

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform (might as well be IE6) It's a bit funny, and a bit sad, that this wasn't always so; I rather liked the Windows version of Safari, and IE for UNIX was apparently pretty good.
- jabbany 5y ago
  Yeah. I don't miss doing web dev in the Win XP days when one had to test everything on IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, etc. but at least there were options back then and things legit ran with different HTML and JS engines. Now it's just Chrome/Chromium and Firefox representing cross-platform browsers, and most other things are platform specific WebKit mods or Chromium reskins...
Turing_Machine 5y ago
> Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform At the moment. Apple has a fairly long history of keeping cross-platform ports alive even if they aren't publicly available (that's why the transitions from 68K->PowerPC->Intel->Apple Silicon have been relatively smooth). I would bet that Apple could roll out a cross-platform Safari in fairly short order, should the powers that be decide that it makes business sense.
- 5y ago