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> …Apple produces a vastly inferior browser… People say this all the time, have you ever actually used Safari? I use it daily and it’s rock solid, I have zero

> …Apple produces a vastly inferior browser… People say this all the time, have you ever actually used Safari? I use it daily and it’s rock solid, I have zero complaints.

nailer 4y ago
Spent years maintaining a completely different flow for my customers because Safari webcrypto was broken.
iasay 4y ago
This. Also it doesn’t absolutely shag your battery on any device.
- Grazester 4y ago
  Battery thing aside, it's inferior. As a developer that sometimes have to dabble on the front end, I have come across areas where Firefox and Chrome supported features for years and I just assumed Safari did also...nope it didn't dues to what I could only assume is some nonsense Apple dogma
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    Chrome has a bunch of Google spyware bundled in it. No thanks.
  - criddell 4y ago
    > Battery thing aside, it's inferior. On mobile platforms that's a pretty major feature to brush aside.
- Cipater 4y ago
  I would 100% use Safari on Android/Windows but, alas.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I’ve long found it shocking the extent to which Google and Mozilla shrug this aspect off. Between laptops, phones, and tablets, computing is dominated by battery powered devices… power efficiency should be a headlining goal, not a trailing afterthought. As a user I don’t care nearly as much if my browser supports WebOnions v2 or whatever feature-du-jour as I do that it’s not wantonly burning through my battery just doing basic browsing.
  - minimaul 4y ago
    Firefox improved this a fair amount a while ago now - by moving to CoreAnimation for a bunch of their rendering? I find Chrome absolutely murders the battery life of my work 16" MBP, though.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
OK cool. Then why does apple need to prevent people from installing other browsers, with other browser engines on iOS?
- rahkiin 4y ago
  Maybe apple can allow other browsers as long as they don’t use JITs. Would that satisfy you?
  - mtomweb 4y ago
    Why can’t they bring their JITs? They’ve got better security records than Safari does.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > why does apple need to prevent people from installing other browsers Because, perhaps, the main one of those "other browsers" is widely considered to be a surveillance tool first, browser second, for a surveillance company and one of Apple's main current marketing thrusts is "we help you avoid people spying on you on your phone"?
  - Agamus 4y ago
    Just for my own clarity, are you saying that the Apple telephone is not used for surveillance? Even by Apple?
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    And that's why users have to prevented from installing all of those other browsers?
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      > And that's why users have to prevented from installing all of those other browsers? ...yes? Who are people going to complain to when ANOther browser leaks their PII from an iPhone? Who will get the bad PR? It won't be ANOther browser because lord knows they've been getting away with it for years with little to no consequence. Why would Apple put themselves - and their customers given their marketing claims to care about their privacy - in a position where that privacy can a) be compromised and b) reflect badly on Apple?
CrLf 4y ago
Try to write a non-trivial web app using vanilla JS/HTML/CSS. Then test with the major browsers. You'll find that Safari is always the one where things break and that forces you to go back and rewrite stuff due to (for the most part) bugs and lack of features. Safari is the modern IE in this respect.
- BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
  I’ve done this but I haven’t encountered issues so far. What’s an example of some vanilla js/html/css that breaks under safari?
  - lucsky 4y ago
    Two examples I have encountered in the past month alone that work just fine on any other browser but Safari: - CSS outline not being affected by the border-radius property. - Drag images being completely screwed up if the dragged element, or any of its ancestor, has a CSS transform. Both of these problems have workarounds (insanely ugly hacks would be a better term), but they shouldn't have.
    - mtomweb 4y ago
      Oh that second one is a nightmare. Our solution for it was to copy the element and create a new one that was absolutely positioned for the draggable element. The issue is syncing elements can be quite tricky.
  - mtomweb 4y ago
    https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 << this issue we’ve had for at least 7 years. It’s never worked and to solve all the edge cases the workarounds are insane.
  - SCLeo 4y ago
    From my memory: - Regular expression lookbehind - overscroll-behavior - Web push - SVG favicon - Web Bluetooth (haven't run into this personally, but someone complained about this)
agust 4y ago
Please consider the relevant viewpoint before commenting. This is about the reliability and capabilities of Safari as a target for websites and web applications from a developer point of view, not the reliability from a user point of view (although, being a Safari user myself, I can also definitely say it's not "rock solid" in that regard either). From a developer point of view, Safari is widely lagging behind other engines in terms of features, and has been rigged with hundreds of show stopping bugs for years, including relative to very basic features like scrolling. As an example, as of today, it is still impossible to reliably prevent page scrolling in Safari on iOS. Don't tell web developers "Safari is rock solid"; for us it's the bane of our existence.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  > Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control over their OS I must have missed the implied “for developers” preface there
- floydnoel 4y ago
  I’m a web developer, and I use Safari almost exclusively. It’s not the bane of my existence, I find it pleasant to work in, the dev tools are good. Just wanted to offer a counterpoint, not all developers hate Safari! I find it to be rock solid.
  - RobertRoberts 4y ago
    Not all developers hated IE either.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      For much of the early 2000’s, IE was the only decent browser.
      - RobertRoberts 4y ago
        That is a subject statement, many people I knew preferred Netscape and then Phoenix.
egeozcan 4y ago
If that is not the case, why limit browser choice? Most will surely keep using it if it's rock solid. I never used Safari as my main browser nor I hate it as a developer. I'm just talking about the argument here.
- Redoubts 4y ago
  We have 40 years of worse-is-better history in computing to look at. Why even ask this question?
  - egeozcan 4y ago
    In what way does "Worse is better" counter the argument of "then let the users decide"?
- tyingq 4y ago
  I suspect Apple also likes the idea of slow-rolling any feature/function that makes web applications compete more directly with native apps.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    If you look at the WebKit/Safari Technology Preview releases over the past 6-12 months, it paints a different picture. They’ve significantly expanded the WebKit team and are (now) clearly invested in improving compatibility.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
benniomars 4y ago
Same here. I use it on all my devices. It's fast and it feels light weight and secure. I love developing for it because I can open web inspector for my iPad and iPhone. I don't trust Chrome. When I went to App Store to get it, and the data Chrome gathers that is linked to your identity is: financial info, location, contact info, contacts, user conten, search history, browsing history, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics and other data. Safari also collects browsing history and location information, but they don't link it to your identity. I would honestly not care if Chrome was 100% faster, because Google is severely lacking in their privacy policy.
- ccouzens 4y ago
  I can't try Chrome out on my work iPhone because Apple won't let me download a free app without first signing into their store. That and other things make me doubt the sincerity of their privacy push. Why do I have a work iPhone? Because Safari is the one browser that you can't just assume things will work for so I need to occasionally use it before pushing website changes.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    No one forces your or your company to use apple products.
- IX-103 4y ago
  You realize that the only time Chrome needs to link those things to user identity is for synchronizing profiles across devices, right? They have to declare everything they might use, but everything is still subject to the various Chrome privacy policies. I can guarantee that if Chrome were found to be violating those policies, people would sue.
- imajoredinecon 4y ago
  Ex-Chrome engineer here. Chrome doesn’t “collect” this information about you. It optionally syncs it across devices. Take a look at the privacy policy: data like autofill, your browsing history, and your password manager does not get used for ad targeting. Apple basically blackmailed Google into putting all of that stuff in the “privacy nutrition label” with absolutely no nuance, under threat of having to take Chrome out of the App Store.
SCLeo 4y ago
Literally an hour ago, I ran into an issue where Safari does not support lookbehind in regular expressions. https://caniuse.com/js-regexp-lookbehind https://caniuse.com/js-regexp-lookbehind Say what you want but it is so frustrating when you run into problems like this. It does remind me of old IE days where we had to produce one gazillion hacks for IE.
- honkdaddy 4y ago
  In this situation, grabbing a 3rd party JS regex library for a handful of kilobytes probably solves your problem, but I’m sure that crossed your mind. Is it really as bad as the IE days though? I didn’t work on web back then, but these days if I run into a safari comparability issue, the workaround is usually pretty painless.
  - SCLeo 4y ago
    I do not believe there is a 3rd party polyfill for lookbehind as it is quite tricky to implement regular expressions. If you found one, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
    - ntoskrnl 4y ago
      There's always this: https://xregexp.com/ https://xregexp.com/ But it's not really a polyfill, just a library.
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        On mobile and can’t tell whether xregexp still doesn’t have lookbehind, but in case it doesn’t I found this: https://github.com/beaugunderson/xregexp-lookbehind https://github.com/beaugunderson/xregexp-lookbehind
  - tomgp 4y ago
    I did work on the web back in those days. The situation now is nothing like it was during IE's dominance in the early 2000s, to claim it is is hyperbole at best.
bfgoodrich 4y ago
It is pretty astonishing reading the rhetoric on HN, overwhelmingly from web developers who basically want a single target. They are quite literally the anathema of the web spirit, but it's basically IE v2.0 -- during the IE 3 / 4 days there were lazy devs who told everyone they should just run IE and be done with it. It is astonishing reading like Safari is some derelict junk when the edges are laughable trivial stuff. "But it doesn't support some random, irrelevant standard Google tried to railroad through last month..."
bastardoperator 4y ago
Same, from a battery perspective I'd say it's the best browser. I have all the plugins I had on chrome, pages seem to load faster, and my battery life and resources seem far more protected. I'm also not being tracked at every level or being mined for ad data.
kyriakos 4y ago
We generally develop on chrome. The outcome always works fine on Firefox and then we start finding bugs on safari. The reason you find safari pleasant is probably because developers spend time working around the shortcomings and bugs because safari has a good chunk of the user base. At the same time by lacking features it becomes the lowest common browser api target blocking progress.
kgc 4y ago
Also every modern browser is based on what was originally Apple's Webkit.

> …Apple produces a vastly inferior browser… People say this all the time, have you ever actually used Safari? I use it daily and it’s rock solid, I have zero complaints.

nailer 4y ago

Spent years maintaining a completely different flow for my customers because Safari webcrypto was broken.

iasay 4y ago

This. Also it doesn’t absolutely shag your battery on any device.

Grazester 4y ago
Battery thing aside, it's inferior. As a developer that sometimes have to dabble on the front end, I have come across areas where Firefox and Chrome supported features for years and I just assumed Safari did also...nope it didn't dues to what I could only assume is some nonsense Apple dogma
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Chrome has a bunch of Google spyware bundled in it. No thanks.
- criddell 4y ago
  > Battery thing aside, it's inferior. On mobile platforms that's a pretty major feature to brush aside.
Cipater 4y ago
I would 100% use Safari on Android/Windows but, alas.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I’ve long found it shocking the extent to which Google and Mozilla shrug this aspect off. Between laptops, phones, and tablets, computing is dominated by battery powered devices… power efficiency should be a headlining goal, not a trailing afterthought. As a user I don’t care nearly as much if my browser supports WebOnions v2 or whatever feature-du-jour as I do that it’s not wantonly burning through my battery just doing basic browsing.
- minimaul 4y ago
  Firefox improved this a fair amount a while ago now - by moving to CoreAnimation for a bunch of their rendering? I find Chrome absolutely murders the battery life of my work 16" MBP, though.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

OK cool. Then why does apple need to prevent people from installing other browsers, with other browser engines on iOS?

rahkiin 4y ago
Maybe apple can allow other browsers as long as they don’t use JITs. Would that satisfy you?
- mtomweb 4y ago
  Why can’t they bring their JITs? They’ve got better security records than Safari does.
zimpenfish 4y ago
> why does apple need to prevent people from installing other browsers Because, perhaps, the main one of those "other browsers" is widely considered to be a surveillance tool first, browser second, for a surveillance company and one of Apple's main current marketing thrusts is "we help you avoid people spying on you on your phone"?
- Agamus 4y ago
  Just for my own clarity, are you saying that the Apple telephone is not used for surveillance? Even by Apple?
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  And that's why users have to prevented from installing all of those other browsers?
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > And that's why users have to prevented from installing all of those other browsers? ...yes? Who are people going to complain to when ANOther browser leaks their PII from an iPhone? Who will get the bad PR? It won't be ANOther browser because lord knows they've been getting away with it for years with little to no consequence. Why would Apple put themselves - and their customers given their marketing claims to care about their privacy - in a position where that privacy can a) be compromised and b) reflect badly on Apple?

CrLf 4y ago

Try to write a non-trivial web app using vanilla JS/HTML/CSS. Then test with the major browsers. You'll find that Safari is always the one where things break and that forces you to go back and rewrite stuff due to (for the most part) bugs and lack of features. Safari is the modern IE in this respect.

BaculumMeumEst 4y ago
I’ve done this but I haven’t encountered issues so far. What’s an example of some vanilla js/html/css that breaks under safari?
- lucsky 4y ago
  Two examples I have encountered in the past month alone that work just fine on any other browser but Safari: - CSS outline not being affected by the border-radius property. - Drag images being completely screwed up if the dragged element, or any of its ancestor, has a CSS transform. Both of these problems have workarounds (insanely ugly hacks would be a better term), but they shouldn't have.
  - mtomweb 4y ago
    Oh that second one is a nightmare. Our solution for it was to copy the element and create a new one that was absolutely positioned for the draggable element. The issue is syncing elements can be quite tricky.
- mtomweb 4y ago
  https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 << this issue we’ve had for at least 7 years. It’s never worked and to solve all the edge cases the workarounds are insane.
- SCLeo 4y ago
  From my memory: - Regular expression lookbehind - overscroll-behavior - Web push - SVG favicon - Web Bluetooth (haven't run into this personally, but someone complained about this)

agust 4y ago

Please consider the relevant viewpoint before commenting. This is about the reliability and capabilities of Safari as a target for websites and web applications from a developer point of view, not the reliability from a user point of view (although, being a Safari user myself, I can also definitely say it's not "rock solid" in that regard either). From a developer point of view, Safari is widely lagging behind other engines in terms of features, and has been rigged with hundreds of show stopping bugs for years, including relative to very basic features like scrolling. As an example, as of today, it is still impossible to reliably prevent page scrolling in Safari on iOS. Don't tell web developers "Safari is rock solid"; for us it's the bane of our existence.

lelandfe 4y ago
> Apple produces a vastly inferior browser and only gets to maintain market share via absolute, monopolistic control over their OS I must have missed the implied “for developers” preface there
floydnoel 4y ago
I’m a web developer, and I use Safari almost exclusively. It’s not the bane of my existence, I find it pleasant to work in, the dev tools are good. Just wanted to offer a counterpoint, not all developers hate Safari! I find it to be rock solid.
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
  Not all developers hated IE either.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    For much of the early 2000’s, IE was the only decent browser.
    - RobertRoberts 4y ago
      That is a subject statement, many people I knew preferred Netscape and then Phoenix.

egeozcan 4y ago

If that is not the case, why limit browser choice? Most will surely keep using it if it's rock solid. I never used Safari as my main browser nor I hate it as a developer. I'm just talking about the argument here.

Redoubts 4y ago
We have 40 years of worse-is-better history in computing to look at. Why even ask this question?
- egeozcan 4y ago
  In what way does "Worse is better" counter the argument of "then let the users decide"?
tyingq 4y ago
I suspect Apple also likes the idea of slow-rolling any feature/function that makes web applications compete more directly with native apps.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  If you look at the WebKit/Safari Technology Preview releases over the past 6-12 months, it paints a different picture. They’ve significantly expanded the WebKit team and are (now) clearly invested in improving compatibility.
bfgoodrich 4y ago

benniomars 4y ago

Same here. I use it on all my devices. It's fast and it feels light weight and secure. I love developing for it because I can open web inspector for my iPad and iPhone. I don't trust Chrome. When I went to App Store to get it, and the data Chrome gathers that is linked to your identity is: financial info, location, contact info, contacts, user conten, search history, browsing history, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics and other data. Safari also collects browsing history and location information, but they don't link it to your identity. I would honestly not care if Chrome was 100% faster, because Google is severely lacking in their privacy policy.

ccouzens 4y ago
I can't try Chrome out on my work iPhone because Apple won't let me download a free app without first signing into their store. That and other things make me doubt the sincerity of their privacy push. Why do I have a work iPhone? Because Safari is the one browser that you can't just assume things will work for so I need to occasionally use it before pushing website changes.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  No one forces your or your company to use apple products.
IX-103 4y ago
You realize that the only time Chrome needs to link those things to user identity is for synchronizing profiles across devices, right? They have to declare everything they might use, but everything is still subject to the various Chrome privacy policies. I can guarantee that if Chrome were found to be violating those policies, people would sue.
imajoredinecon 4y ago
Ex-Chrome engineer here. Chrome doesn’t “collect” this information about you. It optionally syncs it across devices. Take a look at the privacy policy: data like autofill, your browsing history, and your password manager does not get used for ad targeting. Apple basically blackmailed Google into putting all of that stuff in the “privacy nutrition label” with absolutely no nuance, under threat of having to take Chrome out of the App Store.

SCLeo 4y ago

Literally an hour ago, I ran into an issue where Safari does not support lookbehind in regular expressions. https://caniuse.com/js-regexp-lookbehind https://caniuse.com/js-regexp-lookbehind Say what you want but it is so frustrating when you run into problems like this. It does remind me of old IE days where we had to produce one gazillion hacks for IE.

honkdaddy 4y ago
In this situation, grabbing a 3rd party JS regex library for a handful of kilobytes probably solves your problem, but I’m sure that crossed your mind. Is it really as bad as the IE days though? I didn’t work on web back then, but these days if I run into a safari comparability issue, the workaround is usually pretty painless.
- SCLeo 4y ago
  I do not believe there is a 3rd party polyfill for lookbehind as it is quite tricky to implement regular expressions. If you found one, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
  - ntoskrnl 4y ago
    There's always this: https://xregexp.com/ https://xregexp.com/ But it's not really a polyfill, just a library.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      On mobile and can’t tell whether xregexp still doesn’t have lookbehind, but in case it doesn’t I found this: https://github.com/beaugunderson/xregexp-lookbehind https://github.com/beaugunderson/xregexp-lookbehind
- tomgp 4y ago
  I did work on the web back in those days. The situation now is nothing like it was during IE's dominance in the early 2000s, to claim it is is hyperbole at best.

bfgoodrich 4y ago

It is pretty astonishing reading the rhetoric on HN, overwhelmingly from web developers who basically want a single target. They are quite literally the anathema of the web spirit, but it's basically IE v2.0 -- during the IE 3 / 4 days there were lazy devs who told everyone they should just run IE and be done with it. It is astonishing reading like Safari is some derelict junk when the edges are laughable trivial stuff. "But it doesn't support some random, irrelevant standard Google tried to railroad through last month..."

bastardoperator 4y ago

Same, from a battery perspective I'd say it's the best browser. I have all the plugins I had on chrome, pages seem to load faster, and my battery life and resources seem far more protected. I'm also not being tracked at every level or being mined for ad data.

kyriakos 4y ago

We generally develop on chrome. The outcome always works fine on Firefox and then we start finding bugs on safari. The reason you find safari pleasant is probably because developers spend time working around the shortcomings and bugs because safari has a good chunk of the user base. At the same time by lacking features it becomes the lowest common browser api target blocking progress.

kgc 4y ago

Also every modern browser is based on what was originally Apple's Webkit.