17 ms·

Please consider the relevant viewpoint before commenting. This is about the reliability and capabilities of Safari as a target for websites and web applications

by 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.
      - tclancy 4y ago
        I find it hard to imagine anyone preferred Netscape 4.x to IE 5 and 5.5. I think even IE6 may have existed before Netscape 6, though I definitely made the switch to Phoenix as soon as I discovered it.
        RobertRoberts 4y ago
        I certainly did. I used a lot of features in Netscape that IE never had, and at university it was _the_ browser used on campus in the late 90s. IE 5 was a buggy browser lacking a lot of features, but was used often by people not building things online. And forced on people by bizarre site requirements. Though this came worse with IE6. Microsoft was embroiled in legal issues of their browser at this time, and anyone with a sense of logic (most programmers) could see being locked into one piece of software instantly degrades the value of that software. Sept 2002 was when Phoenix was released.[0] IE 6 came out only a year before Phoenix.[1] And you if you were involved with Slashdot back in the day you were tracking browser usage as a daily trend. Phoenix was doing well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6
        icedchai 4y ago
        IE had over 70% marketshare through 2005. In 2002, right after IE 6 was released, it was 85%. Everything else was in the weeds. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/neil.the.analyst/viz/WebBrowserUsageOverTime2002-2019/WebBrowserUsageOverTime2002-2019 https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/neil.the.analyst/viz/...
        RobertRoberts 4y ago
- Wazako 4y ago
  the biggest problem of safari (Apple ecosystem) is the same as IE or even worse, it is integrated into the system, and old devices like ipad do not have updates ...
  - diminish 4y ago
    Old iDevices who are stuck in a non-upgradeable Apple OS are a threat to humanity.
    - LocalH 4y ago
      lolwut
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  A lot of the developers who rail against it are in the advertising industry and those who want to push notifications to you as well as run their garbage javascript in the background.
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    Or perhaps people who search caniuse see it's flaring omissions
Milner08 4y ago
Actually, didn't the latest build of Safari nightly recently over take all the other browsers in terms of number of supported features? I swear that was shared here on HN.
- agust 4y ago
  It 100% did not in that universe. Safari is massively lagging behind, and has been for so long it will certainly be years before it catches up with Chromium or Firefox.
  - replygirl 4y ago
    it 50% did. safari and chrome are trading blows, with safari generally ahead on useful css and chrome generally ahead on useful api https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0&compareCats=all https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0&compareC...
    - agust 4y ago
      The caniuse data shows that the number of APIs Chrome supports that Safari doesn't is at least 3 times higher than the opposite, and among the APIs Safari supports that Chrome don't, most are either too old and useless, too new and equally useless, or very small compared to the massive APIs listed to Chrome advantage. I really don't see how that translates to "Safari and Chrome trading blows" and Safari taking over Chrome by "50%"? Also, here is more representative dataset, where you can see that Safari has more than 5 times the number of API failures compared to Chrome, and 3 times compared to Firefox (in the stable channel): https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&aligned https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...
      - replygirl 4y ago
        oh cool. hey quick question, how do i do a hanging quote in chrome?
      - halostatue 4y ago
replygirl 4y ago
from a developer point of view, i'm about to give my team a talk on container queries + subgrid, and safari is the only browser i can use to demo both. not sure what your scrolling issue is, hidden overflow and blocked pointer events have always worked just fine for me. typically when someone gets scrolling wrong they're using 100vh instead of stretch and/or not scoping overflow correctly
- agust 4y ago
  Container Queries and Subgrid are only available in Safari Technology Preview, not stable, and Firefox has actually been supporting Subgrid for more than 2 years. Because CQ is not supported by either Chrome of Firefox, it will be at least 2 years before we can start actually using it. It would have been much wiser for Safari to catch up on the dozens of features they don't support that both Chrome and Firefox do, or to focus on bug fixes for the most basic features that's been broken for years. Instead, they chose to ship shiny new ones to try and convince both regulators (from the EU, UK, US, etc) and web developers that they are leading the way in feature adoption. Unfortunately this seems to be working to some extent in the web devs community. Regulators are unlikely to fall for it though. Here is the 7 years old scrolling bug I'm referring to, which prevents any decent implementation of modals in Safari on iOS: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 Here you can see that Safari has 5 times more API failures (representative of both missing features and bugs) than Chrome, and 3 times more than Firefox: https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/
  - slightlyoff 4y ago
    Original author of the post here. I'm also a Blink API OWNER, so can happily report that Container Queries have 3 LGTMs and will ship in Chromium browsers very shortly, likely 105 (shipping to Stable in September): https://chromestatus.com/feature/6525308435955712 https://chromestatus.com/feature/6525308435955712 Subgrid is progressing thanks to engineering from the Edge team, and I expect it to land this year.
ngcc_hk 4y ago
You might be right if one fix one mind on developer and latest greatest. But apple preposition at least for user might not be that. We n fact, I thought the whole point of browser is serving the user. Until m1 I am not sure apple has the intel experience considering the hackintosh. But apple dominate for a while the developer market. The question imho is whether apple provide a good enough solution for its users. And for monopoly I am not sure why os pre-installed browser is that relevant. Remember why edge exist. Just to download chrome. Btw I use both as there are things can be easily done by one cannot by the others. I hope we have more. Not less.
isodev 4y ago
If you've checked mdn or caniuse anytime in the last 2-3 years, you'd notice that Safari has been leading the gang in standard web feature adoption. Safari offers the most refined developer experience for web dev and testing (my favourite are the automation capabilities which are incredible and private as it separates my data from test data during a run). With technology preview updates delivered directly in macOS, I'm always confident I have the latest setup to test my web apps...
- lelandfe 4y ago
  https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/ I really like Safari but no, they are definitely not "leading the gang" in adopting features.
- tonetheman 4y ago
  Look at the front page of https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ At the bottom right there is a chart and Safari is in 3rd. I built a company based on browser testing and Safari in general was/is always behind. They have hired some good people so maybe that situation will change but in general Safari is the currently the boat anchor of browsers. Hopefully the situation will change over time.
- MCArth 4y ago
  This just isn't true! There are so many features that have not been supported long after other browsers implemented them (webgl 2 comes to mind, though that is finally available - 4% of global web users still don't have support due to this, though!)
  - mtomweb 4y ago
    Exactly: Install Prompts - 7 Years. Fullscreen API - 11 Years. Push API - 7 Years. Badging - 5 years. Screen Orientation Lock - 11 years. Bluetooth - 5 years.
    - frumper 4y ago
      Nope, nope, definitely nope, not critical in the slightest, nope, and sounds like a very niche case that a native app would do just fine with.
kmlx 4y ago
> Don't tell web developers "Safari is rock solid"; for us it's the bane of our existence. i've been a web dev for 20 years. safari is rock solid but has quirks, yes.
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
  IE was "solid" as long as you only worked inside it's constraints.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    So is Crome. That statement applies to everything.
    - RobertRoberts 4y ago
      It's not the same at all, IE/Safari are/were locked to their OS or abused through monopoly. iOS/Safari is worse than IE because it's exclusive. At least with IE/Windows you could install something else.
      - lelandfe 4y ago
        OK, if you really think Safari is worse than dealing with IE hacks you probably were not writing anything for the web back then. This was already a tenuous argument, but come on. OS lock-in and slow adoption of new web features is perhaps lame but Safari doesn't have anything even approaching it's own box model, or `-ms-filter` equivalent, or quirks mode... the list approaches infinity. Also, "install something else?" Do you know what the browser landscape looked like back then? IE had >80% dominance for years, and your other option was Netscape, which lacked huge swaths of custom features in IE.
        RobertRoberts 4y ago
        If the one key feature in an iOS webapp _kills_ your business, then _yes_ iOS/Safari is magnitudes worse than IE ever was. The expectations and businesses relying on browser functionality back then is minimal compared to today which amplifies the core issues at hand. Try building an PWA with offline capabilities (trivial in modern browsers) that's your core of your business, and you will see what I see. Apple is _trying_ to strangle non-app store apps. Where IE was just a dumb lumbering problem by comparison.
2fast4you 4y ago
I think the user perspective is way more important. I think users get a way better experience using Safari
HWR_14 4y ago
Sure, and from the point of view of thieves the locks I install are bad. Maybe, just maybe, people should stop trying to develop webapps and instead make websites that just work without javascript. Like this one.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Nobody in their right mind would ever want to zoom & pan a map on a website, eh?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    > Nobody in their right mind would ever want to zoom & pan a map on a website 1) I agree. Apps have maps, but most websites? 2) Zooming and panning can be done without WPA. At most some basic JS, although I think you can do the same via HTML+CSS. 3) The old way of zooming panning was buttons for zooming and panning. Those worked fine. In face ,they worked better than zooming and panning buggy implementations.
tsuujin 4y ago
Professional web developer here: I use safari almost exclusively and I have for years. I vastly prefer it to chrome/Firefox/brave/opera/etc.
hansel_der 4y ago
> it is still impossible to reliably prevent page scrolling in Safari on iOS. why would it? it's a USER-Agent after all. if there is something to scroll, the user probably wants to and should be able to.

by agust 4y ago

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.
    - tclancy 4y ago
      I find it hard to imagine anyone preferred Netscape 4.x to IE 5 and 5.5. I think even IE6 may have existed before Netscape 6, though I definitely made the switch to Phoenix as soon as I discovered it.
      - RobertRoberts 4y ago
        I certainly did. I used a lot of features in Netscape that IE never had, and at university it was _the_ browser used on campus in the late 90s. IE 5 was a buggy browser lacking a lot of features, but was used often by people not building things online. And forced on people by bizarre site requirements. Though this came worse with IE6. Microsoft was embroiled in legal issues of their browser at this time, and anyone with a sense of logic (most programmers) could see being locked into one piece of software instantly degrades the value of that software. Sept 2002 was when Phoenix was released.[0] IE 6 came out only a year before Phoenix.[1] And you if you were involved with Slashdot back in the day you were tracking browser usage as a daily trend. Phoenix was doing well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6
        icedchai 4y ago
        IE had over 70% marketshare through 2005. In 2002, right after IE 6 was released, it was 85%. Everything else was in the weeds. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/neil.the.analyst/viz/WebBrowserUsageOverTime2002-2019/WebBrowserUsageOverTime2002-2019 https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/neil.the.analyst/viz/...
        RobertRoberts 4y ago
Wazako 4y ago
the biggest problem of safari (Apple ecosystem) is the same as IE or even worse, it is integrated into the system, and old devices like ipad do not have updates ...
- diminish 4y ago
  Old iDevices who are stuck in a non-upgradeable Apple OS are a threat to humanity.
  - LocalH 4y ago
    lolwut
stjohnswarts 4y ago
A lot of the developers who rail against it are in the advertising industry and those who want to push notifications to you as well as run their garbage javascript in the background.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  Or perhaps people who search caniuse see it's flaring omissions

Milner08 4y ago

Actually, didn't the latest build of Safari nightly recently over take all the other browsers in terms of number of supported features? I swear that was shared here on HN.

agust 4y ago
It 100% did not in that universe. Safari is massively lagging behind, and has been for so long it will certainly be years before it catches up with Chromium or Firefox.
- replygirl 4y ago
  it 50% did. safari and chrome are trading blows, with safari generally ahead on useful css and chrome generally ahead on useful api https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0&compareCats=all https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+106,safari+16.0&compareC...
  - agust 4y ago
    The caniuse data shows that the number of APIs Chrome supports that Safari doesn't is at least 3 times higher than the opposite, and among the APIs Safari supports that Chrome don't, most are either too old and useless, too new and equally useless, or very small compared to the massive APIs listed to Chrome advantage. I really don't see how that translates to "Safari and Chrome trading blows" and Safari taking over Chrome by "50%"? Also, here is more representative dataset, where you can see that Safari has more than 5 times the number of API failures compared to Chrome, and 3 times compared to Firefox (in the stable channel): https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&aligned https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...
    - replygirl 4y ago
      oh cool. hey quick question, how do i do a hanging quote in chrome?
    - halostatue 4y ago

replygirl 4y ago

from a developer point of view, i'm about to give my team a talk on container queries + subgrid, and safari is the only browser i can use to demo both. not sure what your scrolling issue is, hidden overflow and blocked pointer events have always worked just fine for me. typically when someone gets scrolling wrong they're using 100vh instead of stretch and/or not scoping overflow correctly

agust 4y ago
Container Queries and Subgrid are only available in Safari Technology Preview, not stable, and Firefox has actually been supporting Subgrid for more than 2 years. Because CQ is not supported by either Chrome of Firefox, it will be at least 2 years before we can start actually using it. It would have been much wiser for Safari to catch up on the dozens of features they don't support that both Chrome and Firefox do, or to focus on bug fixes for the most basic features that's been broken for years. Instead, they chose to ship shiny new ones to try and convince both regulators (from the EU, UK, US, etc) and web developers that they are leading the way in feature adoption. Unfortunately this seems to be working to some extent in the web devs community. Regulators are unlikely to fall for it though. Here is the 7 years old scrolling bug I'm referring to, which prevents any decent implementation of modals in Safari on iOS: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84 Here you can see that Safari has 5 times more API failures (representative of both missing features and bugs) than Chrome, and 3 times more than Firefox: https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/
- slightlyoff 4y ago
  Original author of the post here. I'm also a Blink API OWNER, so can happily report that Container Queries have 3 LGTMs and will ship in Chromium browsers very shortly, likely 105 (shipping to Stable in September): https://chromestatus.com/feature/6525308435955712 https://chromestatus.com/feature/6525308435955712 Subgrid is progressing thanks to engineering from the Edge team, and I expect it to land this year.

ngcc_hk 4y ago

You might be right if one fix one mind on developer and latest greatest. But apple preposition at least for user might not be that. We n fact, I thought the whole point of browser is serving the user. Until m1 I am not sure apple has the intel experience considering the hackintosh. But apple dominate for a while the developer market. The question imho is whether apple provide a good enough solution for its users. And for monopoly I am not sure why os pre-installed browser is that relevant. Remember why edge exist. Just to download chrome. Btw I use both as there are things can be easily done by one cannot by the others. I hope we have more. Not less.

isodev 4y ago

If you've checked mdn or caniuse anytime in the last 2-3 years, you'd notice that Safari has been leading the gang in standard web feature adoption. Safari offers the most refined developer experience for web dev and testing (my favourite are the automation capabilities which are incredible and private as it separates my data from test data during a run). With technology preview updates delivered directly in macOS, I'm always confident I have the latest setup to test my web apps...

lelandfe 4y ago
https://wpt.fyi/ https://wpt.fyi/ I really like Safari but no, they are definitely not "leading the gang" in adopting features.
tonetheman 4y ago
Look at the front page of https://caniuse.com/ https://caniuse.com/ At the bottom right there is a chart and Safari is in 3rd. I built a company based on browser testing and Safari in general was/is always behind. They have hired some good people so maybe that situation will change but in general Safari is the currently the boat anchor of browsers. Hopefully the situation will change over time.
MCArth 4y ago
This just isn't true! There are so many features that have not been supported long after other browsers implemented them (webgl 2 comes to mind, though that is finally available - 4% of global web users still don't have support due to this, though!)
- mtomweb 4y ago
  Exactly: Install Prompts - 7 Years. Fullscreen API - 11 Years. Push API - 7 Years. Badging - 5 years. Screen Orientation Lock - 11 years. Bluetooth - 5 years.
  - frumper 4y ago
    Nope, nope, definitely nope, not critical in the slightest, nope, and sounds like a very niche case that a native app would do just fine with.

kmlx 4y ago

> Don't tell web developers "Safari is rock solid"; for us it's the bane of our existence. i've been a web dev for 20 years. safari is rock solid but has quirks, yes.

RobertRoberts 4y ago
IE was "solid" as long as you only worked inside it's constraints.
- oneplane 4y ago
  So is Crome. That statement applies to everything.
  - RobertRoberts 4y ago
    It's not the same at all, IE/Safari are/were locked to their OS or abused through monopoly. iOS/Safari is worse than IE because it's exclusive. At least with IE/Windows you could install something else.
    - lelandfe 4y ago
      OK, if you really think Safari is worse than dealing with IE hacks you probably were not writing anything for the web back then. This was already a tenuous argument, but come on. OS lock-in and slow adoption of new web features is perhaps lame but Safari doesn't have anything even approaching it's own box model, or `-ms-filter` equivalent, or quirks mode... the list approaches infinity. Also, "install something else?" Do you know what the browser landscape looked like back then? IE had >80% dominance for years, and your other option was Netscape, which lacked huge swaths of custom features in IE.
      - RobertRoberts 4y ago
        If the one key feature in an iOS webapp _kills_ your business, then _yes_ iOS/Safari is magnitudes worse than IE ever was. The expectations and businesses relying on browser functionality back then is minimal compared to today which amplifies the core issues at hand. Try building an PWA with offline capabilities (trivial in modern browsers) that's your core of your business, and you will see what I see. Apple is _trying_ to strangle non-app store apps. Where IE was just a dumb lumbering problem by comparison.

2fast4you 4y ago

I think the user perspective is way more important. I think users get a way better experience using Safari

HWR_14 4y ago

Sure, and from the point of view of thieves the locks I install are bad. Maybe, just maybe, people should stop trying to develop webapps and instead make websites that just work without javascript. Like this one.

yencabulator 4y ago
Nobody in their right mind would ever want to zoom & pan a map on a website, eh?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > Nobody in their right mind would ever want to zoom & pan a map on a website 1) I agree. Apps have maps, but most websites? 2) Zooming and panning can be done without WPA. At most some basic JS, although I think you can do the same via HTML+CSS. 3) The old way of zooming panning was buttons for zooming and panning. Those worked fine. In face ,they worked better than zooming and panning buggy implementations.

tsuujin 4y ago

Professional web developer here: I use safari almost exclusively and I have for years. I vastly prefer it to chrome/Firefox/brave/opera/etc.

hansel_der 4y ago

> it is still impossible to reliably prevent page scrolling in Safari on iOS. why would it? it's a USER-Agent after all. if there is something to scroll, the user probably wants to and should be able to.