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The most surprising thing for me is that Safari is first with this. Am I in a HN bubble where everyone are always complaining about safari, or is that genuinel

The most surprising thing for me is that Safari is first with this. Am I in a HN bubble where everyone are always complaining about safari, or is that genuinely unusual?

have_faith 4y ago
You’re not wrong, Safari is often behind on features. Unless Apple deem that feature important of course.
akira2501 4y ago
They're behind on features _and_ you have to work around their aggressive privacy choices. It's my least favorite testing phase in any release.
- akie 4y ago
  I love their aggressive privacy choices.
  - solardev 4y ago
    It seems so fake... Apple adds "privacy" by crippling their competitors, then turns around and adds a bunch of their own intrusive advertising. They don't care about you, they just want to be the next Google
  - drawfloat 4y ago
    I love them to an extent. There should be some sort of request API available for temporarily disabling the more stringent media restrictions for a session. I worked on a media heavy fashion site a few years ago and dealing with Safari not allowing you to dynamically add new audio/video elements with auto play (or to auto play at all in low battery mode) was a real headache. By default it’s great, just offer the option to get permission for experiences that require it.
    - matheusmoreira 4y ago
      Auto playing media is not something that should ever be allowed anyway. Apple forcing sites to respect their users is actually a great reason to buy Apple products.
      - drawfloat 4y ago
        Autoplay on page load, no. But you’re going to severely limit the web experiences available to Safari users (and probably in turn the number of people who use Safari) if you don’t allow some way of getting reasonable consent to auto play media after page load. Currently most solutions are to load a number of empty audio buffers when the user first clicks and repurpose those for auto playing content later. If a user has visited a multimedia focused web site (eg: online catwalk show), why not allow them to opt in for that session rather than force them to have a cut down experience?
        matheusmoreira 4y ago
        Because allowing these perfectly reasonable things also means allowing abuse. We can't have nice things because of people who think they can just autoplay random stuff we don't care about while we're trying to concentrate on some text. There is nothing more aggravating than opening a website and having some unexpected loud sound start autoplaying.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > you have to work around their aggressive privacy choices There are work arounds? Looks like they need to be even more aggressive.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    I remember a time when this site didn't take the most uncharitable reading of everything all the time. And yes. Making a streaming application. The CDN that the media is provided through uses cookies to coordinate "side band" metadata. On Safari, there's no way to get at the metadata due to the cookie policy. So, you get the media, but literally no metadata or features associated with it. It's a worse experience for any Safari user and doesn't actually enhance their privacy in any way whatsoever. The workaround was to get the streaming provider to allow the correlation ID that would normally be conveyed through a cookie to be conveyed through URL parameters instead. So.. to the extent that I could track you between two sessions, the workaround means I still can. Not that I need to track you, but because I need to correlate two streams between two different servers onto one device.
tambourine_man 4y ago
It’s not. Safari is just not always blindly adopting whatever Chrome does and their priorities are very different. Safari has consistently been the fastest, more battery and privacy concerned browser. Safari is WebKit, which historically has given us a lot of the CSS standard niceties we take for granted.
- 6510 4y ago
  webp and lazy loading are so powerful that having to do things without it really feels like IE. The big difference is that IE users for some reason failed to install something better. Safari users are locked in.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    Safari supports lazy image loading, which is probably what you want. Just not iFrame lazyloading, which you shouldn’t be using all that much anyway. It also supports webp, even though I never use it. It’s a Google thing, not widely supported by image editors and which fails to be consistently better than a properly optimized jpeg. If you thing you need webp try running it through MozJPEG first
    - solardev 4y ago
      Side note: Webp isn't terribly useful for replacing JPEG, but it IS a very good alternative to PNGs with transparencies (alpha channels).
      - 6510 4y ago
        JPEG artifacts are ugly. With webp they sometimes improve the picture. With blurry backgrounds for example JPEG invents new colors. webp just blurs.
      - tambourine_man 4y ago
        Again, have you seen crushPNG and similar tools? To me, a format must offer significant advantages to overtake decades old standards.
no_way 4y ago
They are first but it's not like other browsers are far behind, Chrome is already shipping :has, being first for one feature doesn't mean much while you are years behind implementing non controversial features already in other browsers, not even talking about Safari bugs..
MatthiasPortzel 4y ago
Because Chrome has such a dominant market share, Safari doesn’t get credit when they implement features first. No one’s going to use or even hear about a Safari-only feature because the people who are making the websites are using Chrome. On the other hand, if Safari doesn’t support a feature Chrome supports, then that’s a problem for Safari because developers are going to be using that feature. There’s this sort of naive attitude that “all browsers should just implement all the specifications.” But in reality all browsers take a fair amount of leeway with what specifications they implement, what timeline they implement them in, and etc. There are plenty of fundamental differences between engines that effect browser compatibility, that haven’t been addressed for years. “Safari is behind Chrome” is just way too linear of a narrative. Web compatibility is a patchwork of over a thousand specifications.
- solardev 4y ago
  Why can't Safari just use Blink? What's the value of having more than one engine?
  - wixyu 4y ago
    See the moribund state of web development from approximately 2003 - 2013 when the web was bound to a monoculture of Internet Explorer. Current the Blink team are running behind both WebKit and Mozilla in meeting the agreed upon goals for interop 2022. https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
    - solardev 4y ago
      > See the moribund state of web development from approximately 2003 - 2013 when the web was bound to a monoculture of Internet Explorer. I think that's a bit of an exaggeration/retconning. Between NetCaptor, Maxthon, etc., that's the era that gave us huge innovations: tabbed browsing, popup blockers, ad blocking, site groups, search in the URL bar, and so much more. And CSS, and GeoCities, and streaming video and animated applets/games/Flash... There was so much innovation going on, the real difficulty was in being able to display your content to your audiences. CanIUse wasn't around then and there were huge incompatibilities between IE, Netscape, Opera, eventually Phoenix, etc. It wasn't the diversity in engines that allowed innovation, it was the market exploring different features and eventually converging on the ones that people really wanted. If anything, having redundant engines slowed down actual development. IE6 was king for a few short years, and in those few years the web was more stable than it ever was before or since, and content was king instead of engine differences. For now Chrome has the best of both worlds: market dominance and rapid innovation. They have no meaningful challengers anymore... Firefox/Gecko is dead and WebKit is only a thing because of iOS, and thankfully it at least shares a heritage with Blink. I think your link proves the opposite point: that the web ecosystem is wasting time on interop instead of actual features. We don't need three renderers that do roughly the same thing, but nothing exactly the same. It was Chrome's hegemony over the last 5-10 years that actually gave us huge leaps in web usability, dev specialization, best practices, and content creation. The real changemaker was making Javascript safe and fast enough that native in-browser programming became a reality. There is no such thing as web standards in reality, only Blink and WebKit's mostly-compatible implementations. If we could move past that delusion and just converge resources on Blink/V8 and just evolve that, the web would be better off for it.
iaml 4y ago
Safari team is really strange with their priorities, most of the time they are dead set on implementing specs last, but every once in a while they decide a feature is important and they implement it faster than everyone else. For example, backdrop-filter was supported in safari way back in 2015, while other browsers added it multiple years later.
- samwillis 4y ago
  I suspect it is the influence internally from other product teams. WebKit is used in so many places within MacOS and iOS, someone recently wrote a blog post looking at the CSS used by Apple, :has() and some other WebKit only css was heavily used.
  - zarzavat 4y ago
    This is how we got <canvas>. Apple needed it for the MacOS. Dashboard feature.
  - lieferant1210 4y ago
    Do you happen to have a link to this blog post?
- easrng 4y ago
  Safari is also ahead on color space support.

The most surprising thing for me is that Safari is first with this. Am I in a HN bubble where everyone are always complaining about safari, or is that genuinely unusual?

have_faith 4y ago

You’re not wrong, Safari is often behind on features. Unless Apple deem that feature important of course.

akira2501 4y ago

They're behind on features _and_ you have to work around their aggressive privacy choices. It's my least favorite testing phase in any release.

akie 4y ago
I love their aggressive privacy choices.
- solardev 4y ago
  It seems so fake... Apple adds "privacy" by crippling their competitors, then turns around and adds a bunch of their own intrusive advertising. They don't care about you, they just want to be the next Google
- drawfloat 4y ago
  I love them to an extent. There should be some sort of request API available for temporarily disabling the more stringent media restrictions for a session. I worked on a media heavy fashion site a few years ago and dealing with Safari not allowing you to dynamically add new audio/video elements with auto play (or to auto play at all in low battery mode) was a real headache. By default it’s great, just offer the option to get permission for experiences that require it.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Auto playing media is not something that should ever be allowed anyway. Apple forcing sites to respect their users is actually a great reason to buy Apple products.
    - drawfloat 4y ago
      Autoplay on page load, no. But you’re going to severely limit the web experiences available to Safari users (and probably in turn the number of people who use Safari) if you don’t allow some way of getting reasonable consent to auto play media after page load. Currently most solutions are to load a number of empty audio buffers when the user first clicks and repurpose those for auto playing content later. If a user has visited a multimedia focused web site (eg: online catwalk show), why not allow them to opt in for that session rather than force them to have a cut down experience?
      - matheusmoreira 4y ago
        Because allowing these perfectly reasonable things also means allowing abuse. We can't have nice things because of people who think they can just autoplay random stuff we don't care about while we're trying to concentrate on some text. There is nothing more aggravating than opening a website and having some unexpected loud sound start autoplaying.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> you have to work around their aggressive privacy choices There are work arounds? Looks like they need to be even more aggressive.
- akira2501 4y ago
  I remember a time when this site didn't take the most uncharitable reading of everything all the time. And yes. Making a streaming application. The CDN that the media is provided through uses cookies to coordinate "side band" metadata. On Safari, there's no way to get at the metadata due to the cookie policy. So, you get the media, but literally no metadata or features associated with it. It's a worse experience for any Safari user and doesn't actually enhance their privacy in any way whatsoever. The workaround was to get the streaming provider to allow the correlation ID that would normally be conveyed through a cookie to be conveyed through URL parameters instead. So.. to the extent that I could track you between two sessions, the workaround means I still can. Not that I need to track you, but because I need to correlate two streams between two different servers onto one device.

tambourine_man 4y ago

It’s not. Safari is just not always blindly adopting whatever Chrome does and their priorities are very different. Safari has consistently been the fastest, more battery and privacy concerned browser. Safari is WebKit, which historically has given us a lot of the CSS standard niceties we take for granted.

6510 4y ago
webp and lazy loading are so powerful that having to do things without it really feels like IE. The big difference is that IE users for some reason failed to install something better. Safari users are locked in.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  Safari supports lazy image loading, which is probably what you want. Just not iFrame lazyloading, which you shouldn’t be using all that much anyway. It also supports webp, even though I never use it. It’s a Google thing, not widely supported by image editors and which fails to be consistently better than a properly optimized jpeg. If you thing you need webp try running it through MozJPEG first
  - solardev 4y ago
    Side note: Webp isn't terribly useful for replacing JPEG, but it IS a very good alternative to PNGs with transparencies (alpha channels).
    - 6510 4y ago
      JPEG artifacts are ugly. With webp they sometimes improve the picture. With blurry backgrounds for example JPEG invents new colors. webp just blurs.
    - tambourine_man 4y ago
      Again, have you seen crushPNG and similar tools? To me, a format must offer significant advantages to overtake decades old standards.

no_way 4y ago

They are first but it's not like other browsers are far behind, Chrome is already shipping :has, being first for one feature doesn't mean much while you are years behind implementing non controversial features already in other browsers, not even talking about Safari bugs..

MatthiasPortzel 4y ago

Because Chrome has such a dominant market share, Safari doesn’t get credit when they implement features first. No one’s going to use or even hear about a Safari-only feature because the people who are making the websites are using Chrome. On the other hand, if Safari doesn’t support a feature Chrome supports, then that’s a problem for Safari because developers are going to be using that feature. There’s this sort of naive attitude that “all browsers should just implement all the specifications.” But in reality all browsers take a fair amount of leeway with what specifications they implement, what timeline they implement them in, and etc. There are plenty of fundamental differences between engines that effect browser compatibility, that haven’t been addressed for years. “Safari is behind Chrome” is just way too linear of a narrative. Web compatibility is a patchwork of over a thousand specifications.

solardev 4y ago
Why can't Safari just use Blink? What's the value of having more than one engine?
- wixyu 4y ago
  See the moribund state of web development from approximately 2003 - 2013 when the web was bound to a monoculture of Internet Explorer. Current the Blink team are running behind both WebKit and Mozilla in meeting the agreed upon goals for interop 2022. https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022
  - solardev 4y ago
    > See the moribund state of web development from approximately 2003 - 2013 when the web was bound to a monoculture of Internet Explorer. I think that's a bit of an exaggeration/retconning. Between NetCaptor, Maxthon, etc., that's the era that gave us huge innovations: tabbed browsing, popup blockers, ad blocking, site groups, search in the URL bar, and so much more. And CSS, and GeoCities, and streaming video and animated applets/games/Flash... There was so much innovation going on, the real difficulty was in being able to display your content to your audiences. CanIUse wasn't around then and there were huge incompatibilities between IE, Netscape, Opera, eventually Phoenix, etc. It wasn't the diversity in engines that allowed innovation, it was the market exploring different features and eventually converging on the ones that people really wanted. If anything, having redundant engines slowed down actual development. IE6 was king for a few short years, and in those few years the web was more stable than it ever was before or since, and content was king instead of engine differences. For now Chrome has the best of both worlds: market dominance and rapid innovation. They have no meaningful challengers anymore... Firefox/Gecko is dead and WebKit is only a thing because of iOS, and thankfully it at least shares a heritage with Blink. I think your link proves the opposite point: that the web ecosystem is wasting time on interop instead of actual features. We don't need three renderers that do roughly the same thing, but nothing exactly the same. It was Chrome's hegemony over the last 5-10 years that actually gave us huge leaps in web usability, dev specialization, best practices, and content creation. The real changemaker was making Javascript safe and fast enough that native in-browser programming became a reality. There is no such thing as web standards in reality, only Blink and WebKit's mostly-compatible implementations. If we could move past that delusion and just converge resources on Blink/V8 and just evolve that, the web would be better off for it.

iaml 4y ago

Safari team is really strange with their priorities, most of the time they are dead set on implementing specs last, but every once in a while they decide a feature is important and they implement it faster than everyone else. For example, backdrop-filter was supported in safari way back in 2015, while other browsers added it multiple years later.

samwillis 4y ago
I suspect it is the influence internally from other product teams. WebKit is used in so many places within MacOS and iOS, someone recently wrote a blog post looking at the CSS used by Apple, :has() and some other WebKit only css was heavily used.
- zarzavat 4y ago
  This is how we got <canvas>. Apple needed it for the MacOS. Dashboard feature.
- lieferant1210 4y ago
  Do you happen to have a link to this blog post?
easrng 4y ago
Safari is also ahead on color space support.