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Safari is basically the worst browser right now. They have a firm toe hold in mobile obviously, but in terms of desktop it's the worst browser to support, even

Safari is basically the worst browser right now. They have a firm toe hold in mobile obviously, but in terms of desktop it's the worst browser to support, even behind IE. Nice to see them finally getting with the times. Every other browser has had this technology for years.

Osmium 12y ago
> Nice to see them finally getting with the times. Every other browser has had this technology for years. Citation needed? Safari's had a JIT JavaScript engine since 2008, and was one of the first (if I remember correctly). This is just a new version again.
matthewmacleod 12y ago
This is just flat wrong. Safari is basically at feature parity with Chrome, which isn't surprising given that they only diverged recently. I haven't to my knowledge ever had to work around differences between the two. Indeed, Safari has had JITed JS for longer than most browsers - this is just an update.
- Touche 12y ago
  > Safari is basically at feature parity with Chrome Is this a joke? IndexedDB, WebRTC, etc.?
  - Turing_Machine 12y ago
    Indeed. There are many missing features in Safari, including such basic stuff as allowing you to set the download attribute on hyperlinks. That makes it very difficult to write client-side apps for Safari (at least if you want to allow the user to save the output to disk). This is a personal pain point that's bitten me several times. For those who aren't familiar with the problem, say you've written a cool web app that creates (just for example) ZIP files. You want to let the user save these to disk. In Chrome, Firefox, or Opera, this is dirt-simple. Put the ZIP data in a data URL, set the href attribute of the link to the data URL, and set the download attribute to "yourcoolfilename.zip" (or whatever you want). Boom. Done. User clicks the link, data downloads to "yourcoolfilename.zip". Totally streamlined. Not in Safari. The best you can do there is open up the data URL in a new window (which of course ignores any mime type you've set, so the user gets an ugly screen full of binary data) and tell them to use Save As to save the mess. Very nasty. Chrome has had this feature for 20 (!) versions, Firefox for 9, Opera for 5. It even works on the Android and Blackberry browsers. Even IE allows this (in a completely non-standard and convoluted way, naturally, but it can be done).
    - threeseed 12y ago
      You know you can set the appropriate header and the file will download correctly ? You make it sound like this downloading ZIP and other files aren't possible on Safari.
      - waps 12y ago
        No, he's saying you can't "download" a ZIP (or any other file type) from a (locally running) javascript app in Safari. Which is true.
        Turing_Machine 12y ago
        Exactly. Edit: a simple illustration of the problem. http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/ http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - Turing_Machine 12y ago
        There is no "header" to set when you're downloading a data URL from a Javascript application.
  - matthewmacleod 12y ago
    No, it's not a joke. You've identified two features that are in Chrome that aren't in Safari. There are a few others - the new filesystem APIs, Shadow DOM etc. - there are also a few features in Safari that aren't in Chrome, like MathML and I think CSS region support. IOW, they aren't far off each other. Safari suffers from a much slower release cycle in particular - Chrome is usually a few features ahead due to this. Same with Firefox.
    - Touche 12y ago
      Pretty much every game-changing web feature comes to Safari years after Firefox and Chrome. Yes, they are good at some things, particularly CSS, but not at the types of things that allow new types of applications to be built.
throwaway420 12y ago
> Safari is basically the worst browser right now. Worst browser for who? Developers or actual users? As a dev, I don't prefer using Safari to build stuff, that's for sure. Chrome and sometimes even Firefox is much more pleasant in that regard. But as a user, the overall browsing experience is usually quite good. There are three things that it does really well IMO. * It renders text and websites beautifully. * I don't care so much about artificial benchmarks - Safari usually feels like one of the faster browsers in normal usage and for things like switching between tabs and all of that normal stuff. * It takes advantage of some newer OS X technologies for extending battery life. The only missing ingredient as a user is the much smaller extension ecosystem for Safari.

Osmium 12y ago

> Nice to see them finally getting with the times. Every other browser has had this technology for years. Citation needed? Safari's had a JIT JavaScript engine since 2008, and was one of the first (if I remember correctly). This is just a new version again.

matthewmacleod 12y ago

This is just flat wrong. Safari is basically at feature parity with Chrome, which isn't surprising given that they only diverged recently. I haven't to my knowledge ever had to work around differences between the two. Indeed, Safari has had JITed JS for longer than most browsers - this is just an update.

Touche 12y ago
> Safari is basically at feature parity with Chrome Is this a joke? IndexedDB, WebRTC, etc.?
- Turing_Machine 12y ago
  Indeed. There are many missing features in Safari, including such basic stuff as allowing you to set the download attribute on hyperlinks. That makes it very difficult to write client-side apps for Safari (at least if you want to allow the user to save the output to disk). This is a personal pain point that's bitten me several times. For those who aren't familiar with the problem, say you've written a cool web app that creates (just for example) ZIP files. You want to let the user save these to disk. In Chrome, Firefox, or Opera, this is dirt-simple. Put the ZIP data in a data URL, set the href attribute of the link to the data URL, and set the download attribute to "yourcoolfilename.zip" (or whatever you want). Boom. Done. User clicks the link, data downloads to "yourcoolfilename.zip". Totally streamlined. Not in Safari. The best you can do there is open up the data URL in a new window (which of course ignores any mime type you've set, so the user gets an ugly screen full of binary data) and tell them to use Save As to save the mess. Very nasty. Chrome has had this feature for 20 (!) versions, Firefox for 9, Opera for 5. It even works on the Android and Blackberry browsers. Even IE allows this (in a completely non-standard and convoluted way, naturally, but it can be done).
  - threeseed 12y ago
    You know you can set the appropriate header and the file will download correctly ? You make it sound like this downloading ZIP and other files aren't possible on Safari.
    - waps 12y ago
      No, he's saying you can't "download" a ZIP (or any other file type) from a (locally running) javascript app in Safari. Which is true.
      - Turing_Machine 12y ago
        Exactly. Edit: a simple illustration of the problem. http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/ http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - Turing_Machine 12y ago
      There is no "header" to set when you're downloading a data URL from a Javascript application.
- matthewmacleod 12y ago
  No, it's not a joke. You've identified two features that are in Chrome that aren't in Safari. There are a few others - the new filesystem APIs, Shadow DOM etc. - there are also a few features in Safari that aren't in Chrome, like MathML and I think CSS region support. IOW, they aren't far off each other. Safari suffers from a much slower release cycle in particular - Chrome is usually a few features ahead due to this. Same with Firefox.
  - Touche 12y ago
    Pretty much every game-changing web feature comes to Safari years after Firefox and Chrome. Yes, they are good at some things, particularly CSS, but not at the types of things that allow new types of applications to be built.

throwaway420 12y ago

> Safari is basically the worst browser right now. Worst browser for who? Developers or actual users? As a dev, I don't prefer using Safari to build stuff, that's for sure. Chrome and sometimes even Firefox is much more pleasant in that regard. But as a user, the overall browsing experience is usually quite good. There are three things that it does really well IMO. * It renders text and websites beautifully. * I don't care so much about artificial benchmarks - Safari usually feels like one of the faster browsers in normal usage and for things like switching between tabs and all of that normal stuff. * It takes advantage of some newer OS X technologies for extending battery life. The only missing ingredient as a user is the much smaller extension ecosystem for Safari.