4 ms·

> Safari is basically at feature parity with Chrome Is this a joke? IndexedDB, WebRTC, etc.?

by Touche 13y ago

Turing_Machine 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
      Exactly. Edit: a simple illustration of the problem. http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/ http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Turing_Machine 13y ago
    There is no "header" to set when you're downloading a data URL from a Javascript application.
matthewmacleod 13y 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 13y 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.

> Safari is basically at feature parity with Chrome Is this a joke? IndexedDB, WebRTC, etc.?

by Touche 13y ago

> Safari is basically at feature parity with Chrome Is this a joke? IndexedDB, WebRTC, etc.?

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 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
    Exactly. Edit: a simple illustration of the problem. http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/ http://jsfiddle.net/7hK7A/2/
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Turing_Machine 13y ago
  There is no "header" to set when you're downloading a data URL from a Javascript application.

matthewmacleod 13y 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 13y 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.