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> Right now the world needs a lot more Safari and Firefox users complaining about Chrome-only sites and tools than it does people complaining about Safari "hold

by nchmy 8mo ago

> Right now the world needs a lot more Safari and Firefox users complaining about Chrome-only sites and tools than it does people complaining about Safari "holding the web back". There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back (no "quotes" needed, as that's precisely what they're doing). > Safari's problems are temporary. What are you talking about? They've been woefully behind for like a decade. Here's an excellent article on the topic: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission/ https://infrequently.org/2023/02/safari-16-4-is-an-admission... And an entire series: https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/ https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/

WorldMaker 8mo ago
> There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back (no "quotes" needed, as that's precisely what they're doing). It's a matter of perspective. The safer perspective is: Safari isn't holding the web back, Chrome is moving too fast. Developers making Chrome-only sites and tools are moving too fast for the safety of web standards/web platform. Where one of the safety factors is "widely available in multiple implementations, not just a single browser". > > Safari's problems are temporary. > What are you talking about? The point is that Safari may be moving slow, but it is still moving. It doesn't have enough users to hold the web back. It isn't "always a decade behind", it 's "a couple years to a couple months behind", depending on which caniuse or MDN Baseline approach you want to take. There are some things Safari doesn't want to implement, but has registered safety or privacy or coupling reasons behind such things. Firefox is doing the same. Safari isn't trapping website developers in "old standards forever", it is encouraging developers to use safe, private, stable choices. Chrome is "move fast and sometimes break things". Safari doesn't want to be that. That's useful for the web as a platform to have one or two browsers considering their implementations. It's a good reason to point out "Chrome-only" developers as being "too bleeding edge" (sometimes emphasis on the bleeding) and out of touch with standards and standards processes.
- nchmy 8mo ago
  As the links I shared showed in tremendous detail, everything you've said is complete nonsense.
  - WorldMaker 8mo ago
    The only well supported and consistent argument I see in those links is that Safari is bad at PWAs. I agree with that. But (timely rant incoming) I also think everyone is currently bad at PWAs. The current ServiceWorker-based approach is brittle and hard to use because it is too low level and too tightly coupled to what seem to be Chrome-specific concerns. The previous manifest.json approach should have never been disabled in Chrome, it should have at least lived side-by-side and let developers vote by their feet, at least until a reasonably equivalent high-level manifest replacement was built. I was just thinking about this this week because I have a webpage I built with offline capabilities and an excuse coming up where many of the webpage's users will be offline for a week but might have use for the webpage, but I can't easily turn it into a PWA because it was built as an MPA and there's no great high level tools for writing an MPA's ServiceWorker because most of the high level libraries are so (overly) focused on SPAs. I wish I could just put a manifest.json or some sort of zip archive users could download and have it share Local Storage. I do pin a lot of this on Google engineers. The side effect is Safari is having a hard time implementing these "standards", but the real cause is the "standards" are over-complicated trash that are also hard to develop for. Everyone including the links you sent can see how Apple's App Store moat gives them an incentive to drag their feet on implementing these "standards" and yet no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards that are hard for anyone to use and harder for anyone else to implement is just another way to drag your feet and keep the whole web platform behind, without looking like you are dragging your feet. It would feel different, too, if the fully declarative manifest.json approach hadn't briefly worked (well) in Edge (Spartan) and Firefox before Google derailed that standards train with "Chrome-first" ServiceWorker complications. Always seemed like one of the reasons that Microsoft just gave up on the web platform because they couldn't keep up with Google's machinations (and conflicts of interest) in Chrome.
tacticus 8mo ago
> There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back Given the number of chrome-only sites that block firefox and not safari i think there are other issues in front end land
- WorldMaker 8mo ago
  I agree. It's also interesting how much that overlaps with "Firefox is an ad blocker" CAPTCHAs/paywalls/ad network complaints.

by nchmy 8mo ago

WorldMaker 8mo ago

> There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back (no "quotes" needed, as that's precisely what they're doing). It's a matter of perspective. The safer perspective is: Safari isn't holding the web back, Chrome is moving too fast. Developers making Chrome-only sites and tools are moving too fast for the safety of web standards/web platform. Where one of the safety factors is "widely available in multiple implementations, not just a single browser". > > Safari's problems are temporary. > What are you talking about? The point is that Safari may be moving slow, but it is still moving. It doesn't have enough users to hold the web back. It isn't "always a decade behind", it 's "a couple years to a couple months behind", depending on which caniuse or MDN Baseline approach you want to take. There are some things Safari doesn't want to implement, but has registered safety or privacy or coupling reasons behind such things. Firefox is doing the same. Safari isn't trapping website developers in "old standards forever", it is encouraging developers to use safe, private, stable choices. Chrome is "move fast and sometimes break things". Safari doesn't want to be that. That's useful for the web as a platform to have one or two browsers considering their implementations. It's a good reason to point out "Chrome-only" developers as being "too bleeding edge" (sometimes emphasis on the bleeding) and out of touch with standards and standards processes.

nchmy 8mo ago
As the links I shared showed in tremendous detail, everything you've said is complete nonsense.
- WorldMaker 8mo ago
  The only well supported and consistent argument I see in those links is that Safari is bad at PWAs. I agree with that. But (timely rant incoming) I also think everyone is currently bad at PWAs. The current ServiceWorker-based approach is brittle and hard to use because it is too low level and too tightly coupled to what seem to be Chrome-specific concerns. The previous manifest.json approach should have never been disabled in Chrome, it should have at least lived side-by-side and let developers vote by their feet, at least until a reasonably equivalent high-level manifest replacement was built. I was just thinking about this this week because I have a webpage I built with offline capabilities and an excuse coming up where many of the webpage's users will be offline for a week but might have use for the webpage, but I can't easily turn it into a PWA because it was built as an MPA and there's no great high level tools for writing an MPA's ServiceWorker because most of the high level libraries are so (overly) focused on SPAs. I wish I could just put a manifest.json or some sort of zip archive users could download and have it share Local Storage. I do pin a lot of this on Google engineers. The side effect is Safari is having a hard time implementing these "standards", but the real cause is the "standards" are over-complicated trash that are also hard to develop for. Everyone including the links you sent can see how Apple's App Store moat gives them an incentive to drag their feet on implementing these "standards" and yet no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards that are hard for anyone to use and harder for anyone else to implement is just another way to drag your feet and keep the whole web platform behind, without looking like you are dragging your feet. It would feel different, too, if the fully declarative manifest.json approach hadn't briefly worked (well) in Edge (Spartan) and Firefox before Google derailed that standards train with "Chrome-first" ServiceWorker complications. Always seemed like one of the reasons that Microsoft just gave up on the web platform because they couldn't keep up with Google's machinations (and conflicts of interest) in Chrome.

tacticus 8mo ago

> There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back Given the number of chrome-only sites that block firefox and not safari i think there are other issues in front end land

WorldMaker 8mo ago
I agree. It's also interesting how much that overlaps with "Firefox is an ad blocker" CAPTCHAs/paywalls/ad network complaints.