6 ms·

People are getting really bogged down in specific standards, but you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever, you can look a

People are getting really bogged down in specific standards, but you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever, you can look at this at a macro level. Here's the ES6 support table: http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ Safari and IE were laggards, but future IE is going to be very solid while future Safari is still going to be terrible. Here's the HTML5 support table: https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html Safari and IE are laggards, and both continue to lag. Safari used to be a Chrome/Firefox-level "modern" browser, while IE was the consistent laggard, with its slow release cycles and bad standards support. The most optimistic thing you can say about Safari now is that it's on IE's level; and realistically, it's even worse than IE -- certainly the IE team is a lot more transparent about future plans than the Safari team is.

realityking 12y ago
To be fair, if you compare IE11's with other browsers at the time of its release, they have stellar support. There is still no other stable browser that supports let, and the only other browser with support for const is Firefox 36 (released yesterday). For better or worse, Internet Explorer has a far longer release cycle. But right after release IE is often ahead of the other browsers in some regard (CSS calc and the ECMA Internationalization API come to mind). Safari hasn't done that in a while.
- cwyers 12y ago
  The kindest thing you can say about IE is that they seem to be well aware of the problems with their release cycle, and are taking steps to remediate this -- they refactored out large amounts of compatibility code from Trident to make EdgeHTML, and I think they plan to up the release cadence of updates to EdgeHTML significantly once they release Spartan. Apple doesn't seem to be doing much of anything to keep up with Firefox and Chrome on those charts. Which isn't even the problem! Apple will not allow Firefox or Chrome's rendering engines onto iOS. Even in the darkest days of the IE/Netscape war, Microsoft never even contemplated not letting users install Netscape. It's the combination of "lagging behind standards" and "wholly locked-down platform" that threatens to stagnate the web, and it's only Apple that's in that position.
  - EdSharkey 12y ago
    I thought Mozilla said they were going to land some form of Firefox on IOS. Yep, here's the press release: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/designing-a-firefox-experience-for-ios/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/designing-a-firefox-e... The actual work is going on here, but it sounds like it's only at the experimental stage: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/ https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/ I'm kindof curious to build it and see if it works. I read that the only issue with getting competing browsers onto iOS is the developer agreement says you can't provide a program with a proprietary javascript engine in it. Frankly, iOS is so big now, I would argue that that restriction strays into competitive advantage territory, and the OP is proof of that. If I were a lawyer at Apple, I would suddenly become magnanimous and get the developer agreement changed such that competing web browser programs _only_ may host their own JavaScript engines.
    - azakai 12y ago
      It is "Firefox", but it's still using the Safari rendering and JavaScript engine under the hood (like Chrome for iOS does), because there isn't an option to do otherwise.
    - CHY872 12y ago
      There are two problems. The first problem is political - firstly Apple make it so that you have to use the Webkit rendering engine for any third party browser. The second problem is more technical - iOS has memory protection that means you can't take a writeable page and make it executable. This means that you can't (for example) JIT compile Javascript (or any other language). Their built in exception to this is Safari. This is why Safari is faster than webviews.
smackfu 12y ago
Does Apple release HTML features updates to Safari in between OS releases? It feels like they freeze the features in July at WWDC, so they would be pretty out of date by February.
frik 12y ago
> you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever But missing functionality is a deal breaker. * WebRTC - web peer to peer connection: Chrome & Firefox yes, IE 11 incompatible by design (bought Skype for 11b, based on it), Safari no (would be Facetime competitor) * WebSQL - web relational database: Chrome & Safari (also 95% of all smartphones) yes, Firefox & IE no (declared dead by Oracle and MS devs (biggest SQL vendors), in favour of complicated NoSQL API IndexedDB on W3C mailing list) * IndexedDB - complicated NoSQL API: Chrome & IE 11 yes, Firefox yes but slow (implemented on top of SQLite, refused to implement WebSQL API, FirefoxOS is the only smartphone OS with no SQL API), Safari yes but buggy * WebGL - OpenGL 3D accelerated graphics: Chrome & Firefox & Safari(since iOS8) yes, IE 11 barely (old 0.9 instead of 2.0 API, few extensions) * CSSRegions - desktop publishing stylesheet features like Adobe InDesign/MS Word: Safari & Firefox yes, Chrome yes but removed again, IE 11 yes but older draft * ContentEditable/HTML editor - a bug free implementation would make MS Word WebApp & Google Docs obsolete: IE 11 yes (invented, based on Frontpage, old HTML4), Firefox & Chrome yes but bugs, Safari barely useable (especially on iOS) So basically every browser vendor is guilty to some extend. Apple protects its AppStore walled garden, FaceTime and "Pages" word processor, Microsoft its Skype/Lync, Office and DirectX/XBox eco-system, Google its GoogleDocs and Hangout, Mozilla community has some sponsored devs from companies with their own agenda (e.g. against WebSQL API, while using SQLite in Firefox to implement NoSQL API IndexedDB).
- bad_user 12y ago
  WebSQL is SQLLite and making that a standard is very hard without including SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior. Mozilla had really good reasons for shooting it down. Calling them out on it is meaningless without specifying why you think they've been wrong. You can say anything about IndexedDB, but at least it has a spec.
  - frik 12y ago
    * The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard, as do several other SQL embedded engines like the SQL engines from MS Access, MS Outlook, MS SQL Embedded and many others. Also Firefox already ships with SQLite for its "awesome bar" and bookmark feature. SQLite is in public domain, so every company can use it (even Microsoft products already use it!) * Also the argument of them that it's "hard" to sync a client side database with a server side database is nonsense. But the two argument basically stopped Web SQL as HTML5 API :( The developers who voted against Web SQL were (former) employees of two big server side SQL db vendors (see the related mailing lists and blog). Nowadays with the rise of NewSQL movement of people who burnt their fingers with NoSQL, one can only hope someone gives some love to Web SQL. To sum up, NoSQL has it's place and SQL has one too. We had this discussion already this week, hopefully W3C board members and Mozilla devs read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082847
Tloewald 12y ago
Seems like a weirdly anti-Safari summary, including assumptions about "future Safari" being inferior to "future IE".
- wavefunction 12y ago
  I consider Safari to be the worst browser out there, especially when you include "Mobile Safari" in that assessment of Safari.
  - Tloewald 12y ago
    While your opinion is of course paramount, you should try the Kindle Fire's browser. (I have the original Kindle Fire; newer models are probably better off -- that said, my original iPads still work fine and their browsers are perfectly usable, if slow.) That said, I use Mobile Safari a lot and it seems pretty good. My experience of Android browsers pretty much ended when my Nexus 7 died, but certainly it did not seem superior in any respect -- and it was markedly inferior in some -- to Mobile Safari.
    - wavefunction 12y ago
      This is from a "developing for the web and dealing with Mobile Safari" perspective, so take that for what it's worth.

realityking 12y ago

To be fair, if you compare IE11's with other browsers at the time of its release, they have stellar support. There is still no other stable browser that supports let, and the only other browser with support for const is Firefox 36 (released yesterday). For better or worse, Internet Explorer has a far longer release cycle. But right after release IE is often ahead of the other browsers in some regard (CSS calc and the ECMA Internationalization API come to mind). Safari hasn't done that in a while.

cwyers 12y ago
The kindest thing you can say about IE is that they seem to be well aware of the problems with their release cycle, and are taking steps to remediate this -- they refactored out large amounts of compatibility code from Trident to make EdgeHTML, and I think they plan to up the release cadence of updates to EdgeHTML significantly once they release Spartan. Apple doesn't seem to be doing much of anything to keep up with Firefox and Chrome on those charts. Which isn't even the problem! Apple will not allow Firefox or Chrome's rendering engines onto iOS. Even in the darkest days of the IE/Netscape war, Microsoft never even contemplated not letting users install Netscape. It's the combination of "lagging behind standards" and "wholly locked-down platform" that threatens to stagnate the web, and it's only Apple that's in that position.
- EdSharkey 12y ago
  I thought Mozilla said they were going to land some form of Firefox on IOS. Yep, here's the press release: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/designing-a-firefox-experience-for-ios/ https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/12/designing-a-firefox-e... The actual work is going on here, but it sounds like it's only at the experimental stage: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/ https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/ I'm kindof curious to build it and see if it works. I read that the only issue with getting competing browsers onto iOS is the developer agreement says you can't provide a program with a proprietary javascript engine in it. Frankly, iOS is so big now, I would argue that that restriction strays into competitive advantage territory, and the OP is proof of that. If I were a lawyer at Apple, I would suddenly become magnanimous and get the developer agreement changed such that competing web browser programs _only_ may host their own JavaScript engines.
  - azakai 12y ago
    It is "Firefox", but it's still using the Safari rendering and JavaScript engine under the hood (like Chrome for iOS does), because there isn't an option to do otherwise.
  - CHY872 12y ago
    There are two problems. The first problem is political - firstly Apple make it so that you have to use the Webkit rendering engine for any third party browser. The second problem is more technical - iOS has memory protection that means you can't take a writeable page and make it executable. This means that you can't (for example) JIT compile Javascript (or any other language). Their built in exception to this is Safari. This is why Safari is faster than webviews.

smackfu 12y ago

Does Apple release HTML features updates to Safari in between OS releases? It feels like they freeze the features in July at WWDC, so they would be pretty out of date by February.

frik 12y ago

> you don't need to talk about pointer events or flexbox or indexeddb or whatever But missing functionality is a deal breaker. * WebRTC - web peer to peer connection: Chrome & Firefox yes, IE 11 incompatible by design (bought Skype for 11b, based on it), Safari no (would be Facetime competitor) * WebSQL - web relational database: Chrome & Safari (also 95% of all smartphones) yes, Firefox & IE no (declared dead by Oracle and MS devs (biggest SQL vendors), in favour of complicated NoSQL API IndexedDB on W3C mailing list) * IndexedDB - complicated NoSQL API: Chrome & IE 11 yes, Firefox yes but slow (implemented on top of SQLite, refused to implement WebSQL API, FirefoxOS is the only smartphone OS with no SQL API), Safari yes but buggy * WebGL - OpenGL 3D accelerated graphics: Chrome & Firefox & Safari(since iOS8) yes, IE 11 barely (old 0.9 instead of 2.0 API, few extensions) * CSSRegions - desktop publishing stylesheet features like Adobe InDesign/MS Word: Safari & Firefox yes, Chrome yes but removed again, IE 11 yes but older draft * ContentEditable/HTML editor - a bug free implementation would make MS Word WebApp & Google Docs obsolete: IE 11 yes (invented, based on Frontpage, old HTML4), Firefox & Chrome yes but bugs, Safari barely useable (especially on iOS) So basically every browser vendor is guilty to some extend. Apple protects its AppStore walled garden, FaceTime and "Pages" word processor, Microsoft its Skype/Lync, Office and DirectX/XBox eco-system, Google its GoogleDocs and Hangout, Mozilla community has some sponsored devs from companies with their own agenda (e.g. against WebSQL API, while using SQLite in Firefox to implement NoSQL API IndexedDB).

bad_user 12y ago
WebSQL is SQLLite and making that a standard is very hard without including SQLite's bugs and non-standard behavior. Mozilla had really good reasons for shooting it down. Calling them out on it is meaningless without specifying why you think they've been wrong. You can say anything about IndexedDB, but at least it has a spec.
- frik 12y ago
  * The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard, as do several other SQL embedded engines like the SQL engines from MS Access, MS Outlook, MS SQL Embedded and many others. Also Firefox already ships with SQLite for its "awesome bar" and bookmark feature. SQLite is in public domain, so every company can use it (even Microsoft products already use it!) * Also the argument of them that it's "hard" to sync a client side database with a server side database is nonsense. But the two argument basically stopped Web SQL as HTML5 API :( The developers who voted against Web SQL were (former) employees of two big server side SQL db vendors (see the related mailing lists and blog). Nowadays with the rise of NewSQL movement of people who burnt their fingers with NoSQL, one can only hope someone gives some love to Web SQL. To sum up, NoSQL has it's place and SQL has one too. We had this discussion already this week, hopefully W3C board members and Mozilla devs read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9082847

Tloewald 12y ago

Seems like a weirdly anti-Safari summary, including assumptions about "future Safari" being inferior to "future IE".

wavefunction 12y ago
I consider Safari to be the worst browser out there, especially when you include "Mobile Safari" in that assessment of Safari.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  While your opinion is of course paramount, you should try the Kindle Fire's browser. (I have the original Kindle Fire; newer models are probably better off -- that said, my original iPads still work fine and their browsers are perfectly usable, if slow.) That said, I use Mobile Safari a lot and it seems pretty good. My experience of Android browsers pretty much ended when my Nexus 7 died, but certainly it did not seem superior in any respect -- and it was markedly inferior in some -- to Mobile Safari.
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    This is from a "developing for the web and dealing with Mobile Safari" perspective, so take that for what it's worth.