10 ms·

Recent improvements to Safari

106 points by tannhaeuser 4y ago

bruce511 4y ago
The addition of push notifications is long awaited, and necessary to take PWA to the next level. It is the single biggest hurdle for me in developing PWAs for iOS. Bring it on!
- lessright 4y ago
  Agree. No longer having wrapper apps will be a blessing for everyone.
- skybrian 4y ago
  I guess, but I will keep blocking them whether they are mobile apps or web apps. Few apps have any business sending notifications.
  - thewebcount 4y ago
    Agreed! I don’t know why anyone would want that. And even Apple is getting bad with their own notifications. I just got one from Apple Music yesterday about the Super Bowl. WTF? I had to turn off Notifications for that now, too.
    - culi 4y ago
      It's not that websites will now send you notifications. It's that PWAs will now have the option to ask to send you notifications in the same way any other app on your iPhone does. It means people can start developing apps for the web that will basically work on any platform that can run a browser. A huge step forward for the web platform that has so far been stunted by Apple's unwillingness to support these web standards
      - theresistor 4y ago
        I think the post you're replying to reflects a very different view of the utility notifications, which I share. I almost never approve a notification request. From anything, be it an app or a website. Off the top of my head the only notification sources that I have enabled are messaging apps, and even there I only have them turned on for the couple that I use for my most important communications. I consider it a nuisance and almost an anti-feature that every random app nags me to give it notification permissions. By the same token, granting that anti-feature to even more things if something I Do. Not. Want.
        culi 4y ago
        I'm with you and almost never grant permissions for anything. I even have notification badges turned off for everything they'll let me turn it off for (everything but the Settings app). Apple's implementation will likely have a toggle in the settings to decide whether or not you can be prompted for this permission. In fact, you can already do this with Firefox (and I assume Chrome). The people like you and me who don't allow any notifications anyways will likely just turn off the prompt entirely. But for developers, this helps bring the web platform one step closer to equal treatment as native platforms and can dramatically open up the ecosystem Apple currently so tightly controls
      - scarface74 4y ago
        And yet almost every site that asks for notifications do if exclusively to spam you.
        culi 4y ago
        You can simply block the ability of websites to even prompt you... That's what I do on Firefox
    - habitue 4y ago
      > I don’t know why anyone would want that. A calendar app, a messaging app, etc. All sort of apps have reasonable use cases for notifications, and now you can write those apps as persistent web apps on iOS. The user should still have control over notifications of course, and if you're downloading, let's say, a shopping app, no reason to allow notifications, it'll just be ads or whatever. Overall, flexibility is good.
      - olliej 4y ago
        Happily good calendaring apps have a standard protocol to communicate with calendar apps that don’t load a ton of Facebook and Google stalkerware every time you load them, and let their users just use their prefer calendar app. Messaging services can also make an app, because I sure as shit don’t want my entire browser to become more annoying just because someone can’t be assed making an app. Hopefully safari will gate this BS on making a home screen app rather than just making every site a beacon of “add notifications so that we can sell you to advertisers even when you aren’t on our site!”
        CGamesPlay 4y ago
        My favorite calendar app is a PWA that uses those standard protocols to integrate with services, plus some other features that I want. And soon, it will have notifications, too. > Overall, flexibility is good.
        olliej 4y ago
        Ah, see I prefer not to have my personal data proliferated to a bunch of additional companies that want to monetize my data, and I like my use of such apps to not include spyware linking that to all the trackers on the web. It would seem we're unlikely to agree on the value proposition of notifications from random websites. My assumption is that I'll see a bunch of BS "get notifications" spam from a variety of sites, none of which have any reason to justify the spam. Just as happened with the first version of "let's give websites the ability to spam users. Surely that won't be abused" notification system.
      - 4y ago
- olliej 4y ago
  So bizarre that there are devs think we want webpages with the ability to spam them. Literally the last thing I want from a random website is notification spams and pop up, but woooooo soon I guess I’ll have to get used to pop ups asking me to receive ads from websites all over again.
  - padjo 4y ago
    If you’re building a web based messaging app notifications are pretty crucial. Safari not having proper webpush was a major pain in these cases.
    - olliej 4y ago
      If you're offering a web based messaging app, I am assuming that no matter how "secure" you may claim it is, your site is filled with spyware that connects to every other website in my browser. To me that's a big negative, and so I'm not going to trust it. As a byproduct I am uninterested in allowing a "secure message" website the ability to spam me when I'm not on that site. If I decide I like/need your service I would expect an app to be available, because again, I don't want the constant threat of my messages being tied to the identity the various spyware companies have built from my browsing. I also don't want to have to switch to my browser and then find the message tab or wait for a giant multi-meg web app to download again. If Safari limits access to the spam API to just home screened pages then I wouldn't mind the addition of notification spam: creating a home screen app is a reasonable indication the user does value a site highly, and more importantly limits the ability of random sites to spam me with notification requests. Don't get me wrong, I understand that you can make mediocre cross platform webapps more easily than actual good apps, it's just that as a user I don't care. The argument "this is easier for me" falls flat because plenty of other people have been able to make apps, and those apps are typically better, but they actually get basic platform behavior correct. Failing that you can make an electron or similar app, and have all the crappy cross-platform BS, but hey at least you get to ask to spam me and you can't sell me out with spyware linked to my normal browser instance.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    Let's say you write an email client as a web app. Or a twitter client. Or perhaps an encrypted voice telephony webapp. Of course it is important for them to deliver notifications for those who want to receive them. This isn't about regular web pages that want to annoy you.
loopdoend 4y ago
I love how Safari fills in OTP codes from SMS messages automatically. I know you’re not supposed to use them but so many services still do.
- ridiculous_fish 4y ago
  This is such a cool feature on Macs. My iPhone receives the OTP via text message, it gets forwarded to Messages on my Mac, and then desktop Safari offers to enter the code. It all takes less than a second. Do other platforms have this? Honest question, I have no idea.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Nope. Android has this API where an app that is confirming your phone number with an SMS can automatically read it (without having access to the rest of your text messages) , but not all apps implement it (probably the majority though). This is the type of feature Apple are capable of doing because they own the full stack - phone OS, computer OS, browser. Nobody else has that (well Google do with ChromeOS but i doubt such UX is a part of their focus there). Of course the problem is that if you want to use a different browser, or Tim Cook forbid, a different mobile OS, you lose of all that because there's no interoperability. A form of vendor lock-in if you will.
- WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  I think this is more because Safari has access to that data. Other applications do not, as they are second-class citizens on Mac OS.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    No, it’s documented API. It’s either because it doesn’t actually work as documented, or because the other applications’ developers are lazy. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_autofill/enabling_password_autofill_on_a_text_input_view/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_...
can16358p 4y ago
I don't really know about all the details of those metrics but I know one thing: Safari is smooth. Actually it was just perfect in the previous years too for me anyway. It just works and works super-efficient. That's why I use it. The only reason I have Chrome installed is to test my websites with Chrome and use MetaMask. TBH I never understood why people use Chrome on a Mac unless there is a specific extension or site that doesn't work with Safari. Also, not using anything from Google is a big plus for me to use Safari (or Firefox for the record) anyway.
- trilbyglens 4y ago
  Anyone who has ever had to test CSS in safari will tell you why. Safari is the laggard, IE equivalent of modern browsers.
  - tgv 4y ago
    Testers for incompetent developers who get their CSS from stackoverflow? That's not a very large group.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    I test CSS on Safari a lot. It works exactly the same as Chrome for 99.9% of daily cases unless someone is doing very edgy quirks. It indeed has some bugs about autocompletion and messing up CSS in dev tools, needing a site reload, but nothing super major.
- deleted 4y ago
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- etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
  Personally, I like Chrome's UI much more than Safari, and also enjoy the devtools UI much better. Also like many devs, I use the most popular browser by default so I can design for the majority of users (realizing how this may offend some of you...).
  - olliej 4y ago
TrispusAttucks 4y ago
No mention of progressive web apps.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  Because no one knows what they are. There's a dozen of standards, and everyone wants a different set of them. Safari has long supported the vast majority of them.
- Tepix 4y ago
  I think push messages in Safari got a mention.
happybuy 4y ago
This article is a counterpoint to an article we wrote over a year ago which looked at some negative and historical issues with Safari: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/tragedy-of-safari/ https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/tragedy-of-safari/ As developers of a Safari exclusive ad blocker – Magic Lasso Adblock – we thought it was time to write this follow-up after seeing the progress Safari has made in the last 12 months. The Safari team deserves kudos for their significant progress and delivery.
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tambourine_man 4y ago
Derided by whom? From an end user point of view, Safari is the best browser, hands down, on any platform, by a long shot. Performance, smoothness, battery life, mobile integration, password management, the list goes on. I had to support and still know by heart the bugs and idiosyncrasies of IE 5, 6, 7, 8 etc. I have no sympathy for people who say Safari is the new IE.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  It’s also a great Mac app. Open a link in a new tab or window, frontmost or background? What happens by default, what keyboard shortcuts should work in each case? No browser has a better answer to these questions. Also, Cocoa text niceties work as expected. Multi language spelling, dictionary, text to speech… I’m a huge fan, one of the best apps Apple ever made. It made the iPhone possible.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    The OS integration aspect is indeed big. The various Cloniums (Chrome, Edge, etc) are probably second best in this regard with Firefox sadly placing last… Mozilla stuff has always lagged behind in that department. For example, it only got native context menus in the past year or two after the issue sat on the bug tracker for over a decade
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >Safari is the best browser, hands down, on any platform, by a long shot. I couldn't disagree more. Ignoring the lack of uBlock Origin and multi-account containers (which are table stakes for a browser), Safari's interface is unwieldy and lacks serious customization and a usable implementation of vertical tabs. I can't believe that a $2t company is so careless with their apps.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    While Safari is no paragon of customizability, Chrome and its derivatives are easily the worst in that regard. At least Safari lets you to customize its toolbar, which is more than Chrome allows.
exodust 4y ago
One very overdue improvement to iOS Safari I noticed: the humble HTML select element. Since the first iPhone, iOS Safari displayed a clunky wheel selector for HTML selects, requiring more taps than necessary to view and select an option from the list. Finally at some point last year they ditched the wheel, replacing it with a simple list (similar to Android), requiring less interaction to select an item. Only took them 15 years to fix this UI inefficiency.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  It wasn't an inefficiency. It was a way to give users nice scrollable lists with large tap targets on tiny mobile screens.
  - pontilanda 4y ago
    Super nice to scroll a 150-lines-long list of countries by swiping on a 1-inch-tall target on my huge screen. Even now it's stupid they don't offer keyboard filtering.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      Your screen wasn't always huge. The original iPhone, and many versions after it, was probably 4 times smaller than the current phone. Even on the current large iPhone screen the dropdown lists (instead of scroll wheels) are usually a pain to navigate because they are often a much smaller target and don't allow mistakes (you mis-click on an item, you have to open the dropdown again) I agree on keyboard filtering though.
  - exodust 4y ago
    > It wasn't an inefficiency. Yes it was. It required more interaction than necessary to select an item from a list, which is the definition of inefficiency. Why do you think they changed it. Not only that, but the picker wheel only showed a few items, you had to scroll to see more than about 3 or 4 items. All this squashed into half the screen. Inefficient and poorly designed. When selecting numbers on a date calendar, the wheel can be forgiven because you don't need to see the whole list to know the estimated position of your choice. But most select boxes on the web are NOT number pickers, but lists of words required to be read before a selection made. The old and now dead iOS select element wheel was a sorry piece of UX design indeed in most select box cases.
skrowl 4y ago
Safari is the new IE6. It's always going to be the weakest / furthest behind major browser.
- grk 4y ago
  Except the data linked in the article proves the exact opposite?
  - olliej 4y ago
    Sssh, the world is filled with people who just think that if chrome does it, it’s correct, and that if chrome doesn’t do it, it doesn’t matter, and that if a site works in chrome then every other browser is wrong. Completely unlike the old IE developers.
    - deleted 4y ago
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  - speedgoose 4y ago
    The data shows that it’s a recent and fast change from being the worst to being the best. It will probably take a few years for Safari to lose the “new IE” reputation it got.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  That role belongs to Chrome, half of their stuff isn't even a Web standard.
  - pontilanda 4y ago
    Chrome is not the the weakest / furthest behind major browser
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      That only reveals a lack understanding how IE 5 took over the Web world. It slowed down when it won, same will happen to Chrome after Google is done turning it into ChromeOS. Safari is the only relevant browser preventing Google to achieve that goal.
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effnorwood 4y ago
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summerlight 4y ago
This is what antitrust regulation can do at its finest; when we had a draft for DMA, it was clear to everyone that Apple cannot block third party browser engine forever. MS has surrendered to Blink and Mozilla is getting irrelevant. So if Apple insists to drive everyone to the App Store ecosystem instead of the Web then Blink will take over the entire browser engine market sooner or later. Which is really bad for customers. I'm happy to see that Apple's now pivoting into the web ecosystem thus bringing real competition back.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So if Apple “is driving everyone to the App Store instead of the web” and Android browsers are so much better, then why do companies waste time making Android apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web? How many companies are making iOS apps and not Android apps and telling Android users to just use the web?
  - summerlight 4y ago
    Oh, what a typical example of whataboutism. We've been talking about iOS and you're bringing not just Android but Android browsers to attack a strawman? Chrome has been a much better development platform than Safari before 2022 but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better than the primary platform API? And why did you think companies will build a web app instead of Android apps when they cannot practically reuse it on iOS? Isn't the whole point of PWA cross-platform? Have you heard about the Apple/Google duopoly structure and how it's working? And about its implications on web development? You looks like assuming that I am defending Android/Google against iOS/Apple. Sorry, I'm a long time iPhone user (about 15 years by now), who believed Steve's HTML5 vision and now just be sick about Safari being nearly unusable as a serious development platform. I am tired of installing 100s of apps just because those companies just wanted to send some weird push notification. Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      No, I’m saying that since almost every service of note has a website for computers anyway, if it’s only Safari that’s keeping apps from being web apps instead of being “forced” to go through the App Store, then why do companies bother about making a web app and an Android app? > And why did you think companies will build a web app instead of Android apps when they cannot practically reuse it on iOS Because they are already building a web app for computers. > Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact. And you really think companies are going to all the sudden stop writing native apps? These companies could have already built just an app for iOS and a web app like they do now for computers and not waste time building native apps. And let’s not even go into how shitty and low powered the average Android device is and how badly it performs with native apps and web apps. No I’m not saying that all Android devices are bad. I’m saying that the average $250 Android device is bad - and yes that’s the average selling price of an Android in the US. Android users aren’t buying high end devices.
mtomweb 4y ago
Overall the progress with Safari in the last has been great, and really shows why it's so important to have competition or even the threat of competition. It's only because of regulatory scrutiny that Apple has been pushed to give the Safari/Webkit the funds they need to make a good browser once again. Still a long way to go to catch up-to Firefox and Chrome but it's heading in the right direction. >A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS. This would give users the choice of which browser and rendering engine to use on their devices. This has been passed into law. Enforcement should begin in 2024. The UK, Japan & Australia have all proposed similar provisions. Interop 2022 is a few features jointly chosen by the browsers to focus on and work on that year. It's not a good metric for comparing browsers. >It is worth noting that these changes are still in draft and are early EU proposals with no final decisions yet made. Again it is Final and has been passed into law.
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
That's nice to hear. Safari is my main (only, really) desktop browser. But let's consider this: "A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS... Some experts believe that this would increase competition in the market" Whoever believes that is not an expert, and hasn't thought it through. Apple's insistence on WebKit is the only thing keeping Chrome from taking over the Web entirely. Once I realized that, I stopped whining about Apple forcing Webkit on everyone in iOS.
- culi 4y ago
  I definitely share the concern over Chrome's dominance, especially given the Manifest v3 crap, but it seems hard to believe they'll manage to take over the iOS ecosystem. Or even the mac ecosystem at that. As shown in this very thread, mac users really value the fact that Apple owns their whole stack and is able to do things like automatically fill in OTP codes from text messages (something that would be a huge invasion of privacy if any other company did it lol). Safari is tightly integrated with Apple's OSes and takes full advantage of that to offer things that would be impossible for other browsers to offer
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    I hope you're right. But remember that readers of this site are not representative of the computer-using public in general. If Mac (and eventually iOS) users have enough sites, friends, or support people from mostly-computer-illiterate service providers telling them to use Chrome, I suspect they might. Most people don't even understand iCloud, let alone notice the few Safari integrations that aren't form- or password-completion that all browsers can do. Not sure about credit-card completion though. Do other browsers offer that? I really appreciate that one in Safari.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  Note how some Google apologists down-modded this simple observation. Pathetic.
beardicus 4y ago
i imagine everybody still has “that one thing” that safari doesn’t support… for me it’s offscreen canvas. here’s hoping their momentum continues.
mateuszbuda 4y ago
What is the best setup for Safari on mac to block ads, block YouTube ads, block trackers, block cookies popups and automatically deny cookies? I like Orion but it is simply broken on many websites, especially some forms or buttons do not work sometimes, and it is not compatible with keychain and doesn't suggest passwords. Because of this, my browser workflow is Orion for everyday browsing, for some websites I know I have to use Safari, for some I have to use Chrome, if a website doesn't work with Safari I first try Firefox and then Chrome. It seems to me like there's a room for improvement here :/
Eric_WVGG 4y ago
When articles about new versions of Safari are released, I go straight to the details of ECMAscript and CSS improvements and disregard everything else as irrelevancy. But the recent introduction of "tab groups" has been an absolute game-changer for me. I currently have groups set up for technical research, shopping, gift ideas, recipes, and random-shit-about-bicycles. This is great not only for keeping tab-madness under control, but also the ability to close windows full of tabs without worrying about losing stuff. The tab groups have memory, sync across devices… brilliant stuff and absolutely worth re-developing ones browser habits around.

106 points by tannhaeuser 4y ago

The addition of push notifications is long awaited, and necessary to take PWA to the next level. It is the single biggest hurdle for me in developing PWAs for iOS. Bring it on!

lessright 4y ago
Agree. No longer having wrapper apps will be a blessing for everyone.
skybrian 4y ago
I guess, but I will keep blocking them whether they are mobile apps or web apps. Few apps have any business sending notifications.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  Agreed! I don’t know why anyone would want that. And even Apple is getting bad with their own notifications. I just got one from Apple Music yesterday about the Super Bowl. WTF? I had to turn off Notifications for that now, too.
  - culi 4y ago
    It's not that websites will now send you notifications. It's that PWAs will now have the option to ask to send you notifications in the same way any other app on your iPhone does. It means people can start developing apps for the web that will basically work on any platform that can run a browser. A huge step forward for the web platform that has so far been stunted by Apple's unwillingness to support these web standards
    - theresistor 4y ago
      I think the post you're replying to reflects a very different view of the utility notifications, which I share. I almost never approve a notification request. From anything, be it an app or a website. Off the top of my head the only notification sources that I have enabled are messaging apps, and even there I only have them turned on for the couple that I use for my most important communications. I consider it a nuisance and almost an anti-feature that every random app nags me to give it notification permissions. By the same token, granting that anti-feature to even more things if something I Do. Not. Want.
      - culi 4y ago
        I'm with you and almost never grant permissions for anything. I even have notification badges turned off for everything they'll let me turn it off for (everything but the Settings app). Apple's implementation will likely have a toggle in the settings to decide whether or not you can be prompted for this permission. In fact, you can already do this with Firefox (and I assume Chrome). The people like you and me who don't allow any notifications anyways will likely just turn off the prompt entirely. But for developers, this helps bring the web platform one step closer to equal treatment as native platforms and can dramatically open up the ecosystem Apple currently so tightly controls
    - scarface74 4y ago
      And yet almost every site that asks for notifications do if exclusively to spam you.
      - culi 4y ago
        You can simply block the ability of websites to even prompt you... That's what I do on Firefox
  - habitue 4y ago
    > I don’t know why anyone would want that. A calendar app, a messaging app, etc. All sort of apps have reasonable use cases for notifications, and now you can write those apps as persistent web apps on iOS. The user should still have control over notifications of course, and if you're downloading, let's say, a shopping app, no reason to allow notifications, it'll just be ads or whatever. Overall, flexibility is good.
    - olliej 4y ago
      Happily good calendaring apps have a standard protocol to communicate with calendar apps that don’t load a ton of Facebook and Google stalkerware every time you load them, and let their users just use their prefer calendar app. Messaging services can also make an app, because I sure as shit don’t want my entire browser to become more annoying just because someone can’t be assed making an app. Hopefully safari will gate this BS on making a home screen app rather than just making every site a beacon of “add notifications so that we can sell you to advertisers even when you aren’t on our site!”
      - CGamesPlay 4y ago
        My favorite calendar app is a PWA that uses those standard protocols to integrate with services, plus some other features that I want. And soon, it will have notifications, too. > Overall, flexibility is good.
        olliej 4y ago
        Ah, see I prefer not to have my personal data proliferated to a bunch of additional companies that want to monetize my data, and I like my use of such apps to not include spyware linking that to all the trackers on the web. It would seem we're unlikely to agree on the value proposition of notifications from random websites. My assumption is that I'll see a bunch of BS "get notifications" spam from a variety of sites, none of which have any reason to justify the spam. Just as happened with the first version of "let's give websites the ability to spam users. Surely that won't be abused" notification system.
    - 4y ago
olliej 4y ago
So bizarre that there are devs think we want webpages with the ability to spam them. Literally the last thing I want from a random website is notification spams and pop up, but woooooo soon I guess I’ll have to get used to pop ups asking me to receive ads from websites all over again.
- padjo 4y ago
  If you’re building a web based messaging app notifications are pretty crucial. Safari not having proper webpush was a major pain in these cases.
  - olliej 4y ago
    If you're offering a web based messaging app, I am assuming that no matter how "secure" you may claim it is, your site is filled with spyware that connects to every other website in my browser. To me that's a big negative, and so I'm not going to trust it. As a byproduct I am uninterested in allowing a "secure message" website the ability to spam me when I'm not on that site. If I decide I like/need your service I would expect an app to be available, because again, I don't want the constant threat of my messages being tied to the identity the various spyware companies have built from my browsing. I also don't want to have to switch to my browser and then find the message tab or wait for a giant multi-meg web app to download again. If Safari limits access to the spam API to just home screened pages then I wouldn't mind the addition of notification spam: creating a home screen app is a reasonable indication the user does value a site highly, and more importantly limits the ability of random sites to spam me with notification requests. Don't get me wrong, I understand that you can make mediocre cross platform webapps more easily than actual good apps, it's just that as a user I don't care. The argument "this is easier for me" falls flat because plenty of other people have been able to make apps, and those apps are typically better, but they actually get basic platform behavior correct. Failing that you can make an electron or similar app, and have all the crappy cross-platform BS, but hey at least you get to ask to spam me and you can't sell me out with spyware linked to my normal browser instance.
- Tepix 4y ago
  Let's say you write an email client as a web app. Or a twitter client. Or perhaps an encrypted voice telephony webapp. Of course it is important for them to deliver notifications for those who want to receive them. This isn't about regular web pages that want to annoy you.

loopdoend 4y ago

I love how Safari fills in OTP codes from SMS messages automatically. I know you’re not supposed to use them but so many services still do.

ridiculous_fish 4y ago
This is such a cool feature on Macs. My iPhone receives the OTP via text message, it gets forwarded to Messages on my Mac, and then desktop Safari offers to enter the code. It all takes less than a second. Do other platforms have this? Honest question, I have no idea.
- sofixa 4y ago
  Nope. Android has this API where an app that is confirming your phone number with an SMS can automatically read it (without having access to the rest of your text messages) , but not all apps implement it (probably the majority though). This is the type of feature Apple are capable of doing because they own the full stack - phone OS, computer OS, browser. Nobody else has that (well Google do with ChromeOS but i doubt such UX is a part of their focus there). Of course the problem is that if you want to use a different browser, or Tim Cook forbid, a different mobile OS, you lose of all that because there's no interoperability. A form of vendor lock-in if you will.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
I think this is more because Safari has access to that data. Other applications do not, as they are second-class citizens on Mac OS.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  No, it’s documented API. It’s either because it doesn’t actually work as documented, or because the other applications’ developers are lazy. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_autofill/enabling_password_autofill_on_a_text_input_view/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/password_...

can16358p 4y ago

I don't really know about all the details of those metrics but I know one thing: Safari is smooth. Actually it was just perfect in the previous years too for me anyway. It just works and works super-efficient. That's why I use it. The only reason I have Chrome installed is to test my websites with Chrome and use MetaMask. TBH I never understood why people use Chrome on a Mac unless there is a specific extension or site that doesn't work with Safari. Also, not using anything from Google is a big plus for me to use Safari (or Firefox for the record) anyway.

trilbyglens 4y ago
Anyone who has ever had to test CSS in safari will tell you why. Safari is the laggard, IE equivalent of modern browsers.
- tgv 4y ago
  Testers for incompetent developers who get their CSS from stackoverflow? That's not a very large group.
- can16358p 4y ago
  I test CSS on Safari a lot. It works exactly the same as Chrome for 99.9% of daily cases unless someone is doing very edgy quirks. It indeed has some bugs about autocompletion and messing up CSS in dev tools, needing a site reload, but nothing super major.
deleted 4y ago
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etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
Personally, I like Chrome's UI much more than Safari, and also enjoy the devtools UI much better. Also like many devs, I use the most popular browser by default so I can design for the majority of users (realizing how this may offend some of you...).
- olliej 4y ago

TrispusAttucks 4y ago

No mention of progressive web apps.

dmitriid 4y ago
Because no one knows what they are. There's a dozen of standards, and everyone wants a different set of them. Safari has long supported the vast majority of them.
Tepix 4y ago
I think push messages in Safari got a mention.

happybuy 4y ago

This article is a counterpoint to an article we wrote over a year ago which looked at some negative and historical issues with Safari: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/tragedy-of-safari/ https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/tragedy-of-safari/ As developers of a Safari exclusive ad blocker – Magic Lasso Adblock – we thought it was time to write this follow-up after seeing the progress Safari has made in the last 12 months. The Safari team deserves kudos for their significant progress and delivery.

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tambourine_man 4y ago

Derided by whom? From an end user point of view, Safari is the best browser, hands down, on any platform, by a long shot. Performance, smoothness, battery life, mobile integration, password management, the list goes on. I had to support and still know by heart the bugs and idiosyncrasies of IE 5, 6, 7, 8 etc. I have no sympathy for people who say Safari is the new IE.

tambourine_man 4y ago
It’s also a great Mac app. Open a link in a new tab or window, frontmost or background? What happens by default, what keyboard shortcuts should work in each case? No browser has a better answer to these questions. Also, Cocoa text niceties work as expected. Multi language spelling, dictionary, text to speech… I’m a huge fan, one of the best apps Apple ever made. It made the iPhone possible.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  The OS integration aspect is indeed big. The various Cloniums (Chrome, Edge, etc) are probably second best in this regard with Firefox sadly placing last… Mozilla stuff has always lagged behind in that department. For example, it only got native context menus in the past year or two after the issue sat on the bug tracker for over a decade
wintermutestwin 4y ago
>Safari is the best browser, hands down, on any platform, by a long shot. I couldn't disagree more. Ignoring the lack of uBlock Origin and multi-account containers (which are table stakes for a browser), Safari's interface is unwieldy and lacks serious customization and a usable implementation of vertical tabs. I can't believe that a $2t company is so careless with their apps.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  While Safari is no paragon of customizability, Chrome and its derivatives are easily the worst in that regard. At least Safari lets you to customize its toolbar, which is more than Chrome allows.

exodust 4y ago

One very overdue improvement to iOS Safari I noticed: the humble HTML select element. Since the first iPhone, iOS Safari displayed a clunky wheel selector for HTML selects, requiring more taps than necessary to view and select an option from the list. Finally at some point last year they ditched the wheel, replacing it with a simple list (similar to Android), requiring less interaction to select an item. Only took them 15 years to fix this UI inefficiency.

dmitriid 4y ago
It wasn't an inefficiency. It was a way to give users nice scrollable lists with large tap targets on tiny mobile screens.
- pontilanda 4y ago
  Super nice to scroll a 150-lines-long list of countries by swiping on a 1-inch-tall target on my huge screen. Even now it's stupid they don't offer keyboard filtering.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    Your screen wasn't always huge. The original iPhone, and many versions after it, was probably 4 times smaller than the current phone. Even on the current large iPhone screen the dropdown lists (instead of scroll wheels) are usually a pain to navigate because they are often a much smaller target and don't allow mistakes (you mis-click on an item, you have to open the dropdown again) I agree on keyboard filtering though.
- exodust 4y ago
  > It wasn't an inefficiency. Yes it was. It required more interaction than necessary to select an item from a list, which is the definition of inefficiency. Why do you think they changed it. Not only that, but the picker wheel only showed a few items, you had to scroll to see more than about 3 or 4 items. All this squashed into half the screen. Inefficient and poorly designed. When selecting numbers on a date calendar, the wheel can be forgiven because you don't need to see the whole list to know the estimated position of your choice. But most select boxes on the web are NOT number pickers, but lists of words required to be read before a selection made. The old and now dead iOS select element wheel was a sorry piece of UX design indeed in most select box cases.

skrowl 4y ago

Safari is the new IE6. It's always going to be the weakest / furthest behind major browser.

grk 4y ago
Except the data linked in the article proves the exact opposite?
- olliej 4y ago
  Sssh, the world is filled with people who just think that if chrome does it, it’s correct, and that if chrome doesn’t do it, it doesn’t matter, and that if a site works in chrome then every other browser is wrong. Completely unlike the old IE developers.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- speedgoose 4y ago
  The data shows that it’s a recent and fast change from being the worst to being the best. It will probably take a few years for Safari to lose the “new IE” reputation it got.
pjmlp 4y ago
That role belongs to Chrome, half of their stuff isn't even a Web standard.
- pontilanda 4y ago
  Chrome is not the the weakest / furthest behind major browser
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    That only reveals a lack understanding how IE 5 took over the Web world. It slowed down when it won, same will happen to Chrome after Google is done turning it into ChromeOS. Safari is the only relevant browser preventing Google to achieve that goal.

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effnorwood 4y ago

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summerlight 4y ago

This is what antitrust regulation can do at its finest; when we had a draft for DMA, it was clear to everyone that Apple cannot block third party browser engine forever. MS has surrendered to Blink and Mozilla is getting irrelevant. So if Apple insists to drive everyone to the App Store ecosystem instead of the Web then Blink will take over the entire browser engine market sooner or later. Which is really bad for customers. I'm happy to see that Apple's now pivoting into the web ecosystem thus bringing real competition back.

scarface74 4y ago
So if Apple “is driving everyone to the App Store instead of the web” and Android browsers are so much better, then why do companies waste time making Android apps instead of telling Android users to just use the web? How many companies are making iOS apps and not Android apps and telling Android users to just use the web?
- summerlight 4y ago
  Oh, what a typical example of whataboutism. We've been talking about iOS and you're bringing not just Android but Android browsers to attack a strawman? Chrome has been a much better development platform than Safari before 2022 but that doesn't necessarily mean it's better than the primary platform API? And why did you think companies will build a web app instead of Android apps when they cannot practically reuse it on iOS? Isn't the whole point of PWA cross-platform? Have you heard about the Apple/Google duopoly structure and how it's working? And about its implications on web development? You looks like assuming that I am defending Android/Google against iOS/Apple. Sorry, I'm a long time iPhone user (about 15 years by now), who believed Steve's HTML5 vision and now just be sick about Safari being nearly unusable as a serious development platform. I am tired of installing 100s of apps just because those companies just wanted to send some weird push notification. Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    No, I’m saying that since almost every service of note has a website for computers anyway, if it’s only Safari that’s keeping apps from being web apps instead of being “forced” to go through the App Store, then why do companies bother about making a web app and an Android app? > And why did you think companies will build a web app instead of Android apps when they cannot practically reuse it on iOS Because they are already building a web app for computers. > Apple is the one to blame and now they're forced to fix that thanks to DMA. You don't have to have that angry of this fact. And you really think companies are going to all the sudden stop writing native apps? These companies could have already built just an app for iOS and a web app like they do now for computers and not waste time building native apps. And let’s not even go into how shitty and low powered the average Android device is and how badly it performs with native apps and web apps. No I’m not saying that all Android devices are bad. I’m saying that the average $250 Android device is bad - and yes that’s the average selling price of an Android in the US. Android users aren’t buying high end devices.

mtomweb 4y ago

Overall the progress with Safari in the last has been great, and really shows why it's so important to have competition or even the threat of competition. It's only because of regulatory scrutiny that Apple has been pushed to give the Safari/Webkit the funds they need to make a good browser once again. Still a long way to go to catch up-to Firefox and Chrome but it's heading in the right direction. >A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS. This would give users the choice of which browser and rendering engine to use on their devices. This has been passed into law. Enforcement should begin in 2024. The UK, Japan & Australia have all proposed similar provisions. Interop 2022 is a few features jointly chosen by the browsers to focus on and work on that year. It's not a good metric for comparing browsers. >It is worth noting that these changes are still in draft and are early EU proposals with no final decisions yet made. Again it is Final and has been passed into law.

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

That's nice to hear. Safari is my main (only, really) desktop browser. But let's consider this: "A leaked proposed EU act may force Apple to allow alternate browser rendering engines on iOS... Some experts believe that this would increase competition in the market" Whoever believes that is not an expert, and hasn't thought it through. Apple's insistence on WebKit is the only thing keeping Chrome from taking over the Web entirely. Once I realized that, I stopped whining about Apple forcing Webkit on everyone in iOS.

culi 4y ago
I definitely share the concern over Chrome's dominance, especially given the Manifest v3 crap, but it seems hard to believe they'll manage to take over the iOS ecosystem. Or even the mac ecosystem at that. As shown in this very thread, mac users really value the fact that Apple owns their whole stack and is able to do things like automatically fill in OTP codes from text messages (something that would be a huge invasion of privacy if any other company did it lol). Safari is tightly integrated with Apple's OSes and takes full advantage of that to offer things that would be impossible for other browsers to offer
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  I hope you're right. But remember that readers of this site are not representative of the computer-using public in general. If Mac (and eventually iOS) users have enough sites, friends, or support people from mostly-computer-illiterate service providers telling them to use Chrome, I suspect they might. Most people don't even understand iCloud, let alone notice the few Safari integrations that aren't form- or password-completion that all browsers can do. Not sure about credit-card completion though. Do other browsers offer that? I really appreciate that one in Safari.
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
Note how some Google apologists down-modded this simple observation. Pathetic.

beardicus 4y ago

i imagine everybody still has “that one thing” that safari doesn’t support… for me it’s offscreen canvas. here’s hoping their momentum continues.

mateuszbuda 4y ago

What is the best setup for Safari on mac to block ads, block YouTube ads, block trackers, block cookies popups and automatically deny cookies? I like Orion but it is simply broken on many websites, especially some forms or buttons do not work sometimes, and it is not compatible with keychain and doesn't suggest passwords. Because of this, my browser workflow is Orion for everyday browsing, for some websites I know I have to use Safari, for some I have to use Chrome, if a website doesn't work with Safari I first try Firefox and then Chrome. It seems to me like there's a room for improvement here :/

Eric_WVGG 4y ago

When articles about new versions of Safari are released, I go straight to the details of ECMAscript and CSS improvements and disregard everything else as irrelevancy. But the recent introduction of "tab groups" has been an absolute game-changer for me. I currently have groups set up for technical research, shopping, gift ideas, recipes, and random-shit-about-bicycles. This is great not only for keeping tab-madness under control, but also the ability to close windows full of tabs without worrying about losing stuff. The tab groups have memory, sync across devices… brilliant stuff and absolutely worth re-developing ones browser habits around.