4 ms·

Oh for sure, having to support IE 5.5/6/7/8 at the same time was a nightmare of conditional comments and css hacks, and testing as you typically could not run m

by lycos 4y ago

Oh for sure, having to support IE 5.5/6/7/8 at the same time was a nightmare of conditional comments and css hacks, and testing as you typically could not run multiple versions side by side due to the deep integration into Windows.

tomxor 4y ago
Yup, it's not like we have to support Safari 15,14,13 ... wait
- lycos 4y ago
  See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633
  - tomxor 4y ago
    Yea, it's not like they substantially diverged from the iframe spec and then abandoned that idea but left it active in a major version that needs support... wait
lucb1e 4y ago
That's literally what I'm now doing for Safari, though. There are very, very few things that don't work automatically across Firefox and Chrome/Chromium/Edgium, but quite a lot where Safari wants it differently. Having to type 'apple' (apple-touch-icon) or 'webkit' (-webkit-text-fill-color) literally into your code is a bad thing in my opinion.
- lycos 4y ago
  I'm just gonna comment on this instead of everyone and I won't reply after this because I've said my part. In my opinion this is not comparable at all, slightly differently or prefixed property/attribute names are really very acceptable to me compared to the hacks we used to implement. Having to hack for multiple IEs while also ensuring those hacks are not applied to other browsers was a special kind of evil to battle, and we are not just talking about "oh IE does not support this so we need to do this another way" but also things like "oh IE like to double the specified padding because why not" - and then at some point they removed conditional comments because they were like "IE is good now." which of course it wasn't. I develop for Safari amongst other browsers daily and have for years, and do not share these frustration everyone else seems to have for it. Do I agree there should be more frequent updates of Safari (also for older MacOS)? Yes. Do I agree iOS should allow other browser engines? Yes. Is supporting older Chromium engines annoying too? Yeah of course, I've run into that as well (don't have any concrete examples right now unfortunately). People like to think that you can expect Chrome to always be the latest version because of the auto updating, but I have experienced multiple issues caused by users with a (very) outdated version. Whether or not you support these depends on your business / target audience, I had to, and it was frustrating. Different browser engines will always be different and implement standards at different rates, and standards are often implemented before they are finalised and some do this with prefixes and others do not. Supporting multiple browsers is part of the job, if you don't like it you should not be doing front-end web development. I for one would hate living in a world that is run by Google (Chromium).
realusername 4y ago
That's exactly how it works for safari, a bunch of ifs for each version of Safari having issues because they don't even have the same issues on desktop and on mobile
- lycos 4y ago
  See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633
  - realusername 4y ago
    Interesting but I disagree, yes Safari has a lot of missing features & stuff behind prefix but it has also a lot of pure rendering bugs and that's where the "if safari" comes into play and the analogy with IE comes from. And Safari is still an outlier compared to the other modern browsers. I've experienced zIndex bugs, border radius bugs, form bugs, svg bugs and even dom event bugs.
    - lycos 4y ago
      I've ran into issues with every browser I developed for (even to the point of the computer freezing in some Chrome bugs I remember) and have never felt like Safari was as annoying or frustrating as IE was back in the day (and _that_ is the main comparison being made in this post). In my 20+ years of front-end development with work supporting millions of users worldwide I can say without doubt, IE was much much worse than Safari is. I don't know how many of the people making this comparison actually had to deal with IE 5.5/6/7/8 support on a daily basis back in those days or what exotic things people are doing now. Safari does feel like it has more rendering bugs yes, but I did also say in my comment that I believe Safari should have more frequent updates because bugs hang around longer. But then again, you are still not guaranteed that people always have the latest version anyway, even in Chrome. I just don't get this comparison to IE and this is the first time I thought I'd comment on it, but in the future I will not do it again. The era of IE sucks, but IE was IE and Safari is Safari, Firefox is Firefox and almost all other browsers are Chrome. We are all allowed our own views on this and I should not have commented at all I guess. Happy new year! *: p.s. Apple should allow different browser engines on iOS

by lycos 4y ago

tomxor 4y ago

Yup, it's not like we have to support Safari 15,14,13 ... wait

lycos 4y ago
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633
- tomxor 4y ago
  Yea, it's not like they substantially diverged from the iframe spec and then abandoned that idea but left it active in a major version that needs support... wait

lucb1e 4y ago

That's literally what I'm now doing for Safari, though. There are very, very few things that don't work automatically across Firefox and Chrome/Chromium/Edgium, but quite a lot where Safari wants it differently. Having to type 'apple' (apple-touch-icon) or 'webkit' (-webkit-text-fill-color) literally into your code is a bad thing in my opinion.

lycos 4y ago
I'm just gonna comment on this instead of everyone and I won't reply after this because I've said my part. In my opinion this is not comparable at all, slightly differently or prefixed property/attribute names are really very acceptable to me compared to the hacks we used to implement. Having to hack for multiple IEs while also ensuring those hacks are not applied to other browsers was a special kind of evil to battle, and we are not just talking about "oh IE does not support this so we need to do this another way" but also things like "oh IE like to double the specified padding because why not" - and then at some point they removed conditional comments because they were like "IE is good now." which of course it wasn't. I develop for Safari amongst other browsers daily and have for years, and do not share these frustration everyone else seems to have for it. Do I agree there should be more frequent updates of Safari (also for older MacOS)? Yes. Do I agree iOS should allow other browser engines? Yes. Is supporting older Chromium engines annoying too? Yeah of course, I've run into that as well (don't have any concrete examples right now unfortunately). People like to think that you can expect Chrome to always be the latest version because of the auto updating, but I have experienced multiple issues caused by users with a (very) outdated version. Whether or not you support these depends on your business / target audience, I had to, and it was frustrating. Different browser engines will always be different and implement standards at different rates, and standards are often implemented before they are finalised and some do this with prefixes and others do not. Supporting multiple browsers is part of the job, if you don't like it you should not be doing front-end web development. I for one would hate living in a world that is run by Google (Chromium).

realusername 4y ago

That's exactly how it works for safari, a bunch of ifs for each version of Safari having issues because they don't even have the same issues on desktop and on mobile

lycos 4y ago
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34146633
- realusername 4y ago
  Interesting but I disagree, yes Safari has a lot of missing features & stuff behind prefix but it has also a lot of pure rendering bugs and that's where the "if safari" comes into play and the analogy with IE comes from. And Safari is still an outlier compared to the other modern browsers. I've experienced zIndex bugs, border radius bugs, form bugs, svg bugs and even dom event bugs.
  - lycos 4y ago
    I've ran into issues with every browser I developed for (even to the point of the computer freezing in some Chrome bugs I remember) and have never felt like Safari was as annoying or frustrating as IE was back in the day (and _that_ is the main comparison being made in this post). In my 20+ years of front-end development with work supporting millions of users worldwide I can say without doubt, IE was much much worse than Safari is. I don't know how many of the people making this comparison actually had to deal with IE 5.5/6/7/8 support on a daily basis back in those days or what exotic things people are doing now. Safari does feel like it has more rendering bugs yes, but I did also say in my comment that I believe Safari should have more frequent updates because bugs hang around longer. But then again, you are still not guaranteed that people always have the latest version anyway, even in Chrome. I just don't get this comparison to IE and this is the first time I thought I'd comment on it, but in the future I will not do it again. The era of IE sucks, but IE was IE and Safari is Safari, Firefox is Firefox and almost all other browsers are Chrome. We are all allowed our own views on this and I should not have commented at all I guess. Happy new year! *: p.s. Apple should allow different browser engines on iOS