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Whenever this question is asked Apple is left out, please remember that all browsers on iOS are effectively Safari. In my market (mostly in the UK), 54% of tra

Whenever this question is asked Apple is left out, please remember that all browsers on iOS are effectively Safari. In my market (mostly in the UK), 54% of transactions happen on a iOS device. Nearly 60% of transactions are using the Apple Webkit engine when you also count Safari on MacOS. Apple absolutely dominates browser engines, I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with Safari then test in Firefox/Chrome. Seems completely backwards to do your development mostly with Chrome.

smoldesu 5y ago
> I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with safari then test in Firefox/Chrome Probably because Safari's dev tools are notoriously worse than what Chrome and Firefox offers.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Perhaps, but I still prefer to develop with Safari then test with FF/Chrome. I'll admit that I'm not necessarily doing cutting-edge JS stuff, but the Safari tools are good enough for my needs.
MattGaiser 5y ago
1. I am judged by how it behaves on Chrome. 2. Safari devtools are a lot worse than Chrome.
Tade0 5y ago
> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines Actually, it doesn't. Look at the "usage relative" chart: https://caniuse.com/?search=localStorage https://caniuse.com/?search=localStorage Safari is the distant second option.
- samwillis 5y ago
  These are my own metrics, which are most important to me. However I believe they are mostly representative of the UK consumer e-commerce market. Obviously if I was building something like an enterprise/business SASS web app that was mostly used on desktop it would be a different story and Chrome would probably dominate. My point is people regularly forget about Apple WebKit (due to iOS) in these sorts of discussions. When it comes to deciding how to test your site and choosing which to use as your "primary" browser while developing, I beleve you should use the one the majority of your customers are using. For us (and allot of people) that's Safari but use your own (not global average) metrics.
sam0x17 5y ago
I don't know any mac users that use Safari willingly anymore
- samwillis 5y ago
  I do, not only for testing as I described but it gives me in significantly more battery time (I believe about 10%).
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    Curious where you all are going where you aren't plugged in all the time anyway? I don't think I've been away from a charger being within 5 feet of me for 2+ years.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    Yes, the power savings and heat reduction are significant to a large enough degree that one has to wonder why Chrome and Firefox are so much worse in that way.
- cglong 5y ago
  My mom does, but she's getting more and more frustrated with website incompatibilities. I think she knows the onus isn't on Apple, but she still thinks they need to invest more to keep up.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  I do. Because for me Safari is a significantly better browser than the alternatives.
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Hmmm, every time I have used Safari I ended up frantically looking for a chrome icon. I would absolutely love it if Safari didn't suck. I just left an org where everyone used Macs (many thousands). Never saw anyone use Safari (except for one project manager expert beginner).
dathinab 5y ago
Because for anything beyond basic website Safari is a buggy mess, and requires a Mac and maybe had less good dev tooling.
- acdha 5y ago
  This is hyperbole: if you are developing against web standards, most things work compatibly in all browsers now. In my experience, it's a bit more likely that you'll find a problem with Safari than Chrome or Firefox but not enormously so; the worst I've found are typically cases where someone only developed in Chrome and ended up relying on the non-standard API they started with rather than the final standard version.
  - wildrhythms 5y ago
    iOS Safari (for iPhone) still does not support the Fullscreen API. Works fine on iPad, but not iPhone. Why? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fullscreen_API#document.fullscreenelement https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fullscreen_... And some weird CSS behavior that only exists in Safari right now: like :first-child selectors, limited flex-basis values, the gap property not working in a multi-column layout... It's mysterious discrepancies like this that drive me insane doing frontend for iOS. Apple can't spend a crumb of it's $2T+ getting their browser and dev tools up to par with even Firefox? Please
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      > Apple can't spend a crumb of it's $2T+ getting their browser and dev tools up to par with even Firefox? Ugh, please. They've only got a mere 200 billion in liquid cash.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Two things: that's not “a buggy mess” unless you think Firefox/Chrome magically turn into one if you use one of the APIs which Safari supports which they don't or have bugs with. Again, remember that I wasn't saying that there are no problems, only that they were exaggerating the magnitude and degree to which it's specific to Safari. Second, this is not only not “a buggy mess” but a conscious design decision and one which I generally agree with. Safari supports full-screen video, which is the primary reason why I want this, and the full-screen API is a notorious security risk on touchscreen devices even more than traditional computers because you don't have the equivalent of the escape key or the operating system UI giving you a way to tell that the “Please enter your password” dialog which just popped up was generated by the web page and not your OS. On iOS, Safari is already close to full screen anyway so the extra few pixels is less than what you'd need to account for in different screen heights between devices anyway.
judge2020 5y ago
IMO it seems like "all browsers on iOS are Safari" isn't that big of a deal because 'browsers' on iOS still get to throw all their own features and sync services into their browser app. It'd be like saying you wish you didn't have to use Windows' window APIs to create windows or wished you could avoid UIKit to do anything on iOS.
- samwillis 5y ago
  This is conflating "Browser Chrome/UI" and "Browser Rendering Engine", from a developers/business (and a web standards) perspective the rendering engine is what matters. From that perspective all bowsers "engines" on iOS are Safari/Webkit.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    From a purely business standpoint, the UI really is all that matters. Users don't choose firefox over Chrome just because FF has CSS cascade layers[0] (for example), they choose it because they think the sync/PW manager is better for them, or they might like the look of it more compared to alternatives. 0: https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-layers https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-layers
    - debaserab2 5y ago
      No, they choose Chrome because it doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, which has everything to do with the underlying tech.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, and Safari doesn't crash (although it only works on Darwin); that doesn't sound like a differentiator.
        yellowapple 5y ago
        > Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere Hell, it works more "everywhere" than Chromium (let alone Chrome) does.
eyelidlessness 5y ago
I quite like Safari as an end user, but I do tend to do most of my development/manual testing on Chrome first because I just plain don’t understand Safari’s dev tools. If I could just attach Chrome’s debugger, I’d happily use Safari more for dev.
joshstrange 5y ago
Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are absolute dogshit. God have mercy on your soul if you try to use the dev tools for Safari on the phone and/or a cross-platform web-based app on the phone. It crashes more often than not and locks up like crazy. I do everything in my power to avoid using Safari except at the last stage of testing.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are absolute dogshit. Which is really sad because Safari used to have near-best-in-class dev tools 10-12 years ago.
vagrantJin 5y ago
> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines Where? > In my market (mostly in the UK) Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a bunch of islands. Unless you are building super localised products, the world is a big place with a lot of people who don't use iOS. In case you didn't know.
- samwillis 5y ago
  >> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines >Where? >> In my market (mostly in the UK) >Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a bunch of islands. Unless you are building super localised products, the world is a big place with a lot of people who don't use iOS. You have purposely quoted my comment out of order, implying that I’m unaware of how geography and market effect browser usage, when that’s literally my point and Safari does dominate in some areas. >In case you didn't know. Is that tone really necessary?
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    Yes that tone was absolutely neccesary because you wrote > I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with Safari then test in Firefox/Chrome. Seems completely backwards to do your development mostly with Chrome. I do 98% of my dev with a MBP. I hate it but its a work laptop. That being the case, we build products used in multiple continents and Safari has never been first. At best, 3rd. So no sir, we aren't doing things backwards.
    - samwillis 5y ago
      > Yes that tone was absolutely neccesary We will have to agree to disagree on that. > we build products used in multiple continents and Safari has never been first. At best, 3rd. So, you have a different experience to me, which is the literal point, and in fact to the global average where Safari is very much second: https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/
      - 5y ago

smoldesu 5y ago

> I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with safari then test in Firefox/Chrome Probably because Safari's dev tools are notoriously worse than what Chrome and Firefox offers.

dhosek 5y ago
Perhaps, but I still prefer to develop with Safari then test with FF/Chrome. I'll admit that I'm not necessarily doing cutting-edge JS stuff, but the Safari tools are good enough for my needs.

MattGaiser 5y ago

1. I am judged by how it behaves on Chrome. 2. Safari devtools are a lot worse than Chrome.

Tade0 5y ago

> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines Actually, it doesn't. Look at the "usage relative" chart: https://caniuse.com/?search=localStorage https://caniuse.com/?search=localStorage Safari is the distant second option.

samwillis 5y ago
These are my own metrics, which are most important to me. However I believe they are mostly representative of the UK consumer e-commerce market. Obviously if I was building something like an enterprise/business SASS web app that was mostly used on desktop it would be a different story and Chrome would probably dominate. My point is people regularly forget about Apple WebKit (due to iOS) in these sorts of discussions. When it comes to deciding how to test your site and choosing which to use as your "primary" browser while developing, I beleve you should use the one the majority of your customers are using. For us (and allot of people) that's Safari but use your own (not global average) metrics.

sam0x17 5y ago

I don't know any mac users that use Safari willingly anymore

samwillis 5y ago
I do, not only for testing as I described but it gives me in significantly more battery time (I believe about 10%).
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Curious where you all are going where you aren't plugged in all the time anyway? I don't think I've been away from a charger being within 5 feet of me for 2+ years.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Yes, the power savings and heat reduction are significant to a large enough degree that one has to wonder why Chrome and Firefox are so much worse in that way.
cglong 5y ago
My mom does, but she's getting more and more frustrated with website incompatibilities. I think she knows the onus isn't on Apple, but she still thinks they need to invest more to keep up.
dmitriid 5y ago
I do. Because for me Safari is a significantly better browser than the alternatives.
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Hmmm, every time I have used Safari I ended up frantically looking for a chrome icon. I would absolutely love it if Safari didn't suck. I just left an org where everyone used Macs (many thousands). Never saw anyone use Safari (except for one project manager expert beginner).

dathinab 5y ago

Because for anything beyond basic website Safari is a buggy mess, and requires a Mac and maybe had less good dev tooling.

acdha 5y ago
This is hyperbole: if you are developing against web standards, most things work compatibly in all browsers now. In my experience, it's a bit more likely that you'll find a problem with Safari than Chrome or Firefox but not enormously so; the worst I've found are typically cases where someone only developed in Chrome and ended up relying on the non-standard API they started with rather than the final standard version.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  iOS Safari (for iPhone) still does not support the Fullscreen API. Works fine on iPad, but not iPhone. Why? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fullscreen_API#document.fullscreenelement https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fullscreen_... And some weird CSS behavior that only exists in Safari right now: like :first-child selectors, limited flex-basis values, the gap property not working in a multi-column layout... It's mysterious discrepancies like this that drive me insane doing frontend for iOS. Apple can't spend a crumb of it's $2T+ getting their browser and dev tools up to par with even Firefox? Please
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    > Apple can't spend a crumb of it's $2T+ getting their browser and dev tools up to par with even Firefox? Ugh, please. They've only got a mere 200 billion in liquid cash.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Two things: that's not “a buggy mess” unless you think Firefox/Chrome magically turn into one if you use one of the APIs which Safari supports which they don't or have bugs with. Again, remember that I wasn't saying that there are no problems, only that they were exaggerating the magnitude and degree to which it's specific to Safari. Second, this is not only not “a buggy mess” but a conscious design decision and one which I generally agree with. Safari supports full-screen video, which is the primary reason why I want this, and the full-screen API is a notorious security risk on touchscreen devices even more than traditional computers because you don't have the equivalent of the escape key or the operating system UI giving you a way to tell that the “Please enter your password” dialog which just popped up was generated by the web page and not your OS. On iOS, Safari is already close to full screen anyway so the extra few pixels is less than what you'd need to account for in different screen heights between devices anyway.

judge2020 5y ago

IMO it seems like "all browsers on iOS are Safari" isn't that big of a deal because 'browsers' on iOS still get to throw all their own features and sync services into their browser app. It'd be like saying you wish you didn't have to use Windows' window APIs to create windows or wished you could avoid UIKit to do anything on iOS.

samwillis 5y ago
This is conflating "Browser Chrome/UI" and "Browser Rendering Engine", from a developers/business (and a web standards) perspective the rendering engine is what matters. From that perspective all bowsers "engines" on iOS are Safari/Webkit.
- judge2020 5y ago
  From a purely business standpoint, the UI really is all that matters. Users don't choose firefox over Chrome just because FF has CSS cascade layers[0] (for example), they choose it because they think the sync/PW manager is better for them, or they might like the look of it more compared to alternatives. 0: https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-layers https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-layers
  - debaserab2 5y ago
    No, they choose Chrome because it doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, which has everything to do with the underlying tech.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, and Safari doesn't crash (although it only works on Darwin); that doesn't sound like a differentiator.
      - yellowapple 5y ago
        > Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere Hell, it works more "everywhere" than Chromium (let alone Chrome) does.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

I quite like Safari as an end user, but I do tend to do most of my development/manual testing on Chrome first because I just plain don’t understand Safari’s dev tools. If I could just attach Chrome’s debugger, I’d happily use Safari more for dev.

joshstrange 5y ago

Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are absolute dogshit. God have mercy on your soul if you try to use the dev tools for Safari on the phone and/or a cross-platform web-based app on the phone. It crashes more often than not and locks up like crazy. I do everything in my power to avoid using Safari except at the last stage of testing.

dmitriid 5y ago
> Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are absolute dogshit. Which is really sad because Safari used to have near-best-in-class dev tools 10-12 years ago.

vagrantJin 5y ago

> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines Where? > In my market (mostly in the UK) Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a bunch of islands. Unless you are building super localised products, the world is a big place with a lot of people who don't use iOS. In case you didn't know.

samwillis 5y ago
>> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines >Where? >> In my market (mostly in the UK) >Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a bunch of islands. Unless you are building super localised products, the world is a big place with a lot of people who don't use iOS. You have purposely quoted my comment out of order, implying that I’m unaware of how geography and market effect browser usage, when that’s literally my point and Safari does dominate in some areas. >In case you didn't know. Is that tone really necessary?
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  Yes that tone was absolutely neccesary because you wrote > I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with Safari then test in Firefox/Chrome. Seems completely backwards to do your development mostly with Chrome. I do 98% of my dev with a MBP. I hate it but its a work laptop. That being the case, we build products used in multiple continents and Safari has never been first. At best, 3rd. So no sir, we aren't doing things backwards.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    > Yes that tone was absolutely neccesary We will have to agree to disagree on that. > we build products used in multiple continents and Safari has never been first. At best, 3rd. So, you have a different experience to me, which is the literal point, and in fact to the global average where Safari is very much second: https://gs.statcounter.com/ https://gs.statcounter.com/
    - 5y ago