8 ms·
New WebKit Features in Safari 15.5
- etchalon 4y agoIt seems like Apple is accelerating WebKit/Safari changes.
- agust 4y agoThey have accelerated and started hiring massively around October last year, that is when several regulators started investigating the browser engine ban on iOS (the CMA in the UK first).
- jinder 4y agoCorrect - after years of deliberately hobbling Safari so you couldn't build quality app experiences, they suddenly start releasing lots of useful improvement just as regulators are sniffing around.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- scarface74 4y agoI keep seeing this conspiracy. It came out during the epic trial that the vast majority of revenue from the App Store comes from pay to win games. Apple isn’t making money off of apps that could be a web apps.
- jinder 4y agoThe vast majority of apps you see on the App Store, including most games can be web apps. So I'm not sure what your point is? Apple has deliberately under-invested in implementing web platform features on Safari. If you've tried to build a web app on Safari vs Android Chrome, you'll know what I mean. It's not a conspiracy - it's a clear as day policy to keep consumers and developers locked into their platform.
- scarface74 4y agoHow many pay to win games are web apps on Android then? Why didn’t Epic just make all of their game web apps on Android and PC.
- mhoad 4y agoThat’s really just more evidence to support the theory and is in no way exculpatory. The only thing it adds to the picture is that the majority of their revenue is also extremely predatory and the underlying model essentially works the same way as slot machines.
- mtomweb 4y agoIt’s an awful business model. It’s one thing to have Safari hobbled because of high quality business apps and games, another for loot boxes, gems and countdown timers to exploit whales.
- scarface74 4y agoIf only Safari is hobbled to not allow games - why are all popular games native apps on Android?
- mtomweb 4y agoThe main advantage of the web is interoperability, if you don’t have that and the game engines developers just go for native. Once the core gaming APIs are supported across both iOS and Android (WebGPU, SIMD, WASM threads, fast storage, install prompts, notifications), I think you will see the main gaming engines implemented and then you’ll see the games move.
- scarface74 4y agoThe game studios like in app purchasing where you get to buy loot boxes and other zero marginal cost goods without thinking about it. We have a control in the experiment - we have an “open ecosystem” in Android and supposedly a much better browser - yet and still, game developers still choose to give Google the same 30% cut as Apple. Maybe it’s not because Apple is holding the web back?
- mtomweb 4y ago
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoany links? (on the hirings)
- jensimmons 4y agohttps://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=WebKit&sort=relevance&location=united-states-USA https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=WebKit&sort=relev...
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoThose are open jobs which is great to see. Is there a way to see the existing number of employees working on webkit?
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoit was an abandonware until last year
- etchalon 4y agoThey’ve consistently added features with every OS release cycle. Which isn’t nearly as fast as other browsers move, but it was never abandonware.
- JanSt 4y agoI keep hoping for the bluetooth api to be added at some point. Still unlikely unfortunately :-(
- akmarinov 4y ago0 chance of that happening
- JanSt 4y agoyeah, apple is pretty stubborn on that one. I’m glad we have Chrome
- hbn 4y agoThe nice thing about Chrome is that any and every feature is implemented. The bad thing about Chrome is that any and every feature is implemented.
- aeharding 4y agoThere's still some things Safari prioritizes that other vendors don't have. For example, Chrome (and FF) still haven't fully implemented CSS colors level 4. Chrome and Firefox are still clamping all CSS colors to sRGB. You literally can't render anything outside of sRGB with CSS. And almost all modern Apple devices are capable of the display-p3 color space. This is very noticeable when rendering reds and greens, especially. https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-display-p3/ https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...
- SemanticStrengh 4y agothis is not true anymore, chromium added support for other color spaces this year
- aeharding 4y ago
- dmix 4y ago`inert` sounds like something that could be abused, similar to how websites (annoyingly) try to block you from easily right-click saving photos.
- evan_ 4y ago`inert` doesn't let you do anything you couldn't do before, it just does it with one attribute instead of a half-dozen attributes and CSS rules that need to be applied to the element and its children. You can defeat right-click save-as about ten different ways already so that ship has sailed. And all of those can be defeated using the Application tab in the Chrome dev tools or mitmproxy etc.
- teg4n_ 4y agoIt’s desperately needed to implement current patterns like model dialogs in an accessible way. It doesn’t do anything JavaScript can’t already do so I don’t think it’s any worse for abuse.
- tiffanyh 4y agoStill waiting for Apple to enable PREFETCH https://caniuse.com/link-rel-prefetch https://caniuse.com/link-rel-prefetch It's been there since Safari v13.1 but disabled by default. (PreFetch is what allows https://instant.page https://instant.page to load assets super fast.)
- webmobdev 4y agoAnd also extensively used for privacy invasive tracking (1) there is no same-origin restriction for link prefetching and (2) it allow cookies to be planted from tracking servers. ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefetching_FAQ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Link_prefe... ).
- phillipseamore 4y agoStill waiting for MSE and fullscreen API support in iOS Safari for better media support without having to roll out an app. Both have been available on iPadOS for a few years now.
- charlescooper 4y agoI have been using Firefox & macOS for about the last 4-5 years. I primarily use it because I enjoy the bookmark sync between my Mac and linux desktops and because I try using open-source software as much as reasonably possible. However I will used a closed-source product when I feel it is better than the open source option. (E.g. MS Excel) It seems like Safari has been rapidly improving as of late. Any recommendations to try it again over Firefox? Would be a bit annoying to find some sort of "bookmark sync" solution again, but something good probably exists out there.
- corrral 4y agoThe main selling point is that it's far more respectful of system resources than its big two competitors. Noticeably lower power use, reduced effects on performance of other software outside the browser. If the rest of your stuff is also Apple, browser sync is a pretty solid Just Works thing, which can be a benefit of using it, but you're not all-Apple, so that benefit's out. [EDIT] "So what are the downsides?" worse dev tools, worse add-on ecosystem. Sometimes it's missing engine features that FF and Chrome have (this never hinders me at all in practice, with my usage patterns, and in fact I'm usually glad when they choose not to uncritically and promptly implement every single feature Google adds to Chrome, but I understand it bothers some people a lot, so would definitely count against Safari if those features are things you really want/need)
- bastardoperator 4y agoThis is exactly why I use safari, it's not perfect, but it respects the battery life to a noticeable extent.
- MBCook 4y agoI love it. In my eyes it’s the best browser because of that and it’s Apple ecosystem integration. It also feels so much faster. Maybe the others have caught up on the Mac over the years. But it used to be night and day. I even use it for development. The dev tools are fine for me. I agree FF/Chrome are better, so I use them when I need it. Especially for the React or Redux plug-ins. But for standard JS errors and CSS tinkering I find Safari works just fine.
- lazyjeff 4y agoWhile we're making wishlists for Safari, the one I think would have the most real world impact is AV1 support, to have a modern royalty-free codec across all browsers if Safari adds it. Safari is the last holdout. Considering the large proportion of internet usage is to transfer video, the savings in storage and transmission would be non-trivial.
- aluminum96 4y agoApple is very close with the media entities that receive royalties from MPEG, h.264, etc, so I wouldn't hold your breath.
- galad87 4y agoUntil there are enough devices with an av1 hardware decoder, any storage and transmission saving is lost to the higher energy usage and worse battery life for the end user.
- lazyjeff 4y agoMy phone already has av1 hardware decoding (pixel 6). But anyway it's a chicken/egg problem, where the broader hardware decoding will come once browser support is there. The long-term impacts are more significant. Also, energy use worldwide might decline if fewer datacenters are needed to store/transmit videos. Kind of hard to measure and compare against enduser devices, but it's another factor to consider.
- galad87 4y agoApple makes both its browser and its hardware, so it's not really a chicken/egg problem for them. But they are a member of Alliance for Open Media, so maybe this WWDC or next they will announce something.
- ksec 4y ago>Also, energy use worldwide might decline if fewer datacenters are needed to store/transmit videos. You dont save on Storage, you are storing an additional copy of video using a different codec.
- leeoniya 4y ago> Fixed scrolling background-attachment: fixed oh, joy! only took 8+ years: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23236158/how-to-replicate-background-attachment-fixed-on-ios https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23236158/how-to-replicat...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rikschennink 4y agoHaven’t checked yet but assume that canvas memory management is probably still broken.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agowhen will they support sharedworkers..
- no_way 4y agoI am still insanely upset that there are a lot of years spanning bugs which aren't fixed in Safari or even acknowledged in their bug tracker, but the situation is getting a lot better with the release frequency and new features so at least there is hope for things to get better from here.
- mtomweb 4y agoI understand the feeling, we’d stopped bothering to lodge tickets until this year. If you find ones that haven’t got attention and they’re still important, tweet at webkit or Jen. They’ve been really good with bugs recently and they are getting fixed. If you do find new bugs I would encourage you to make tickets.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Daiz 4y agoGotta say, really disappointed with the fact that instead of Safari making 100vh actually mean 100% of viewport height like it's supposed to, they instead present us with all these new viewport units, all to fix a problem that was caused by their own deviation from the spec to begin with. And of course they're not going to do anything about 100vh even with all these new units, because how else are we going to force developers to use our special units to cater to our browser's quirks!
- lilyball 4y agoWhat spec? I just looked up what the issue is with vh on mobile and the very first resource I found talked about how the spec isn't clear on how it's supposed to behave in the presence of movable chrome, like the address bar on mobile browsers. It also says that Safari's initial implementation updated `vh` when the address bar changed visibility and this caused a bad jump in layout, which is why they changed it to ignore the address bar so it's a fixed value instead. And it says Chrome mobile followed suite as well, which means it's not just Safari that thinks the "fixed value" approach is better on mobile.
- Daiz 4y agoI've yet to meet a single developer who likes what Apple did with 100vh. And it's why all my projects to date that want to use viewport height in CSS have ended up adding a JS snippet that sets a --vh CSS variable to window.innerHeight on resize, because I have no interest in dealing with Apple's special boy CSS behavior. And really, even Apple itself admits that their 100vh solution is troublesome - they wouldn't have introduced all these new units otherwise! Even if the saner solution would have been to just change their idiosyncratic 100vh behavior to what developers actually expect from it.
- lilyball 4y agoAnd what do "developers" expect from it? Because as a user I certainly remember that it used to be very common for website layout to jump around in an aggravating fashion when hiding the address bar. These new units do not indicate that Apple's 100vh behavior is "troublesome", they indicate that mobile needs better viewport units than desktop does. Which is why there are three separate new viewport units, to correspond to the three different desired measurements. Even if Apple never changed 100vh behavior, these new set of units are a significant improvement.
- intellix 4y agoSafari is like internet explorer and where I spend the majority of my day fixing issues related to quirks and bugs