8 ms·

What’s new in Safari and WebKit

29 points by itsuka 4y ago

rektide 4y ago
- warning26 4y ago
  Safari: the new IE6!
  - rektide 4y ago
    - neonsunset 4y ago
      What makes Apple or any other big tech. company fascist? What makes them totalitarian? What is with this habit in US to distort the meaning of words and use them to manipulate the perception of others?
      - rektide 4y ago
        There's a longstanding idea of the war on general-purpose computing[1], that more and more power will be stripped away from the person/individual, and that computers will be turned into corporate-run appliances. Apple's strict marshal control over their platform, their escalating stripping of user rights & removal of choice: this is what makes them leading villains in the war against general-purpose computing. They prevent choice, they obstruct. They use the tools of authoritarianism to spread the propoganda that fascism is good for you, the common man: it's everything else you should Fear! Every other computing company out there respect that users have rights over their computers. Everyone freaked out when Microsoft introduced Secure BIOS, but it turns out, a decade latter, they've lived up to their word & it's still a system that requires both security AND freedom. Unlike the big titan Apple. [1] https://google.com/search?q=war+on+general-purpose+computing https://google.com/search?q=war+on+general-purpose+computing
    - moistly 4y ago
      If you didn’t write like an unhinged lunatic, one might take your opinion seriously instead of finding it laughably over-the-top and instantly dismissing it as the ravings of a madman.
      - rektide 4y ago
        Still not wrong! To modify another nearby comment[1], > At least [I] have an ethos One I can wear proudly. It seems like there's some pretty clear & obvious truths to how Apple anti-competitively restrains the web. My words might sound wild to many. But I think it's less clear how many pro-Safari anti-choice advocates sound, how warped & weird that reality is. What even is the ethos? I cite the idea of the the war-on-general-purpose-computing[2]. This is one of the darkest, most anti-personal worst fates computing could suffer: to have humanity stripped of agency, to leave us only with appliances, fixed functions. Apple's "balance", their "security" feels like a certain relinquishing of exploration, of possibility, of liberty, an enforcement of only their way of doing this. Apple's logos seems in severe clash with humankind's ethos. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662743 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662723
        etchalon 4y ago
        The idea a company "anti-competitively restrains the web" by "not adding some features some developers want fast enough" is just so high-school drama hyperbolic it's hard to take you seriously.
        rektide 4y ago
        > The idea a company "anti-competitively restrains the web" by "not adding some features some developers want fast enough" is just so high-school drama hyperbolic it's hard to take you seriously. What about "anti competitively restrains the web by preventing any other browsers from running"? Like, holy shit- do we remember what Microsoft got in trouble for?[1][2] For making IE the default browser? For including a browser at all? Windows had like >90% market share on desktops, iOS doesn't have >30%, but if 30% of the computers run Apple-Web- and can't run the real web at all, that's about as blatantly anti-competitive, is as crude & crippling a blow as could be imagined. Other browsers had been possible vs IE- Apple won't even allow the possibility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      > fascist-totalitarian ur-state Apple At least they have an ethos.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      > Safari is enforced by a fascist-totalitarian ur-state Apple, via complex techno-legalistic anti-competitive machinations That’s Google. You’re describing Google.
      - rektide 4y ago
        Why?
        rayiner 4y ago
        Google has its fingers in everything from search to mobile. It overthrew the W3C and killed the open standards web years ago. It’s also deeply involved in politics (Eric Schmidt, Michelle Lee, etc). Apple just makes hardware with bundled software. It has no monopoly to increase its leverage, and stays out of politics for the most part.
        rektide 4y ago
        There's no way to argue you out of emotional non-factual convictions like this. This position is built on feelings (& fear), & there's no way I can use reason to convince you of anything other than the "truth" you think you're onto. Chrome is one of the most transparent & open projects on the planet. They draft, get positons, state intent early & accept open comments- usually with little protest noted- get TAG & security opions proactively... christ its hard to think of bow muchore tbey could do to make do-gooding open.
    - etchalon 4y ago
      Someone learned some big words and wanted to use them.
    - workerdrone451 4y ago
      Many will call you crazy due to the phrasing, but you're not wrong. The problem is that people look at the Apple / Google duopoly and say "look we have competition! How can you compare this to Microsoft in the 90s!?" The sheer amount of anticompetitive behavior both these companies have done over the years is insane when you put in prospective what Microsoft went to court over. Many of us saw projects like Firefox grow in the 2000s, giving hope that open source and standards would win out in the end. But we dwindled, lulled by the sweet promises of Chrome and their open core. And just like that we're back to a major corporation controlling large swaths of the web. Makes the future look pretty bleak to be honest.
      - rektide 4y ago
        > The problem is that people look at the Apple / Google duopoly and say "look we have competition! How can you compare this to Microsoft in the 90s!?" Strong agreement. There's also a flacid, weak, shitty, useless anti-trust system, which was stripped of power by Borkism in the Reagan era. My generation has almost never seen effective anti-trust. Not once has a case been made against exploitative, anti-competitive practices that really has resonated in America, in decades, and it's not for lack of shitty, no good villians. It's because of Borkism[1][2], because of redefinition of what anti-trust meant under Reagan. > The sheer amount of anticompetitive behavior both these companies have done over the years is insane when you put in prospective what Microsoft went to court over. That Microsoft faced so much shit for such a relatively small act is amazing. What Apple does is absurd to me, that there's seemingly no legal challenge to their dominion-without-question of 30% of the web. I've looked at quite a number of anti-trust complaints against Google, and frankly, I owe it to myself/all to go re-review. Google like Apple has suits against them for the 30% cut they charge at their store, which is both valid & respectable but also- on Android- easily avoidable & the open-source OS itself (& it's releases) actively supports alternative delivery platforms such as F-Droid and sideloading: Google actively supports competition. But we're seeing a lot of apps drop in-app sales, and I think that's a telling & real response: 30% is absurd. There's a number of suits against ads, and search. To be honest, none of these have left a distinct impression, have really clicked for me. I am fully able to believe there may be some serious fuckery here-abouts. There's a suit about Google Assistant systems being unable to also support alternative systems like Alexa: as a fan of general-purpose computing & competitive competition, I think this is absolutely a place that there should be straightforward & clear mandates for all companys, Google included, to be compelled to allow interopation: restricting people making devices to have to pick one and only one partner is basically a reasonable battle against Qualcomm-ism[3], against coersion, is a move to enable basic device-maker and consumer choice. Against all of this backdrop though, one critical thing I think most of the world really has no sense of is that Google is somewhat alive under a weird patronage model. Their cash cows feel serve as patrons to the artists, and the artists are there just to make the ecosystem healthy & alive. The cash registers ring because of a semi-open market, because the web is a pretty damned good place to connect, host shit, do shit; better than AOL, better than Microsoft Windows, better than apps. Trying to stack the deck laterally, to make the web be Google's web, or Android be Google's Android: they are extremely liable to kill the cash cow. These need to be healthy, independent, functional systems, that are getting better & remaining at the very forefront of competition against all others. This health is absolutely the pinnacle concern, is existentially important. Android or the web could readily collapse if things go poorly, if corruption takes root, if whiffs of real genuine misdealings gets into the air. And frankly, the problem solves itself internally. Google historically & famously has been an engineering lead organization. They have a long history of employing very good, public figures who care about the web, who know about the web, who have wanted to make the web better, who seem motivated by strong intrinsic desires. These people sit on standards boards, they help align Chrome. These people don't take shit from traditional corporate lackies trying to make some fast bucks by dodgy inter-dealings. Again, given Google's strong first & second party relationships (search and ads), no matter what happens with browsers, webtech (& to a lesser degree Android), Google will have an incomparable vast & mighty perch to understand & analyze & model the web from, and not unfairly, not by cheating, not by underhandedness. The objective is to keep the shared, common, competitive platform alive, shared, & competitive. By doing good engineering. By making development better & easier & giving them better superpowers. By not hazarding gross breakage that would sabotage public belief/faith. This isn't a super complex system. It's nicely isolated parts, which each do their own thing: make better systems, use free-market search & ads to be top of the game (to make $ & to keep funding/patronizing the essential ecosystem). > Many of us saw projects like Firefox grow in the 2000s, giving hope that open source and standards would win out in the end. But we dwindled, lulled by the sweet promises of Chrome and their open core. True true. Will has been lost. Chromium is remarkably accessible, there are remarkably good hooks still in place to go build our own sync systems or what not. Few have chased up, have tried to really amplify & enhance Chromium into an open browser. That's unfortunate. In general I'd say the real frontier for advancement is on https://wicg.io https://wicg.io . This has been a very compelling case for how the web really needed to advance all along. An extremely low barrier to entry to start proposing ideas, where other standards folks & standards-adjacent folk can chime in & help steer, help sheppard young web ideas into desireable, promising standards that stand a fair chance of being adopted. I definitely wish there were more alternatives out there, more efforts. I have hope we'll see some new arisals show up. But at the same time, I don't see Chrome as bad or scary or problematic. There's very few cases people have made against it that seem, well, real. Emotion & fear & doubt run rampant. Even when the team makes decisions I truly detest (e.g. squandering awesome HTTP Push potential then abandoning the capability) I generally understand & can see where folks are coming from. We're not accelerating to where I'd wish to go, but it's incredibly rare that I see Chrome/Chromium as going in actively bad directions, building "bad" web platform. Very few have made a case that I can really see or grasp, that's worth agreeing or disagreeing with about Chrome or Android, about how Google invests & shapes these forwards. I continue to see this more as a patronage system, as investment in the necessary & worthy ecosystem, that supports the existence of a separate, more corporate entity. And I don't see the anti-competitive practices taking root in this web or android space, generally. [1] https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork [2] https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628094
- neonsunset 4y ago
  It’s a feature I never needed and the websites that most often prompt to enable web notifications are the sketchy ones save for twitter.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Judging only by our own limited known experiences, & weighting that higher than all the people who do use & enjoy a thing is... not good. I agree that Web Push has a lot of really bad uses, is terrible on almost all sites. But it also means folks using ProtonMail or other email systems[1], or folks on chat platforms, can function when all they have is a random web browser on a random computer in front of them. Ultimately I lay much of the blame here on how permissions & user-gestures were iterated forwards, thinking it was going to reduce nagging on websites. User-gestures failed to accomplish the desired results, are a failure, haven't fixed how annoying permissions are on the web, & we need some new approaches. Web Push is perhaps the headlining feature that makes the problem most obvious, because the ratio of places we'd want it to places that have it is tiny. But that doesn't change my base feeling, which is that this is a vital & core capability, and our personal apathy towards it's presence shouldn't prevent us from appreciating how great it is for some. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31645577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31645577
- runlevel1 4y ago
  > End the Safari iOS monopoly We'll be trading it for a Chrome monopoly on all platforms. To quote the Alien vs. Predator tagline: Whoever wins, we lose.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    No, because safari will not be chrome. Whereas Chrome is currently safari.
  - usrn 4y ago
    Giving third party developers push notifications would be a win because at least we could start building open chat applications again. Apple is pretty much single-handedly responsible for destroying internet chat apps.
    - runlevel1 4y ago
      Safari definitely needs work, and there are quite a few areas it's holding back wider adoption of features. My previous comment was scoped only to Apple's prohibiting other browser engines in the App Store being the only thing holding back a Chrome monopoly.
- dangus 4y ago
  mo·nop·o·ly noun Any mobile operating system with less than 30% global market share or browser with less than 20% global market share. "I wanted to avoid using Apple's web browser, since it represents a monopoly, so I decided that a web browser used by more than half the world developed by a web advertising company with a over 90% search engine market share was a better alternative.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  > SharedWorkers, shipped in Chrome 4, in January 2010 And in Safari 5, June 2010. Many features around workers, shared resources between them, high resolution timers and much more have been introduced… then removed… then reintroduced by all of the major browsers. As with push notifications, I’m glad the WebKit team has been cautious about adding or reintroducing functionality that could be abused. There are surely pet bugs I wish they’d fix sooner, but they’re hardly the stagnation you portray, especially in the last couple years. There are features devs care about where WK and even Safari have been first to ship. I’m sympathetic to the argument that iOS shouldn’t prevent other browser engines, albeit cautiously so. But this kind of disingenuous haranguing isn’t helping anyone understand the situation or helping them have a better experience on their own devices.
  - rektide 4y ago
    Do you have any links sharing why this feature was removed? I'd be interested to see the justification. I have a hard time reconciling a little caution & reasonableness with a 12 year absence. Calling it "disingenuous haranguing" feels itself disingenuous.
    - curling_grad 4y ago
      Not sure about others, but as far as I know high resolution timers were removed to (partly) mitigate side channel attacks. https://webkit.org/blog/8048/what-spectre-and-meltdown-mean-for-webkit/ https://webkit.org/blog/8048/what-spectre-and-meltdown-mean-...
      - rektide 4y ago
        That post is from 2018, but Safari 7 dropped SharedWorkers in 2012. My longstanding belief & understanding was that Safari was deliberately crippling cross-tab interactions. This felt like a marked place where Safari had did the right thing, and simply decided what was good for the web was bad for Apple. But I don't know where I'd go to find evidence or citations.
    - AlphaSite 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robertoandred 4y ago
  Safari already has :has(), Chrome and Firefox do not. :has() is actually useful, Chrome pushes features that are largely a waste.
  - rektide 4y ago
    From https://chromestatus.com/feature/5794378545102848 https://chromestatus.com/feature/5794378545102848 : > Unlike other selectors, :has pseudo class gives a way to apply a style rule to preceding elements (preceding siblings / ancestors / preceding siblings of ancestors) of a certain elements. > This difference is attractive to web developers, but also it generates lots of concerns mainly about performance and complexity. So there have been discussion about these over the years, but it was difficult to get those discussion moving forward. > It is true that it can generate performance issues and complex cases. But it is also true that there have been clear demands for the usage. > We thought that, clarifying those concerns would be helpful for the discussion. So we started to check feasibility on blink, and were able to get some meaningful and reasonable results from this step. Based on the results, we are going to move forward by prototyping. Right now the estimate is that they can ship in Chrome 105, but this still in advance. I often hear Safari-defenders say their browser is faster, that Chrome is bloated, and I think this is a great case demonstrating an opposite direction, showing a Chrome that is very focused on making sure the web stays healthy & doesn't have pitfalls & doesn't accidentally get slow. But Chrome is willing to play ball, has acknowledged the lack of this feature hurts, and has come around & tried to meet developer desire, rather than stay fast, & has followed what Safari has pushed for. Roberto, I had a really frustrating & negative time dealing with your pro-Safari anti-Chrome skepticisms[1] yesterday, which I felt were aimed primarily at snubbing & shorting. I hope if we engage again this time we can have a more earnest & forthright discourse. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31647980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31647980
    - robertoandred 4y ago
      Has Safari pushed for it? Or is it simply that Google is slow to adopt the spec? If Safari is faster with features than Chrome is without, maybe it’s Chrome that’s the problem, and we shouldn’t let it hold back the web.
- rayiner 4y ago
  Safari on iOS is the only thing keeping Chrome from completely embracing and extending the web Microsoft-circa-1996 style.
  - etchalon 4y ago
    We must end the iOS monopoly and so that Chrome can have an all-OS monopoly. It's the only sane thing to do.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    Safari, as the default browser, could still keep Chrome from embracing and extending the web. It would just have to be a competent implementation instead of the half-baked pile of bugs it is now.
- astrange 4y ago
  Sometimes you're mad that everything Google does is about tracking you, sometimes you're mad that other browsers don't implement the features Google added to track you.
pvg 4y ago
Yesterday, 136 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31644622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31644622
artdigital 4y ago
I use Safari as my main browser (by choice) but wish they'd do a bit more about general snappy-ness and better support for sites that use video/microphone (like google meets) It's sad that a lot of sites decide to only optimize for Chromium/Blink and have horrible performance on anything else, or hold back features altogether. Orion browser was posted here just recently and looks very neat which feels a bit snappier, though still a bit rough on extensions and doesn't support Safari extensions.
- gwill 4y ago
  how about sites that refuse to give you access if you're not using chrome? i use firefox as my main browser and ive found that a few sites which claim to not be compatible with ff work perfectly fine if i change my useragent to appear as chrome. it's really annoying and lazy to see how many people they're shutting out when they do this, vs just giving a warning that some features haven't been tested on browser x.
  - notriddle 4y ago
    Report this at https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/ Mozilla can add a special case to make Firefox lie about its UA by default.
- al_borland 4y ago
  I find Google Maps painfully slow in Safari. When I got a new M1 Pro and loaded it up the first time it seemed amazing, but over time it got worse. I don't know if this is an issue with Safari or Google's way to push poeple to Chrome. I started using Orion over the past few days. There are definitely some things I like, but even though it says it supports Chrome and Firefox extensions, the only one I care about is 1Password. It installed, but wouldn't run because Orion isn't verified in some way.
  - artdigital 4y ago
    The Firefox version of 1Password does run on Orion, but it doesn't stay unlocked for longer than a minute. Also no biometric authentication
darthrupert 4y ago
Well, if nothing else, this thread will be good material for n-gate.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jordemort 4y ago
  If only they'd come back. If you're out there, I'd throw some $ at a Patreon.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
In 2015/2016, I led a 4-member engineering team to overhaul an upcoming eCommerce website for a pretty well-known brand in India. I think this was when an Indian unicorn, Flipkart, was going around town advertising their excellent Progressive Web App features for browsers (Chrome/Android). We stole many ideas from that and implemented them for the client, including the notorious connection persistence when the Internet was patchy. One of the biggest hurdles was convincing the CEO (for revenue) and CTO of the calculated risk of alienating a tiny fraction of users on iOS (iPhones) and pre-IE10s (I think). They will lose about 2% of the revenue from those if we go ahead with the plan and push those people away. Remember, 2% of a large number is still a significant number when seen independently and impacts their P&L. I promised them that the increase in revenue would make up for that north of their expectation. It did. In fact, to my surprise, their revenue doubled in about 3-5 months of the new deployment. I saw the internal email sent by the CEO to the whole company; it was all praises, big numbers, and such. The lesson was to look closely at the data and take big calculated bets. Based on usage, quite a lot of things happening in the Safari world was pretty insignificant. By 2018/19, for another product decision, we were hoping that Safari will catch-up but didn't really. Personally, I use Safari on all devices and would hate websites pushing notifications!

29 points by itsuka 4y ago

rektide 4y ago

warning26 4y ago
Safari: the new IE6!
- rektide 4y ago
  - neonsunset 4y ago
    What makes Apple or any other big tech. company fascist? What makes them totalitarian? What is with this habit in US to distort the meaning of words and use them to manipulate the perception of others?
    - rektide 4y ago
      There's a longstanding idea of the war on general-purpose computing[1], that more and more power will be stripped away from the person/individual, and that computers will be turned into corporate-run appliances. Apple's strict marshal control over their platform, their escalating stripping of user rights & removal of choice: this is what makes them leading villains in the war against general-purpose computing. They prevent choice, they obstruct. They use the tools of authoritarianism to spread the propoganda that fascism is good for you, the common man: it's everything else you should Fear! Every other computing company out there respect that users have rights over their computers. Everyone freaked out when Microsoft introduced Secure BIOS, but it turns out, a decade latter, they've lived up to their word & it's still a system that requires both security AND freedom. Unlike the big titan Apple. [1] https://google.com/search?q=war+on+general-purpose+computing https://google.com/search?q=war+on+general-purpose+computing
  - moistly 4y ago
    If you didn’t write like an unhinged lunatic, one might take your opinion seriously instead of finding it laughably over-the-top and instantly dismissing it as the ravings of a madman.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Still not wrong! To modify another nearby comment[1], > At least [I] have an ethos One I can wear proudly. It seems like there's some pretty clear & obvious truths to how Apple anti-competitively restrains the web. My words might sound wild to many. But I think it's less clear how many pro-Safari anti-choice advocates sound, how warped & weird that reality is. What even is the ethos? I cite the idea of the the war-on-general-purpose-computing[2]. This is one of the darkest, most anti-personal worst fates computing could suffer: to have humanity stripped of agency, to leave us only with appliances, fixed functions. Apple's "balance", their "security" feels like a certain relinquishing of exploration, of possibility, of liberty, an enforcement of only their way of doing this. Apple's logos seems in severe clash with humankind's ethos. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662743 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31662723
      - etchalon 4y ago
        The idea a company "anti-competitively restrains the web" by "not adding some features some developers want fast enough" is just so high-school drama hyperbolic it's hard to take you seriously.
        rektide 4y ago
        > The idea a company "anti-competitively restrains the web" by "not adding some features some developers want fast enough" is just so high-school drama hyperbolic it's hard to take you seriously. What about "anti competitively restrains the web by preventing any other browsers from running"? Like, holy shit- do we remember what Microsoft got in trouble for?[1][2] For making IE the default browser? For including a browser at all? Windows had like >90% market share on desktops, iOS doesn't have >30%, but if 30% of the computers run Apple-Web- and can't run the real web at all, that's about as blatantly anti-competitive, is as crude & crippling a blow as could be imagined. Other browsers had been possible vs IE- Apple won't even allow the possibility. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    > fascist-totalitarian ur-state Apple At least they have an ethos.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    > Safari is enforced by a fascist-totalitarian ur-state Apple, via complex techno-legalistic anti-competitive machinations That’s Google. You’re describing Google.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Why?
      - rayiner 4y ago
        Google has its fingers in everything from search to mobile. It overthrew the W3C and killed the open standards web years ago. It’s also deeply involved in politics (Eric Schmidt, Michelle Lee, etc). Apple just makes hardware with bundled software. It has no monopoly to increase its leverage, and stays out of politics for the most part.
        rektide 4y ago
        There's no way to argue you out of emotional non-factual convictions like this. This position is built on feelings (& fear), & there's no way I can use reason to convince you of anything other than the "truth" you think you're onto. Chrome is one of the most transparent & open projects on the planet. They draft, get positons, state intent early & accept open comments- usually with little protest noted- get TAG & security opions proactively... christ its hard to think of bow muchore tbey could do to make do-gooding open.
  - etchalon 4y ago
    Someone learned some big words and wanted to use them.
  - workerdrone451 4y ago
    Many will call you crazy due to the phrasing, but you're not wrong. The problem is that people look at the Apple / Google duopoly and say "look we have competition! How can you compare this to Microsoft in the 90s!?" The sheer amount of anticompetitive behavior both these companies have done over the years is insane when you put in prospective what Microsoft went to court over. Many of us saw projects like Firefox grow in the 2000s, giving hope that open source and standards would win out in the end. But we dwindled, lulled by the sweet promises of Chrome and their open core. And just like that we're back to a major corporation controlling large swaths of the web. Makes the future look pretty bleak to be honest.
    - rektide 4y ago
      > The problem is that people look at the Apple / Google duopoly and say "look we have competition! How can you compare this to Microsoft in the 90s!?" Strong agreement. There's also a flacid, weak, shitty, useless anti-trust system, which was stripped of power by Borkism in the Reagan era. My generation has almost never seen effective anti-trust. Not once has a case been made against exploitative, anti-competitive practices that really has resonated in America, in decades, and it's not for lack of shitty, no good villians. It's because of Borkism[1][2], because of redefinition of what anti-trust meant under Reagan. > The sheer amount of anticompetitive behavior both these companies have done over the years is insane when you put in prospective what Microsoft went to court over. That Microsoft faced so much shit for such a relatively small act is amazing. What Apple does is absurd to me, that there's seemingly no legal challenge to their dominion-without-question of 30% of the web. I've looked at quite a number of anti-trust complaints against Google, and frankly, I owe it to myself/all to go re-review. Google like Apple has suits against them for the 30% cut they charge at their store, which is both valid & respectable but also- on Android- easily avoidable & the open-source OS itself (& it's releases) actively supports alternative delivery platforms such as F-Droid and sideloading: Google actively supports competition. But we're seeing a lot of apps drop in-app sales, and I think that's a telling & real response: 30% is absurd. There's a number of suits against ads, and search. To be honest, none of these have left a distinct impression, have really clicked for me. I am fully able to believe there may be some serious fuckery here-abouts. There's a suit about Google Assistant systems being unable to also support alternative systems like Alexa: as a fan of general-purpose computing & competitive competition, I think this is absolutely a place that there should be straightforward & clear mandates for all companys, Google included, to be compelled to allow interopation: restricting people making devices to have to pick one and only one partner is basically a reasonable battle against Qualcomm-ism[3], against coersion, is a move to enable basic device-maker and consumer choice. Against all of this backdrop though, one critical thing I think most of the world really has no sense of is that Google is somewhat alive under a weird patronage model. Their cash cows feel serve as patrons to the artists, and the artists are there just to make the ecosystem healthy & alive. The cash registers ring because of a semi-open market, because the web is a pretty damned good place to connect, host shit, do shit; better than AOL, better than Microsoft Windows, better than apps. Trying to stack the deck laterally, to make the web be Google's web, or Android be Google's Android: they are extremely liable to kill the cash cow. These need to be healthy, independent, functional systems, that are getting better & remaining at the very forefront of competition against all others. This health is absolutely the pinnacle concern, is existentially important. Android or the web could readily collapse if things go poorly, if corruption takes root, if whiffs of real genuine misdealings gets into the air. And frankly, the problem solves itself internally. Google historically & famously has been an engineering lead organization. They have a long history of employing very good, public figures who care about the web, who know about the web, who have wanted to make the web better, who seem motivated by strong intrinsic desires. These people sit on standards boards, they help align Chrome. These people don't take shit from traditional corporate lackies trying to make some fast bucks by dodgy inter-dealings. Again, given Google's strong first & second party relationships (search and ads), no matter what happens with browsers, webtech (& to a lesser degree Android), Google will have an incomparable vast & mighty perch to understand & analyze & model the web from, and not unfairly, not by cheating, not by underhandedness. The objective is to keep the shared, common, competitive platform alive, shared, & competitive. By doing good engineering. By making development better & easier & giving them better superpowers. By not hazarding gross breakage that would sabotage public belief/faith. This isn't a super complex system. It's nicely isolated parts, which each do their own thing: make better systems, use free-market search & ads to be top of the game (to make $ & to keep funding/patronizing the essential ecosystem). > Many of us saw projects like Firefox grow in the 2000s, giving hope that open source and standards would win out in the end. But we dwindled, lulled by the sweet promises of Chrome and their open core. True true. Will has been lost. Chromium is remarkably accessible, there are remarkably good hooks still in place to go build our own sync systems or what not. Few have chased up, have tried to really amplify & enhance Chromium into an open browser. That's unfortunate. In general I'd say the real frontier for advancement is on https://wicg.io https://wicg.io . This has been a very compelling case for how the web really needed to advance all along. An extremely low barrier to entry to start proposing ideas, where other standards folks & standards-adjacent folk can chime in & help steer, help sheppard young web ideas into desireable, promising standards that stand a fair chance of being adopted. I definitely wish there were more alternatives out there, more efforts. I have hope we'll see some new arisals show up. But at the same time, I don't see Chrome as bad or scary or problematic. There's very few cases people have made against it that seem, well, real. Emotion & fear & doubt run rampant. Even when the team makes decisions I truly detest (e.g. squandering awesome HTTP Push potential then abandoning the capability) I generally understand & can see where folks are coming from. We're not accelerating to where I'd wish to go, but it's incredibly rare that I see Chrome/Chromium as going in actively bad directions, building "bad" web platform. Very few have made a case that I can really see or grasp, that's worth agreeing or disagreeing with about Chrome or Android, about how Google invests & shapes these forwards. I continue to see this more as a patronage system, as investment in the necessary & worthy ecosystem, that supports the existence of a separate, more corporate entity. And I don't see the anti-competitive practices taking root in this web or android space, generally. [1] https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/#fuck-bork [2] https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31628094
neonsunset 4y ago
It’s a feature I never needed and the websites that most often prompt to enable web notifications are the sketchy ones save for twitter.
- rektide 4y ago
  Judging only by our own limited known experiences, & weighting that higher than all the people who do use & enjoy a thing is... not good. I agree that Web Push has a lot of really bad uses, is terrible on almost all sites. But it also means folks using ProtonMail or other email systems[1], or folks on chat platforms, can function when all they have is a random web browser on a random computer in front of them. Ultimately I lay much of the blame here on how permissions & user-gestures were iterated forwards, thinking it was going to reduce nagging on websites. User-gestures failed to accomplish the desired results, are a failure, haven't fixed how annoying permissions are on the web, & we need some new approaches. Web Push is perhaps the headlining feature that makes the problem most obvious, because the ratio of places we'd want it to places that have it is tiny. But that doesn't change my base feeling, which is that this is a vital & core capability, and our personal apathy towards it's presence shouldn't prevent us from appreciating how great it is for some. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31645577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31645577
runlevel1 4y ago
> End the Safari iOS monopoly We'll be trading it for a Chrome monopoly on all platforms. To quote the Alien vs. Predator tagline: Whoever wins, we lose.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  No, because safari will not be chrome. Whereas Chrome is currently safari.
- usrn 4y ago
  Giving third party developers push notifications would be a win because at least we could start building open chat applications again. Apple is pretty much single-handedly responsible for destroying internet chat apps.
  - runlevel1 4y ago
    Safari definitely needs work, and there are quite a few areas it's holding back wider adoption of features. My previous comment was scoped only to Apple's prohibiting other browser engines in the App Store being the only thing holding back a Chrome monopoly.
dangus 4y ago
mo·nop·o·ly noun Any mobile operating system with less than 30% global market share or browser with less than 20% global market share. "I wanted to avoid using Apple's web browser, since it represents a monopoly, so I decided that a web browser used by more than half the world developed by a web advertising company with a over 90% search engine market share was a better alternative.
eyelidlessness 4y ago
> SharedWorkers, shipped in Chrome 4, in January 2010 And in Safari 5, June 2010. Many features around workers, shared resources between them, high resolution timers and much more have been introduced… then removed… then reintroduced by all of the major browsers. As with push notifications, I’m glad the WebKit team has been cautious about adding or reintroducing functionality that could be abused. There are surely pet bugs I wish they’d fix sooner, but they’re hardly the stagnation you portray, especially in the last couple years. There are features devs care about where WK and even Safari have been first to ship. I’m sympathetic to the argument that iOS shouldn’t prevent other browser engines, albeit cautiously so. But this kind of disingenuous haranguing isn’t helping anyone understand the situation or helping them have a better experience on their own devices.
- rektide 4y ago
  Do you have any links sharing why this feature was removed? I'd be interested to see the justification. I have a hard time reconciling a little caution & reasonableness with a 12 year absence. Calling it "disingenuous haranguing" feels itself disingenuous.
  - curling_grad 4y ago
    Not sure about others, but as far as I know high resolution timers were removed to (partly) mitigate side channel attacks. https://webkit.org/blog/8048/what-spectre-and-meltdown-mean-for-webkit/ https://webkit.org/blog/8048/what-spectre-and-meltdown-mean-...
    - rektide 4y ago
      That post is from 2018, but Safari 7 dropped SharedWorkers in 2012. My longstanding belief & understanding was that Safari was deliberately crippling cross-tab interactions. This felt like a marked place where Safari had did the right thing, and simply decided what was good for the web was bad for Apple. But I don't know where I'd go to find evidence or citations.
  - AlphaSite 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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robertoandred 4y ago
Safari already has :has(), Chrome and Firefox do not. :has() is actually useful, Chrome pushes features that are largely a waste.
- rektide 4y ago
  From https://chromestatus.com/feature/5794378545102848 https://chromestatus.com/feature/5794378545102848 : > Unlike other selectors, :has pseudo class gives a way to apply a style rule to preceding elements (preceding siblings / ancestors / preceding siblings of ancestors) of a certain elements. > This difference is attractive to web developers, but also it generates lots of concerns mainly about performance and complexity. So there have been discussion about these over the years, but it was difficult to get those discussion moving forward. > It is true that it can generate performance issues and complex cases. But it is also true that there have been clear demands for the usage. > We thought that, clarifying those concerns would be helpful for the discussion. So we started to check feasibility on blink, and were able to get some meaningful and reasonable results from this step. Based on the results, we are going to move forward by prototyping. Right now the estimate is that they can ship in Chrome 105, but this still in advance. I often hear Safari-defenders say their browser is faster, that Chrome is bloated, and I think this is a great case demonstrating an opposite direction, showing a Chrome that is very focused on making sure the web stays healthy & doesn't have pitfalls & doesn't accidentally get slow. But Chrome is willing to play ball, has acknowledged the lack of this feature hurts, and has come around & tried to meet developer desire, rather than stay fast, & has followed what Safari has pushed for. Roberto, I had a really frustrating & negative time dealing with your pro-Safari anti-Chrome skepticisms[1] yesterday, which I felt were aimed primarily at snubbing & shorting. I hope if we engage again this time we can have a more earnest & forthright discourse. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31647980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31647980
  - robertoandred 4y ago
    Has Safari pushed for it? Or is it simply that Google is slow to adopt the spec? If Safari is faster with features than Chrome is without, maybe it’s Chrome that’s the problem, and we shouldn’t let it hold back the web.
rayiner 4y ago
Safari on iOS is the only thing keeping Chrome from completely embracing and extending the web Microsoft-circa-1996 style.
- etchalon 4y ago
  We must end the iOS monopoly and so that Chrome can have an all-OS monopoly. It's the only sane thing to do.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Safari, as the default browser, could still keep Chrome from embracing and extending the web. It would just have to be a competent implementation instead of the half-baked pile of bugs it is now.
astrange 4y ago
Sometimes you're mad that everything Google does is about tracking you, sometimes you're mad that other browsers don't implement the features Google added to track you.

pvg 4y ago

Yesterday, 136 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31644622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31644622

artdigital 4y ago

I use Safari as my main browser (by choice) but wish they'd do a bit more about general snappy-ness and better support for sites that use video/microphone (like google meets) It's sad that a lot of sites decide to only optimize for Chromium/Blink and have horrible performance on anything else, or hold back features altogether. Orion browser was posted here just recently and looks very neat which feels a bit snappier, though still a bit rough on extensions and doesn't support Safari extensions.

gwill 4y ago
how about sites that refuse to give you access if you're not using chrome? i use firefox as my main browser and ive found that a few sites which claim to not be compatible with ff work perfectly fine if i change my useragent to appear as chrome. it's really annoying and lazy to see how many people they're shutting out when they do this, vs just giving a warning that some features haven't been tested on browser x.
- notriddle 4y ago
  Report this at https://webcompat.com/ https://webcompat.com/ Mozilla can add a special case to make Firefox lie about its UA by default.
al_borland 4y ago
I find Google Maps painfully slow in Safari. When I got a new M1 Pro and loaded it up the first time it seemed amazing, but over time it got worse. I don't know if this is an issue with Safari or Google's way to push poeple to Chrome. I started using Orion over the past few days. There are definitely some things I like, but even though it says it supports Chrome and Firefox extensions, the only one I care about is 1Password. It installed, but wouldn't run because Orion isn't verified in some way.
- artdigital 4y ago
  The Firefox version of 1Password does run on Orion, but it doesn't stay unlocked for longer than a minute. Also no biometric authentication

darthrupert 4y ago

Well, if nothing else, this thread will be good material for n-gate.

deleted 4y ago
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jordemort 4y ago
If only they'd come back. If you're out there, I'd throw some $ at a Patreon.

Brajeshwar 4y ago

In 2015/2016, I led a 4-member engineering team to overhaul an upcoming eCommerce website for a pretty well-known brand in India. I think this was when an Indian unicorn, Flipkart, was going around town advertising their excellent Progressive Web App features for browsers (Chrome/Android). We stole many ideas from that and implemented them for the client, including the notorious connection persistence when the Internet was patchy. One of the biggest hurdles was convincing the CEO (for revenue) and CTO of the calculated risk of alienating a tiny fraction of users on iOS (iPhones) and pre-IE10s (I think). They will lose about 2% of the revenue from those if we go ahead with the plan and push those people away. Remember, 2% of a large number is still a significant number when seen independently and impacts their P&L. I promised them that the increase in revenue would make up for that north of their expectation. It did. In fact, to my surprise, their revenue doubled in about 3-5 months of the new deployment. I saw the internal email sent by the CEO to the whole company; it was all praises, big numbers, and such. The lesson was to look closely at the data and take big calculated bets. Based on usage, quite a lot of things happening in the Safari world was pretty insignificant. By 2018/19, for another product decision, we were hoping that Safari will catch-up but didn't really. Personally, I use Safari on all devices and would hate websites pushing notifications!