25 ms·

Safari is the new IE

753 points by nolanl 11y ago

espadrine 11y ago
Safari is worse than IE, however. You could install an alternative. Even if they weren't, I fully agree with progressive enhancement. It is always going to provide the right incentives for everyone. Only the features most used (by end-users) will become browser vendors' utmost priority.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
  You can of course install an alternative to desktop Safari, just not to Mobile Safari.
  - sigzero 11y ago
    So I should delete my Google Chrome app then? Granted it doesn't take the default for things but I can still use it.
    - supster 11y ago
      Google Chrome app on iPhones still use mobile safari's rendering engine lol
    - spaar 11y ago
      The iOS version of Chrome doesn't use Chrome's rendering and JavaScript engines though, per the App Store rules it has to use WebKit [0]. So, any other browser app on iOS would have the same problems as mobile Safari. [0] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-ios http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-ios (linked by the article btw)
      - jegutman 11y ago
        Yea, I just really like that I can access all of my open tabs with it. It also context switches better with iOS outlook if you click on links you can quickly go back to outlook.
      - smrtinsert 11y ago
        That's amazing. Thanks for reminding me how much contempt they have for choice.
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Not quite my area of expertise, but I believe that browsers on Android also tend to use the core Android browser components though they can dress them up slightly differently.
        lorenzhs 11y ago
        They can, but they don't have to. Mozilla ships a Gecko engine in Firefox for Android.
        Someone1234 11y ago
        Browsers on Android are not required to use Android's built in WebViews. And several alternative browser engines are offered by the platform[0]. Android has no specific restrictions in place. Although it is the path of least resistance to use the built in WebView, since you now don't need to deploy your own. [0] Including: Blink (Amazon Silk, Chrome, Opera), WebKit (BlackBerry, Dolphin, et al), Gecko (Firefox, Minimo), NetFront (Blazer). At the moment WebKit derivatives seem to be most popular, but several browsers re-build it from the source rather than just using Android's WebKit components.
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Thanks, as I said, NMAOE and I was mostly reflecting observations based on some dated Android builds.
        glogla 11y ago
        Some browsers do, but Firefox Mobile uses it's own core. That makes it possible to use extensions like ublock, for much better browsing experience than any browser without ad blocker can provide.
        sangnoir 11y ago
      - benburton 11y ago
        Sounds like United States v. Microsoft Corp.[1] all over again. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
    - tbassetto 11y ago
      On iOS, all 3rd-party browsers (and even the upcoming Firefox for iOS) are using the rendering engine of Safari. The complaint is not about Safari the browser but more about its rendering engine.
  - emsy 11y ago
    By the numbers, mobile is the one that matters.
- justwannasing 11y ago
  It's not. At least not according to caniuse.com, html5test.com or css3test.com.
sergimansilla 11y ago
Agreed. However, it still has the best perceived performance. Just open a page with a heavy layout and scroll up and down, or type an address or search term in the location bar and "feel" how fast it loads. Apple really put some effort in making it "feel" extremely fast.
- krisdol 11y ago
  I agree except for the back button. I hate how swiping to go back takes you back to a screenshot temporarily while the page reloads. I attempt to scroll up and down and interact with the screenshot until suddenly the page isn't how I remember it due to the reload. It's such a terrible, terrible design and I check every new version in hopes that this would be addressed.
  - jshelly 11y ago
    I'm fine with Safari, but the page refresh on back annoys me to no end
    - janinge 11y ago
      I really like this feature. A page redraw generally takes less time than the time needed for my eyes and brain to re-parse the page. When I have to stare at a blank page for a varying amount of time after having decided to go back, the entire navigation process feels very sluggish and slow. Using other browsers I find myself opening a lot more temporary tabs to account for this. Swipe and hold is also nice when you just need to go back to reread a few sentences, etc. Most pages shouldn't need a refresh when you go back after a few seconds or minutes. What annoys me are websites that set stupid expiry times or Cache-Control values.
  - vincentriemer 11y ago
    in 10.11 it seems like this is fixed and the page won't always need to reload.
- dailyrorschach 11y ago
  I use Safari daily as my primary browser on desktop. I don't doubt it presents challenges for developers, and hope they update faster. But, not only is it fast on OS X, the battery life optimization is amazing. I run Safari without Flash installed, and only need to pop over to Chrome once and a while. I've come to understand Chrome is making more power consumption adjustments in it's OS X version, and look forward to seeing if it can compare, but I'd also like to see memory usage addressed. But for me, Safari loads everything I need, save for the odd video that is only available in flash, which now happens very rarely. And for me being able to use the web browser for hours and hours each day without a similar hit from Chrome to both power and memory is worth it for me.
eloisant 11y ago
Is he talking about the iOS version? Because I don't think the desktop version's market share is big enough for developers to really care about it (unlike IE).
superiortoyou 11y ago
If Safari became a little too good, people might stop buying or developing apps.
- criswell 11y ago
  Absolutely agreed. They want the web to lose.
  - jenscow 11y ago
    Hence it being the new IE.
  - Tloewald 11y ago
    Absolutely disagree. Apple wants to make the best experience for users because then they'll keep buying Apple products. If users want the web, then they make the browser better. If Apps are more appropriate, then they make apps better. Apple prioritizes stuff users care about -- battery life > IndexedDB, accessibility > WebGL. Until you understand this and stop thinking like a conspiracy theorist, you won't understand Apple and will keep confusing your priorities with user priorities. Again: pleasing users -> profit. Making web lose -> ??? This isn't "embrace and extend" -- Microsoft added huge swathes of proprietary functionality to IE and tended (and tends) to prioritize developer and corporate IT desires over users. Insofar as Apple extends the browser, they do it through standards and proposed standards and (mostly) open source the implementations.
    - vdaniuk 11y ago
      Apple wants to make the best experience for users while maintaining vendor lock-in. iOS users invest hundreds of dollars in apps and games and enjoy exclusive products. This creates a very significant barrier to switch to another mobile platform. Quite obviously increased switching costs for users are important for iOS to maintain leadership in platform wars. Therefore, rapid advancement of web apps user experience to the level of native apps in some categories would be detrimental to Apple's competitive positions. Making web lose -> stronger competitive advantage.
gwbas1c 11y ago
The article misses the point. The browser is a document viewer, not an application delivery platform. Back in 2005 we all thought that web-based applications were going to take the world by storm, but now that we have slick application stores on all major platforms, this isn’t the case. If you need functionality like you describe, ship a native application via an app store. It’s a much better experience than web development.
- Loque 11y ago
  I think there is a lot more in this than you make out. Unless you really need specific hardware access that cannot be achieved in the browser alone, creating a mobile app is an unnecessary, very complicated set of hoops, to jump through, for each platform, as well as then making a desktop app/website. A side comment would be that you can make your webapp perform remarkably well on mobile, with things like HW accelerated transitions, local storage, etc...
- swsieber 11y ago
  The browser has been and is a document viewer, but it's also becoming a application delivery platform and has been for quite some time. App delivery can be cross platform easily if Apple steps up their game.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  I don't fully agree. Apps like gmail and google maps are often preferred to their native alternatives on desktop. I have pretty much ditched native office suites in favor of google drive as well on my desktop system. And things like Facebook hasn't even considered native desktop implementations. So it is safe to say that the web is a great app delivery platform (at least on the desktop) and as such, I think it is completely reasonable to improve upon it and extend this benefit to mobile.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Have to parse that carefully. The web is a great delivery platform. But the apps ... not so much. They can be laggy, unresponsive, render poorly, double-process user events, and on and on. The apps are not great. In fact, only their mother could love them.
kijin 11y ago
As a primarily web-based advertising company, Google benefits immensely from a more feature-packed web. So does Mozilla, both because they depend on ad revenue and because they are betting very heavily on the web as a platform. Even Microsoft is heavily invested in web technologies, not only because of Bing but also because HTML5 forms the backbone of Modern (Metro) UI. Apple, on the other hand, has no reason to want the web to flourish. They make money by selling hardware, and by managing a closed ecosystem of apps and services that revolve around said hardware. iAd focuses exclusively on apps, not webpages. Cross-platform web technologies that try to close the gap between web apps and native apps are a threat to Apple's bottom line. The more people abandon the web in favor of native apps, the more money Apple makes. At least in the days of IE6, Microsoft didn't really care about the web. Apple nowadays, on the other hand, has every incentive to sabotage the web. I don't think it's just technological purism that makes them reluctant to allow alternate rendering engines to work on iOS. They need to ensure that apps are the only way for developers to bring advanced features to iOS users. Because they're not competing on the web like the others. They're competing against the web.
- JohnBooty 11y ago
  Apple, on the other hand, has no reason to want the web to flourish. They make money by selling hardware, and by managing a closed ecosystem of apps and services that revolve around said hardware. You have the key thing correct: Apple makes money on hardware. So it doesn't follow that they would want to stamp out or ignore the web. The web is a huge part of what customers use Macs and iOS devices for, and Apple makes the same amount of money on a piece of hardware whether you use it to browse the web or use the $0.00 Facebook app. There's no denying that Apple wants you to buy into their ecosystem of apps: it helps bind you to their devices. But there's no incentive for them to extinguish the web. At least in the days of IE6, Microsoft didn't really care about the web. No. The web was directly opposite to Microsoft's goals. Microsoft made money on operating systems and applications. If the web "won" then you wouldn't need a Microsoft OS any more, and Microsoft would "lose."
- kalleboo 11y ago
  If Apple really wanted to make Web Apps feel like a second class citizen, they wouldn't be adding Force Touch, custom AirPlay control support and Picture In Picture support to the upcoming version of Safari. Those are deep, native app level features that aren't even Web standards yet. I assume Apple is underinvesting in safari simply because they have bigger fish to fry, and they are notoriously understaffed with competent engineers (or have bad project management).
benjamindc 11y ago
Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). You might disagree with Apple's priorities, but it doesn't mean other browsers are "better" per se, they're just different. Safari's release cycle, however, is stupid per se.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  Exactly. Apple adds features based on what users seem to need, not what programmers want (Google) or programmers want to work on (Mozilla). It should also be noted that Safari's accessibility support is head and shoulders above anything (including IE with dedicated third-party extensions -- our blind accessibility guy who has access to every accessible technology under the sun simply uses Apple devices at home). Wake me up when IE is open source, Google gives flying f* about accessibility, and Firefox is better than a distant second.
- yAnonymous 11y ago
  As stated in the article, often Safari's implementation just sucks.
- Touche 11y ago
  > Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). So then let's name these things, specifically, if you really believe that. I'm not aware of any new specs related to animations in the last couple of years. Can you name them?
  - yoklov 11y ago
    I'm not really well informed here, but I'd guess that he means how the animations, visual effects, Ui, etc. actually look and behave, rather than new specs. One thing I've noticed several times is that in chrome, many CSS animations aren't animated across sub-pixel boundaries. I don't know necessarily that safari does this (again, I'm not well informed here -- for all I know this has been fixed in Chrome), but if they did, that would count in my book, despite not being a new spec. (Honestly, my suspicion is that they aren't though, since a high dpi screen removes most of the need for sub-pixel accuracy).
bickfordb 11y ago
The definition of a web browser is enormous now. Even though Apple has massive resources, is it really fair to rant against them for not implementing every possible specification, five years old or not? If web assembly is supposedly as fast as C, why can't we have web browsers with a smaller built-in feature set and implement new specifications as libraries?
- realityking 11y ago
  While web assembly may give us performance, it doesn't give us access to new platform API. Web assembly can in no way replace Service Worker, IndexedDB or Web Manifests. It also won't help with Web Components unless you're aming for a Web where we just draw on a big canvas.
  - verbin217 11y ago
    I want a web where we just draw on a big canvas. That's a pretty simple API for implementers to get right. Then we could move the scene graph (DOM) and it's rendering engine entirely into the application language where it could be more readily hot-fixed. It'd be like PDFJS but for your whole fucking web browser.
    - notduncansmith 11y ago
      Have you looked into the Famo.us project? It's not my cup of tea in terms of implementation, but it sounds like exactly what you're looking for. Alternatively, what's keeping you from just using <canvas>?
    - bzbarsky 11y ago
      Note that PDFJS still creates a DOM, in order to support little things like selection, accessibility, etc.
- ripter 11y ago
  That was the idea behind ActiveX. Instead of continuing development on the browser, people could just write an ActiveX component. Or A Java Applet.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tzakrajs 11y ago
Firefox renders pages terribly and is the real dud here. edit: not speed, but aesthetic quality and parity with Chrome/Safari
- tzakrajs 11y ago
  Evidence is anecdotal and based on browser compatibility bugs reported to me on web apps I develop. Chrome and Safari are best in class in this regard. Firefox has gross UI elements that remind me of the 90s.
- Cshelton 11y ago
  Do you have a very outdated version of FF? Firefox is actually starting to beat Chrome on many benchmarks once again.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    He's talking about rendering (quality) not speed.
- zecg 11y ago
  Mobile Firefox, however, is the only way to have a competent ad blocker on mobile: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
  - zimpenfish 11y ago
    Although Mobile Safari will no doubt get a deluge once iOS 9 is released. cf. http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/6/24/an-hour-with-safari-content-blocker-in-ios-9 http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/6/24/an-hour-with-safari-cont...
Cshelton 11y ago
As a user, I love Safari. The hand off between my macbook and iphone is amazing, it feels smoother than other browsers. As a developer, I would say they are just doing a few things differently. I think the web API and DOM/css should have a standard set that every browser has to implement in the same way. It's actually way way better than it used to be. However, I'm fine with additional api features as targeting browsers is not not difficult and may open up some cool features. Like perhaps native notifications API on IOS Safari, that would be sweet! For the base Web API though, Safari has deviated on a few small things, but it's not really to the point where IE6 was. Also, people will upgrade Safari. Unlike IE6, where IT shops would not upgrade because of Active X applications, Safari will at least be upgraded. So I think it's unfair to compare it to the old IE. P.S., The new Windows Edge browser in Windows 10 is pretty amazing, it feels like Chrome. Very fast. And if you are not familiar with the Mozilla Servo project, it's worth checking out. It still has a long way to go, but down the line could be very interesting.
- zecho 11y ago
  Handoff actually works for you? You're one in a million.
  - Cshelton 11y ago
    Yeah I've never had any issues with it. It also works when I'm using Chrome on my macbook. Like, a safari tab will show up on Chrome, it's pretty sweet.
- dcarmo 11y ago
  Handoff also works with Chrome - it only needs to be the default browser on your Mac.
jug 11y ago
It isn't as bad as what led to IE's state that took several years of active development by Microsoft to even begin correcting. The gap between IE 6 and IE 7 was terrible, and IE 6 wasn't even that much more than IE 5, standards-wise. Here's an overview of what's new in Safari (WebKit) as it ships with OS X El Capitan: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_11.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016227-DontLinkElementID_58 https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releaseno...
- dspillett 11y ago
  What people often forget is that there was a time when IE6 was actually better than the alternatives (on Windows anyway). Around the time it was released Navigator was the main competitor and that was getting progressively less stable and failed to keep up with the way the web was evolving. And by "evolving" I don't just mean new techniques/standards/whatever - simply the way the size of things was growing as people started to commonly have access to decent bandwidth. A key example I remember well is large nested tables (semantic markup was even less easy to get right cross-browser at that point) - Navigator would sometimes spin the CPU for a full minute to render a page that IE would throw out in seconds. This is the secondary reason IE gained share quickly (the primary one being bundling, of course). Then Netscpae fell over and it didn't have competition at all for a while so MS simply stopped trying (why work to improve when there is no competition and you can use the resources to work on something else?) so IE gained even more share on Windows (other OSs were not large enough in the desktop market to figure at that point, and mobile browsing was embryonic) without any effort from MS. It wasn't until Firefox got to the point of being enough better to attract a large share that the tables started turning and even then the change was slow. Opera was significant around the time too, but it not being free (or not free without adverts) was a sticking point that stopped it being widely adopted. That is a key problem that hopefully can't play out the same way these days though. No one browser, even mobile safari, is so commonly used that if it fails to keep up it can't start to be ignored, and away from iDevices we don't have the pure binary choice so if B doesn't keep up with A C and D probably will and B will be forced to (or it won't matter so much if B dies).
  - 11y ago
exelius 11y ago
Disagree with this assessment. IE was so bad because Microsoft tried to go off and create its own standards that were incompatible with Mozilla / Firefox / etc. (I'm thinking of IE6 specifically). And this was big, core functionality like page layout and CSS; not some data structures that can be implemented in other ways (albeit with a performance hit). This was doubly bad because "enterprise" companies (SAP, SAS, Oracle, etc) built their original web interfaces against IE6; and those systems are so costly to upgrade that many companies still run IE6-compatible browsers. Chrome even has an option that can be pushed out via GPO to render certain pages using an IE6-compatible renderer. Safari is nowhere near that bad; I have yet to run across a page that works in Chrome that doesn't work in Safari. Safari, by comparison, is just behind the curve on some developer-centric features. But Safari also has some things going in its favor: in my experience, it's the fastest browser on OS X by a pretty wide margin. Chrome is so bloated and full of garbage at this point that when I have it open, I usually have at least one tab sitting at 100% CPU (and this is with FlashBlock enabled). Safari also manages to feel faster while using significantly less power -- I suspect Apple has done some optimizations through Grand Central on this front. Safari on mobile is a bit of a different story; yes it has problems, but I don't know that supporting a larger feature set is the answer.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  > Safari on mobile is a bit of a different story; yes it has problems that's a understatement., working on ios safari has been a travesty: it steals a good 20% of view area and 25% of clickable area, it makes a mess with pages trying to be responsive by misreporting the viewport area, it has loads of bugs with resizing and orientation change events and just dies if one script in any page becomes unresponsive
  - exelius 11y ago
    Right, but the problems Safari has on mobile aren't going to be fixed by implementing IndexedDB; and honestly the WebSQL vs IndexedDB argument is irrelevant to most people: 95% of web developers will just use a framework that abstracts the differences. And I wouldn't claim that mobile Chrome is a whole lot better on this front, even (or especially) on Android. The limitations of mobile CPUs combined with higher user expectations on responsiveness mean you have to pull the plug on a runaway process a lot faster than on a PC, and neither Apple nor Google is immune to this.
NietTim 11y ago
Nolan, I'm not familiar with what you do or have done, but have you ever tried to make a website back in the day? Ever tried to support IE6? 7? 8? IE literally broke the web. CSS rules which worked in every browser ever wouldn't work in IE. Entire webpages weren't formatting correctly, having to spend hours, days, on workarounds. Comparing Safari to IE is just wrong. Safari doesn't break the web, it 'just' lacks support for some new javascript functions, not break standards/rules that had been there for tens of years. But I'm sure this title gets you more clicks.
- rplnt 11y ago
  In the same vain, Chrome does break web by introducing various custom features that can't be found in other browsers. See all those Google demos from past several years: "You need Chrome to view this" sounds very much like those "IE5+" warnings.
  - JadeNB 11y ago
    > See all those Google demos from past several years: "You need Chrome to view this" sounds very much like those "IE5+" warnings. I'm in sympathy with the spirit of this post, but I'm not sure that I agree with this specific example. I think that there's a big difference between an 'everyday' web page requiring a specific browser, and the creator of a browser showing off what they see as its exceptional capabilities. However much designers (and users) like adherence to standards, I think that it's clear that a lot of the innovations we take for granted have come from browsers leading the way; and there's not much point in having those innovations in the browser if the user doesn't know about them. (I should be clear that I'm not advocating a functionality free-for-all, though; probably much more harm than good has come from this behaviour.)
  - jfoster 11y ago
    Google are definitely breaking the web in lots of ways. They even have an audio limitation in Chrome on Android where they have added an explicit exception just for google.com: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178297#c59 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178297#c... That said, there are some cases where things are Chrome-only simply because other vendors are far behind. (eg. speech recognition & synthesis)
mschuster91 11y ago
> Now, after one year, Apple has fixed a whopping two bugs in IndexedDB (out of several), and they’ve publicly stated that they don’t find much value in working on it, because they don’t see “a huge use.” Well duh, nobody’s going to use IndexedDB if the browser support is completely broken. (Microsoft, I’m looking at you too.) Well, the reason for this is clear: offline web apps are supported in iOS but without a reliable way to store larger amounts of data, web apps get pretty much useless and so people have to go through the Crapp Store. But, I have to defend Apple, IndexedDB is a ridiculous steaming pile of junk when compared to WebSQL. Writing a single-line SQL statement with multiple WHERE clauses and a couple ORDER BY, takes metric tons of boilerplate crap in addition to callback hell because the IndexedDB crap is async.
jackgavigan 11y ago
I recently ditched Chrome as my default desktop browser in favour of Safari because of its lower power consumption. Apple may well have made a conscious choice to eschew staying up to date with cutting-edge web technologies in favour of a better overall user experience for the majority of users. If so, it was a wise choice.
binarymax 11y ago
Hey Nolan, It was good to "meet" you at edgeconf (really we were just throwing the mic back and forth, and I couldnt make it to the afterparty). I really enjoyed your panel intro and insight. I agree with your assessment that IndexedDB is laughably bad in Safari, but maybe they haven't bothered because its really not such a great solution in general? I'm going to reassert that I think we could do much better - since IndexedDB is too low-level for what it is, but too specific for alternate solutions. I've been kicking around a blog post that I haven't got out yet - but we really need something more stream like and generic than a NoSQL index in the browser - especially something fundamental to address the future influx of WebAssembly apps. Cheers!
- Touche 11y ago
  > I agree with your assessment that IndexedDB is laughably bad in Safari, but maybe they haven't bothered because its really not such a great solution in general? So where's their alternative spec?
- nolanl 11y ago
  I still have a soft spot for WebSQL over IndexedDB - way easier to work with, incredibly powerful, brought the speed and reliability of SQLite. However, WebSQL only ever managed to have one implementation (Chrome and Safari shared WebKit at the time), and the other vendors besides Opera didn't want to touch it. So it's long since time to accept that it's dead. What bothered me most about the IndexedDB fiasco with iOS8 is that Apple not only held out for so many years, but then they deployed a broken implementation. Anybody who had written an app using an IndexedDB shim either had a crashed site at best or lost user data at worst. YDN-DB author Kyaw Tun had the best quote: "I don't understand how they can release this." Whether you like an API or not, a browser vendor should at least release it in good faith if they're going to release it.
biturd 11y ago
What if gmail or another large service implemented a reliance on these new features. Safari would be forced to add them in?
jccalhoun 11y ago
"There was one company not in attendance, though, and they served as the proverbial elephant in the room that no one wanted to discuss. I heard them referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain fruit company.” Their glowing logo illuminated nearly every laptop in the room, and yet it seemed like nobody dared speak their name. " Why wouldn't people just say "Apple?" Is this hyperbole or is there some reason why people are afraid to directly criticize apple at a conference that apple isn't even at?
- michaelwww 11y ago
  Happy thousand day anniversary on HN! (I accidentally clicked your name.) The author is exaggerating, like he did with the title. IE was until recently a big drag on web dev, but Safari is not. Speaking about Apple in hushed tones seems like a joke by the author, because it seems to me that some devs who use Apple products really over-rate Apple's importance. I don't use Apple products and don't feel I am missing anything. Most important innovations in web dev are in the much bigger eco-system outside of Apple. My only concern is that Apple is onboard with WebAssembly, because it would be unfortunate if they did not implement that, but as the author said, WebKit is open source and someone will do it.
  - nolanl 11y ago
    Nope, people literally did say things like "a certain company in California." But yeah, I'm exaggerating a bit, because the name "Apple" did come up occasionally. The problem is that when everybody wants to discuss the hot new browser features, mentioning Apple is just a big downer. We all know we're going to have to polyfill at best, or just not support Safari at worst. Nobody wants to be reminded of that sad fact when you're trying to get excited about the potential of the web platform.
advanderveer 11y ago
Here is an unpopular opinion: Maybe we should chill down on the constant innovation of "the web". I think we are at the point that we need some stablity, such that technologies (and companies!) build on top of it get some time to focus on maintainability, safety and usability instead of having to constantly spend time playing catch up.
- smhg 11y ago
  I wouldn't say it is an unpopular opinion. I can imagine most have had a similar thought at one point or the other about some technology. But what looks like constant innovation to one, is probably a long awaited feature to someone else. Don't feel like you have to catch up. You don't have to (and probably can't) follow every single innovation. Rather try to limit what you follow. Yes, you might miss out on things, but that's happening anyway.
- isaacremuant 11y ago
  It's not unpopular but unrealistic. It's like asking scientists to "improve, standarize and organize" what exists instead of seeking new knowledge and making more experiments that confuse everyone even further. You can't force companies to stop innovating. Specially when history shows that, the best innovations survive in a sort of tech-evolutionary process.
pjc50 11y ago
The difference between IE and (iOS) Safari is that Microsoft got fined for bundling IE ( http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/microsoft-vs-doj/ie/DOJSuesMS.html http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/micros... ) while Apple get away with not only bundling a browser but banning competing implementations on their platform.
- josephlord 11y ago
  At the time Windows had more than 95% (pulling percentage out of thin air but I think it is realistic) of the desktop operating system market. Apple is less than half of the mobile market. This doesn't mean I agree with the limitations but it is certainly legally relevant to whether they are "get away" with doing it.
  - smitherfield 11y ago
    >99%, actually. (98-99% including both desktops and servers/mainframes).
lostgame 11y ago
Uh... Comparing a webkit-based browser of any kind to the agony of supporting something like IE6 back in the day is like comparing a paper cut to a stab wound. Nice clickbait title, though, got you to #1, aren't you proud. :P
tsax 11y ago
More 'X is the new Y.' Wonderful!
framp 11y ago
Today news: browsers sucks. The real thing I'm worried about is that no one is working on an open app ecosystem. The only thing we have are browsers - which are horribly inefficient and have huge discrepancies with one another. We're so terribly behind. Really, Safari's problems are just a symptom. The real problem is browser existence.
outsidetheparty 11y ago
>I heard them referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain fruit company.” Oh, come on. Nobody does this. Why would anybody do this? Hyperbole for effect is all well and good -- and the clickbait title makes it quite clear that that's what we're wading into here -- but this borders on self-parody, like saying MICRO$OFT or chanting "don't be evil!" or "WWSJD" it makes you look like a partisan rather than someone with a valid point to make. Safari does lack IndexedDB, and their 'powersaver plugin' thing has caused me headaches. Firefox is the most likely to go unresponsive under CPU load, IME, and a nasty growing habit of pushing new monetization strategies into their toolbar. Chrome has poor performance, broken video event handling, and is the one that seems most likely to break my app every time they push an update. IE8-11 have various issues with animation and SVG, and most irritatingly there are four versions of it still in active use, each with their own quirks. Edge is, I'll guiltily admit, not really on my radar yet, but I'm sure it'll have its advantages and disadvantages as well. None of them are the new IE. Even IE isn't the new IE. There's never going to be another IE6 for the web -- we've all, developers and customers alike, learned the lesson about proprietary extensions and platform lock-in.
venomsnake 11y ago
People cannot opt out of mobile safari - so in a way it is order of magnitude worse than even IE at its peak shittiness.
hiou 11y ago
> As recently as 2010, back when Steve Jobs famously skewered Flash while declaring that HTML5 is the future, Apple was a fierce web partisan. Web partisan or just trying to eliminate the biggest cross platform competition to native applications at that time? (flash)
digital-rubber 11y ago
Nolan, LOL WORDPRESS.
tempodox 11y ago
It would be easy to interpret Apple's behavior as a declaration of war on the browser. They want to force everyone into their brave new native app ecosystem where it costs you three tithes (30%) of your revenue. They certainly don't want to give you any encouragement to circumvent that via browser. And web apps become ever more attractive in the appleverse: You stay in control, not Apple, and you get the revenue, not Apple. It's quite clear why Apple doesn't want that.
thanatropism 11y ago
"X is the new Y" considered harmful.
ebbv 11y ago
Failing to support newly proposed APIs != making your own non-standard implementations of things and refusing to care about compatibility.
hardwaresofton 11y ago
This might be crazy, but... Maybe Apple is working on a new browser? Maybe that's why they're not working on Safari any more?
likeclockwork 11y ago
Well.. that's certainly one way to make sure developers own an Apple computer and an iOS device. As long as one browser sticks out like a sore thumb you have to make a conscious decision to either pay attention to it and its ecosystem or ignore it.
joesmo 11y ago
I think the title is right, but mainly because of the multitude of Safari bugs and its incredibly slow performance. This is for Safari of OS X: assuming it doesn't crash on startup (so for me, about two out of three computers these days, up from one out of three), Safari is a piss poor browser even when it manages to run. I have a lot of code that runs incredibly slow on Safari yet has no problems in other browsers. Sometimes it drops connections randomly. Sometimes pages just crash. Sometimes it just won't render anything. The exact same code works fine in Chrome, FF, etc. and is pretty typical angular code. In other words, it's cross-browser code. Luckily, I don't think we have many Safari customers and at this point, if things don't work in Safari, the bugs I find are filed with the lowest precedence (ie: they will never get fixed) and that only because we have a person on our team who insists on using this broken browser. The lack of support for the APIs mentioned in the article only serves to drive the point home for me. The developer tools are also substandard compared to either Chrome or FF. IE at least had market share. There is nothing that makes developing for Safari (OS X) worth the time spent.
Grue3 11y ago
Except Safari's market share is not anywhere near IE's. How many times have you seen a website that works only in Safari? I never did. However I've seen "only works in Chrome" many times. So if anything, Google Chrome is the new IE.
nosideeffects 11y ago
Harvey Lubin, why did you have to be THAT Apple fanboy and ruin the constructiveness of any comments on this blog post?
usaphp 11y ago
What is happening with safari swipe to go back functionality, every time I swipe back it shows me a cached version of a page and then reloads it making it unusable and irrational, what is the point of showing a cached version for split of a second if you are going to reload it again ( happens on both iOS and OS X , Adblock is not installed)
frik 11y ago
You forgot the "6" in IE6. Beside that IE11 is the new IE6 - it's there to stay for a long time, Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise will come with IE11 and Edge!
fixermark 11y ago
From the article: "Although performance has been improving significantly with JSCore and the new WKWebView..." Hypothesis: new features tend to be a distraction from optimization work. If Safari is focused on optimization work, maybe the team is making the conscious decision to get what's implemented right before expanding the scope.
spullara 11y ago
If Firefox and Chrome would render websites as nicely as Safari and integrate with the keychain I would switch (on Mac). As it stands though, neither of the alternatives are as pleasant and as well integrated with the rest of the operating system. Unlike with IE, they could be.
mikhailt 11y ago
I have to agree with the author based on the experience of developing an extension for it. Safari is sadly way behind Firefox and Chrome in supporting latest features. This has not changed since Safari 5/6 in Lion. I think the author is saying Safari is new IE in terms that you need to start adding features to your sites (and extensions) that Safari won't support and blame Apple for not catching up, like Microsoft did at the time with IE. Even Microsoft is planning to duplicate Chrome's extension APIs for Edge.
grumblestumble 11y ago
Absolutely agree with this article. Safari is fast becoming the bane of my existence, to the point where we're considering migrating our entire app to Electron just to lock down compatibility issues. Something the article doesn't touch on is that the maximum version of Safari is locked to the OS version, and on desktop, many A/V professionals have serious PTSD when it comes to upgrading OS X. We have many customers using our app who won't upgrade from Mountain Lion, so supporting Safari cripples what we can do - even flexbox isn't an option.
ytdht 11y ago
that reminds me of this CSS file I once saw on microsoft.com: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/49/119928279_59247e2095.jpg http://farm1.staticflickr.com/49/119928279_59247e2095.jpg
amelius 11y ago
This is why I want the following html to work in every browser: <meta name="render-engine" content="chrome/webkit" />
yellowapple 11y ago
This article leaves out the rather obvious Option #4: ignore Safari and develop to modern standards. Put up warnings about how Safari is broken like we all did when we decided enough was enough with IE, and that - if a user wants one's sites to not be broken - one should use something that isn't Safari (and, in the case of iOS, something that isn't iOS). The more developers who get on board with the "fuck you, Apple; if you want our sites to work for our users, then you need to fix your shit", the more pressure there will be from users for Apple to either fix Safari themselves or allow the installation of real alternative browsers on iOS, and thus the sooner either of those things will happen (or Apple slips closer to its pre-iPod days of borderline-obscurity).
smitherfield 11y ago
As IE11 is going to be the last version prior to Edge with backwards-compatibility with IE-only features, IE11 is going to be the new IE well into the 2020s, even if Safari never receives another update.
scelerat 11y ago
Incredibly hyperbolic, considering the not-uncommon x2.5 cost for developing for both IE and Netscape, pre-IE7 or so. Not even in the same ballpark. But I get it, Safari is lagging on a lot of things, and it's frustrating.
booleanbetrayal 11y ago
perfect example of why safari is the new IE ... they BREAK core Javascript functionality and then let those breakages linger for months and months. example - https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/9128#issuecomment-108210732 https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/9128#issuecomme...
emehrkay 11y ago
I use safari as my main browser, but yesterday I had to add -webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0); So that a relative positioned element would have a higher z-index than a fixed position one. Jesus.
harel 11y ago
Why support it then? As long as people polyfill for safari or hack something to work, you just prolong its life and give Apple the motivation to continue the neglect. The same happened with IE6 - people complained and bitched but supported it, so the users had no reason to change. Until at some point it became more expensive to support IE than it was to lose the users (which of course, then upgraded).
lambdasquirrel 11y ago
Okay, I'm getting on this a little late, but this is where I have to say, Hacker News, you are full of shit. Every time someone comes up with an anti-Apple title, it gets several hundred points. I'm seeing 600+ right now. And the evidence does not corroborate the claim. In the beginning of the article, the author points out this set of techs as stuff that Apple does not support: {Service Worker, Web Components, Shadow DOM, Web Manifests}. Well, you can go to caniuse.com, and see that for all of those (except Web Manifests, which doesn't show up), they are only well-supported by Chrome and Opera. Firefox usually has it disabled by default, and it's noticeably absent from IE. I think the real issue here is something we might all find a little uncomfortable, and it's that the web isn't as important as it used to be, and Google is the only company really pushing it as a platform. Certainly, Microsoft may be repentant, but Microsoft either doesn't care to catch up, or they think it's not going to help them even the ground against Apple. And that doesn't deserve the title or the comments we're seeing here.
- demarq 11y ago
  > web isn't as important as it used to be How on earth did you come to this conclusion?
  - aceperry 11y ago
    I think fanbois just make up stuff to support their argument. Doesn't have anything to do with reality.
- azakai 11y ago
  I think you are wrong that the web matters less, and also wrong that only Google is pushing it. First, you forgot IndexedDB, another example from the article, which disproves your point. Other examples include fullscreen and WebAssembly. Web Components/Shadow DOM and Service Workers happen to be two technologies that Google is pushing. There are of course plenty of examples where Google is behind: Nested Workers, asm.js, ES6, etc. etc. It might be true that the web matters less to Apple than it used to, and that isn't very surprising - Apple's native apps on iOS are massively successful, and it makes sense for Apple to focus more on that. And that does mean the web matters less on mobile, since Apple is huge there, but the web is still just as important as it always was on desktop.
rubyn00bie 11y ago
I generally disagree with the article, but I was also making web apps ten years ago. Trying to write them for IE, Firefox, and Safari.... It was hell. IE was the centerpiece of it because it was the dominant browser by market share. Now-a-days, I think Chrome was the new IE or rather causing the same type of problems IE created. Why? Developers don't test other browsers by and large. They are choosing to support Chrome, and implement non-standard APIs, because they see it is the browser they use. IE got us into trouble because of its market position, and because it fixed a lot of broken code (so when someone went to use another browser they though the other browser was broken NOT IE). Developers made apps which worked only for IE and not other browsers; most of the time by accident (as their app WAS broken) but still... Now with Chrome, I see this happening again. Websites/web-apps are needlessly broken in Firefox because the devs simply didn't even try it. Maybe, I'm wrong, I fucking hope I'm wrong, but it feels like the shit winds are getting ready to pick up again...
- jordanthoms 11y ago
  The big difference is that both Chrome and Firefox update very regularly, and a high percentage of users keep at least reasonably up to date - the biggest issue was really that IE had massive market share and was also not updated. We use a lot of chrome-specific APIs, and they allow us to achieve things that otherwise we couldn't (e.g OCR running in the browser through Native Client with no performance penalty vs a native binary). We're often implementing improvements with APIs that are a few weeks or months old. We do test on other browsers though and make sure things either degrade cleanly or we provide an alternative implementation.
addicted44 11y ago
I would have hoped that as web devs we would have learned our lessons from the IE6 fiasco. The only browser web devs should be supporting and evangelizing is Firefox. Admittedly Firefox isn't always the best browser, but it has always been good enough, and if the people spending time, money and effort improving WebKit or Blink spent that effort on Gecko and Firefox instead, it would be a better than it is now. Personally, Firefox has become my only browser on every platform but iOS and it isn't even for ideological reasons but simply when combined with extensions it is the best browser around. Once it (finally!) incorporates isolated processes for tabs, it's gonna be head and shoulders above its competition IMO.

753 points by nolanl 11y ago

Safari is worse than IE, however. You could install an alternative. Even if they weren't, I fully agree with progressive enhancement. It is always going to provide the right incentives for everyone. Only the features most used (by end-users) will become browser vendors' utmost priority.

Doctor_Fegg 11y ago
You can of course install an alternative to desktop Safari, just not to Mobile Safari.
- sigzero 11y ago
  So I should delete my Google Chrome app then? Granted it doesn't take the default for things but I can still use it.
  - supster 11y ago
    Google Chrome app on iPhones still use mobile safari's rendering engine lol
  - spaar 11y ago
    The iOS version of Chrome doesn't use Chrome's rendering and JavaScript engines though, per the App Store rules it has to use WebKit [0]. So, any other browser app on iOS would have the same problems as mobile Safari. [0] http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-ios http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-ios (linked by the article btw)
    - jegutman 11y ago
      Yea, I just really like that I can access all of my open tabs with it. It also context switches better with iOS outlook if you click on links you can quickly go back to outlook.
    - smrtinsert 11y ago
      That's amazing. Thanks for reminding me how much contempt they have for choice.
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        Not quite my area of expertise, but I believe that browsers on Android also tend to use the core Android browser components though they can dress them up slightly differently.
        lorenzhs 11y ago
        They can, but they don't have to. Mozilla ships a Gecko engine in Firefox for Android.
        Someone1234 11y ago
        Browsers on Android are not required to use Android's built in WebViews. And several alternative browser engines are offered by the platform[0]. Android has no specific restrictions in place. Although it is the path of least resistance to use the built in WebView, since you now don't need to deploy your own. [0] Including: Blink (Amazon Silk, Chrome, Opera), WebKit (BlackBerry, Dolphin, et al), Gecko (Firefox, Minimo), NetFront (Blazer). At the moment WebKit derivatives seem to be most popular, but several browsers re-build it from the source rather than just using Android's WebKit components.
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        Thanks, as I said, NMAOE and I was mostly reflecting observations based on some dated Android builds.
        glogla 11y ago
        Some browsers do, but Firefox Mobile uses it's own core. That makes it possible to use extensions like ublock, for much better browsing experience than any browser without ad blocker can provide.
        sangnoir 11y ago
    - benburton 11y ago
      Sounds like United States v. Microsoft Corp.[1] all over again. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
  - tbassetto 11y ago
    On iOS, all 3rd-party browsers (and even the upcoming Firefox for iOS) are using the rendering engine of Safari. The complaint is not about Safari the browser but more about its rendering engine.
- emsy 11y ago
  By the numbers, mobile is the one that matters.
justwannasing 11y ago
It's not. At least not according to caniuse.com, html5test.com or css3test.com.

sergimansilla 11y ago

Agreed. However, it still has the best perceived performance. Just open a page with a heavy layout and scroll up and down, or type an address or search term in the location bar and "feel" how fast it loads. Apple really put some effort in making it "feel" extremely fast.

krisdol 11y ago
I agree except for the back button. I hate how swiping to go back takes you back to a screenshot temporarily while the page reloads. I attempt to scroll up and down and interact with the screenshot until suddenly the page isn't how I remember it due to the reload. It's such a terrible, terrible design and I check every new version in hopes that this would be addressed.
- jshelly 11y ago
  I'm fine with Safari, but the page refresh on back annoys me to no end
  - janinge 11y ago
    I really like this feature. A page redraw generally takes less time than the time needed for my eyes and brain to re-parse the page. When I have to stare at a blank page for a varying amount of time after having decided to go back, the entire navigation process feels very sluggish and slow. Using other browsers I find myself opening a lot more temporary tabs to account for this. Swipe and hold is also nice when you just need to go back to reread a few sentences, etc. Most pages shouldn't need a refresh when you go back after a few seconds or minutes. What annoys me are websites that set stupid expiry times or Cache-Control values.
- vincentriemer 11y ago
  in 10.11 it seems like this is fixed and the page won't always need to reload.
dailyrorschach 11y ago
I use Safari daily as my primary browser on desktop. I don't doubt it presents challenges for developers, and hope they update faster. But, not only is it fast on OS X, the battery life optimization is amazing. I run Safari without Flash installed, and only need to pop over to Chrome once and a while. I've come to understand Chrome is making more power consumption adjustments in it's OS X version, and look forward to seeing if it can compare, but I'd also like to see memory usage addressed. But for me, Safari loads everything I need, save for the odd video that is only available in flash, which now happens very rarely. And for me being able to use the web browser for hours and hours each day without a similar hit from Chrome to both power and memory is worth it for me.

eloisant 11y ago

Is he talking about the iOS version? Because I don't think the desktop version's market share is big enough for developers to really care about it (unlike IE).

superiortoyou 11y ago

If Safari became a little too good, people might stop buying or developing apps.

criswell 11y ago
Absolutely agreed. They want the web to lose.
- jenscow 11y ago
  Hence it being the new IE.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  Absolutely disagree. Apple wants to make the best experience for users because then they'll keep buying Apple products. If users want the web, then they make the browser better. If Apps are more appropriate, then they make apps better. Apple prioritizes stuff users care about -- battery life > IndexedDB, accessibility > WebGL. Until you understand this and stop thinking like a conspiracy theorist, you won't understand Apple and will keep confusing your priorities with user priorities. Again: pleasing users -> profit. Making web lose -> ??? This isn't "embrace and extend" -- Microsoft added huge swathes of proprietary functionality to IE and tended (and tends) to prioritize developer and corporate IT desires over users. Insofar as Apple extends the browser, they do it through standards and proposed standards and (mostly) open source the implementations.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    Apple wants to make the best experience for users while maintaining vendor lock-in. iOS users invest hundreds of dollars in apps and games and enjoy exclusive products. This creates a very significant barrier to switch to another mobile platform. Quite obviously increased switching costs for users are important for iOS to maintain leadership in platform wars. Therefore, rapid advancement of web apps user experience to the level of native apps in some categories would be detrimental to Apple's competitive positions. Making web lose -> stronger competitive advantage.

gwbas1c 11y ago

The article misses the point. The browser is a document viewer, not an application delivery platform. Back in 2005 we all thought that web-based applications were going to take the world by storm, but now that we have slick application stores on all major platforms, this isn’t the case. If you need functionality like you describe, ship a native application via an app store. It’s a much better experience than web development.

Loque 11y ago
I think there is a lot more in this than you make out. Unless you really need specific hardware access that cannot be achieved in the browser alone, creating a mobile app is an unnecessary, very complicated set of hoops, to jump through, for each platform, as well as then making a desktop app/website. A side comment would be that you can make your webapp perform remarkably well on mobile, with things like HW accelerated transitions, local storage, etc...
swsieber 11y ago
The browser has been and is a document viewer, but it's also becoming a application delivery platform and has been for quite some time. App delivery can be cross platform easily if Apple steps up their game.
wodenokoto 11y ago
I don't fully agree. Apps like gmail and google maps are often preferred to their native alternatives on desktop. I have pretty much ditched native office suites in favor of google drive as well on my desktop system. And things like Facebook hasn't even considered native desktop implementations. So it is safe to say that the web is a great app delivery platform (at least on the desktop) and as such, I think it is completely reasonable to improve upon it and extend this benefit to mobile.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Have to parse that carefully. The web is a great delivery platform. But the apps ... not so much. They can be laggy, unresponsive, render poorly, double-process user events, and on and on. The apps are not great. In fact, only their mother could love them.

kijin 11y ago

As a primarily web-based advertising company, Google benefits immensely from a more feature-packed web. So does Mozilla, both because they depend on ad revenue and because they are betting very heavily on the web as a platform. Even Microsoft is heavily invested in web technologies, not only because of Bing but also because HTML5 forms the backbone of Modern (Metro) UI. Apple, on the other hand, has no reason to want the web to flourish. They make money by selling hardware, and by managing a closed ecosystem of apps and services that revolve around said hardware. iAd focuses exclusively on apps, not webpages. Cross-platform web technologies that try to close the gap between web apps and native apps are a threat to Apple's bottom line. The more people abandon the web in favor of native apps, the more money Apple makes. At least in the days of IE6, Microsoft didn't really care about the web. Apple nowadays, on the other hand, has every incentive to sabotage the web. I don't think it's just technological purism that makes them reluctant to allow alternate rendering engines to work on iOS. They need to ensure that apps are the only way for developers to bring advanced features to iOS users. Because they're not competing on the web like the others. They're competing against the web.

JohnBooty 11y ago
Apple, on the other hand, has no reason to want the web to flourish. They make money by selling hardware, and by managing a closed ecosystem of apps and services that revolve around said hardware. You have the key thing correct: Apple makes money on hardware. So it doesn't follow that they would want to stamp out or ignore the web. The web is a huge part of what customers use Macs and iOS devices for, and Apple makes the same amount of money on a piece of hardware whether you use it to browse the web or use the $0.00 Facebook app. There's no denying that Apple wants you to buy into their ecosystem of apps: it helps bind you to their devices. But there's no incentive for them to extinguish the web. At least in the days of IE6, Microsoft didn't really care about the web. No. The web was directly opposite to Microsoft's goals. Microsoft made money on operating systems and applications. If the web "won" then you wouldn't need a Microsoft OS any more, and Microsoft would "lose."
kalleboo 11y ago
If Apple really wanted to make Web Apps feel like a second class citizen, they wouldn't be adding Force Touch, custom AirPlay control support and Picture In Picture support to the upcoming version of Safari. Those are deep, native app level features that aren't even Web standards yet. I assume Apple is underinvesting in safari simply because they have bigger fish to fry, and they are notoriously understaffed with competent engineers (or have bad project management).

benjamindc 11y ago

Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). You might disagree with Apple's priorities, but it doesn't mean other browsers are "better" per se, they're just different. Safari's release cycle, however, is stupid per se.

Tloewald 11y ago
Exactly. Apple adds features based on what users seem to need, not what programmers want (Google) or programmers want to work on (Mozilla). It should also be noted that Safari's accessibility support is head and shoulders above anything (including IE with dedicated third-party extensions -- our blind accessibility guy who has access to every accessible technology under the sun simply uses Apple devices at home). Wake me up when IE is open source, Google gives flying f* about accessibility, and Firefox is better than a distant second.
yAnonymous 11y ago
As stated in the article, often Safari's implementation just sucks.
Touche 11y ago
> Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). So then let's name these things, specifically, if you really believe that. I'm not aware of any new specs related to animations in the last couple of years. Can you name them?
- yoklov 11y ago
  I'm not really well informed here, but I'd guess that he means how the animations, visual effects, Ui, etc. actually look and behave, rather than new specs. One thing I've noticed several times is that in chrome, many CSS animations aren't animated across sub-pixel boundaries. I don't know necessarily that safari does this (again, I'm not well informed here -- for all I know this has been fixed in Chrome), but if they did, that would count in my book, despite not being a new spec. (Honestly, my suspicion is that they aren't though, since a high dpi screen removes most of the need for sub-pixel accuracy).

bickfordb 11y ago

The definition of a web browser is enormous now. Even though Apple has massive resources, is it really fair to rant against them for not implementing every possible specification, five years old or not? If web assembly is supposedly as fast as C, why can't we have web browsers with a smaller built-in feature set and implement new specifications as libraries?

realityking 11y ago
While web assembly may give us performance, it doesn't give us access to new platform API. Web assembly can in no way replace Service Worker, IndexedDB or Web Manifests. It also won't help with Web Components unless you're aming for a Web where we just draw on a big canvas.
- verbin217 11y ago
  I want a web where we just draw on a big canvas. That's a pretty simple API for implementers to get right. Then we could move the scene graph (DOM) and it's rendering engine entirely into the application language where it could be more readily hot-fixed. It'd be like PDFJS but for your whole fucking web browser.
  - notduncansmith 11y ago
    Have you looked into the Famo.us project? It's not my cup of tea in terms of implementation, but it sounds like exactly what you're looking for. Alternatively, what's keeping you from just using <canvas>?
  - bzbarsky 11y ago
    Note that PDFJS still creates a DOM, in order to support little things like selection, accessibility, etc.
ripter 11y ago
That was the idea behind ActiveX. Instead of continuing development on the browser, people could just write an ActiveX component. Or A Java Applet.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tzakrajs 11y ago

Firefox renders pages terribly and is the real dud here. edit: not speed, but aesthetic quality and parity with Chrome/Safari

tzakrajs 11y ago
Evidence is anecdotal and based on browser compatibility bugs reported to me on web apps I develop. Chrome and Safari are best in class in this regard. Firefox has gross UI elements that remind me of the 90s.
Cshelton 11y ago
Do you have a very outdated version of FF? Firefox is actually starting to beat Chrome on many benchmarks once again.
- coldtea 11y ago
  He's talking about rendering (quality) not speed.
zecg 11y ago
Mobile Firefox, however, is the only way to have a competent ad blocker on mobile: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
- zimpenfish 11y ago
  Although Mobile Safari will no doubt get a deluge once iOS 9 is released. cf. http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/6/24/an-hour-with-safari-content-blocker-in-ios-9 http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/6/24/an-hour-with-safari-cont...

Cshelton 11y ago

As a user, I love Safari. The hand off between my macbook and iphone is amazing, it feels smoother than other browsers. As a developer, I would say they are just doing a few things differently. I think the web API and DOM/css should have a standard set that every browser has to implement in the same way. It's actually way way better than it used to be. However, I'm fine with additional api features as targeting browsers is not not difficult and may open up some cool features. Like perhaps native notifications API on IOS Safari, that would be sweet! For the base Web API though, Safari has deviated on a few small things, but it's not really to the point where IE6 was. Also, people will upgrade Safari. Unlike IE6, where IT shops would not upgrade because of Active X applications, Safari will at least be upgraded. So I think it's unfair to compare it to the old IE. P.S., The new Windows Edge browser in Windows 10 is pretty amazing, it feels like Chrome. Very fast. And if you are not familiar with the Mozilla Servo project, it's worth checking out. It still has a long way to go, but down the line could be very interesting.

zecho 11y ago
Handoff actually works for you? You're one in a million.
- Cshelton 11y ago
  Yeah I've never had any issues with it. It also works when I'm using Chrome on my macbook. Like, a safari tab will show up on Chrome, it's pretty sweet.
dcarmo 11y ago
Handoff also works with Chrome - it only needs to be the default browser on your Mac.

jug 11y ago

It isn't as bad as what led to IE's state that took several years of active development by Microsoft to even begin correcting. The gap between IE 6 and IE 7 was terrible, and IE 6 wasn't even that much more than IE 5, standards-wise. Here's an overview of what's new in Safari (WebKit) as it ships with OS X El Capitan: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_11.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016227-DontLinkElementID_58 https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releaseno...

dspillett 11y ago
What people often forget is that there was a time when IE6 was actually better than the alternatives (on Windows anyway). Around the time it was released Navigator was the main competitor and that was getting progressively less stable and failed to keep up with the way the web was evolving. And by "evolving" I don't just mean new techniques/standards/whatever - simply the way the size of things was growing as people started to commonly have access to decent bandwidth. A key example I remember well is large nested tables (semantic markup was even less easy to get right cross-browser at that point) - Navigator would sometimes spin the CPU for a full minute to render a page that IE would throw out in seconds. This is the secondary reason IE gained share quickly (the primary one being bundling, of course). Then Netscpae fell over and it didn't have competition at all for a while so MS simply stopped trying (why work to improve when there is no competition and you can use the resources to work on something else?) so IE gained even more share on Windows (other OSs were not large enough in the desktop market to figure at that point, and mobile browsing was embryonic) without any effort from MS. It wasn't until Firefox got to the point of being enough better to attract a large share that the tables started turning and even then the change was slow. Opera was significant around the time too, but it not being free (or not free without adverts) was a sticking point that stopped it being widely adopted. That is a key problem that hopefully can't play out the same way these days though. No one browser, even mobile safari, is so commonly used that if it fails to keep up it can't start to be ignored, and away from iDevices we don't have the pure binary choice so if B doesn't keep up with A C and D probably will and B will be forced to (or it won't matter so much if B dies).
- 11y ago

exelius 11y ago

Disagree with this assessment. IE was so bad because Microsoft tried to go off and create its own standards that were incompatible with Mozilla / Firefox / etc. (I'm thinking of IE6 specifically). And this was big, core functionality like page layout and CSS; not some data structures that can be implemented in other ways (albeit with a performance hit). This was doubly bad because "enterprise" companies (SAP, SAS, Oracle, etc) built their original web interfaces against IE6; and those systems are so costly to upgrade that many companies still run IE6-compatible browsers. Chrome even has an option that can be pushed out via GPO to render certain pages using an IE6-compatible renderer. Safari is nowhere near that bad; I have yet to run across a page that works in Chrome that doesn't work in Safari. Safari, by comparison, is just behind the curve on some developer-centric features. But Safari also has some things going in its favor: in my experience, it's the fastest browser on OS X by a pretty wide margin. Chrome is so bloated and full of garbage at this point that when I have it open, I usually have at least one tab sitting at 100% CPU (and this is with FlashBlock enabled). Safari also manages to feel faster while using significantly less power -- I suspect Apple has done some optimizations through Grand Central on this front. Safari on mobile is a bit of a different story; yes it has problems, but I don't know that supporting a larger feature set is the answer.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
> Safari on mobile is a bit of a different story; yes it has problems that's a understatement., working on ios safari has been a travesty: it steals a good 20% of view area and 25% of clickable area, it makes a mess with pages trying to be responsive by misreporting the viewport area, it has loads of bugs with resizing and orientation change events and just dies if one script in any page becomes unresponsive
- exelius 11y ago
  Right, but the problems Safari has on mobile aren't going to be fixed by implementing IndexedDB; and honestly the WebSQL vs IndexedDB argument is irrelevant to most people: 95% of web developers will just use a framework that abstracts the differences. And I wouldn't claim that mobile Chrome is a whole lot better on this front, even (or especially) on Android. The limitations of mobile CPUs combined with higher user expectations on responsiveness mean you have to pull the plug on a runaway process a lot faster than on a PC, and neither Apple nor Google is immune to this.

NietTim 11y ago

Nolan, I'm not familiar with what you do or have done, but have you ever tried to make a website back in the day? Ever tried to support IE6? 7? 8? IE literally broke the web. CSS rules which worked in every browser ever wouldn't work in IE. Entire webpages weren't formatting correctly, having to spend hours, days, on workarounds. Comparing Safari to IE is just wrong. Safari doesn't break the web, it 'just' lacks support for some new javascript functions, not break standards/rules that had been there for tens of years. But I'm sure this title gets you more clicks.

rplnt 11y ago
In the same vain, Chrome does break web by introducing various custom features that can't be found in other browsers. See all those Google demos from past several years: "You need Chrome to view this" sounds very much like those "IE5+" warnings.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  > See all those Google demos from past several years: "You need Chrome to view this" sounds very much like those "IE5+" warnings. I'm in sympathy with the spirit of this post, but I'm not sure that I agree with this specific example. I think that there's a big difference between an 'everyday' web page requiring a specific browser, and the creator of a browser showing off what they see as its exceptional capabilities. However much designers (and users) like adherence to standards, I think that it's clear that a lot of the innovations we take for granted have come from browsers leading the way; and there's not much point in having those innovations in the browser if the user doesn't know about them. (I should be clear that I'm not advocating a functionality free-for-all, though; probably much more harm than good has come from this behaviour.)
- jfoster 11y ago
  Google are definitely breaking the web in lots of ways. They even have an audio limitation in Chrome on Android where they have added an explicit exception just for google.com: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178297#c59 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=178297#c... That said, there are some cases where things are Chrome-only simply because other vendors are far behind. (eg. speech recognition & synthesis)

mschuster91 11y ago

> Now, after one year, Apple has fixed a whopping two bugs in IndexedDB (out of several), and they’ve publicly stated that they don’t find much value in working on it, because they don’t see “a huge use.” Well duh, nobody’s going to use IndexedDB if the browser support is completely broken. (Microsoft, I’m looking at you too.) Well, the reason for this is clear: offline web apps are supported in iOS but without a reliable way to store larger amounts of data, web apps get pretty much useless and so people have to go through the Crapp Store. But, I have to defend Apple, IndexedDB is a ridiculous steaming pile of junk when compared to WebSQL. Writing a single-line SQL statement with multiple WHERE clauses and a couple ORDER BY, takes metric tons of boilerplate crap in addition to callback hell because the IndexedDB crap is async.

jackgavigan 11y ago

I recently ditched Chrome as my default desktop browser in favour of Safari because of its lower power consumption. Apple may well have made a conscious choice to eschew staying up to date with cutting-edge web technologies in favour of a better overall user experience for the majority of users. If so, it was a wise choice.

binarymax 11y ago

Hey Nolan, It was good to "meet" you at edgeconf (really we were just throwing the mic back and forth, and I couldnt make it to the afterparty). I really enjoyed your panel intro and insight. I agree with your assessment that IndexedDB is laughably bad in Safari, but maybe they haven't bothered because its really not such a great solution in general? I'm going to reassert that I think we could do much better - since IndexedDB is too low-level for what it is, but too specific for alternate solutions. I've been kicking around a blog post that I haven't got out yet - but we really need something more stream like and generic than a NoSQL index in the browser - especially something fundamental to address the future influx of WebAssembly apps. Cheers!

Touche 11y ago
> I agree with your assessment that IndexedDB is laughably bad in Safari, but maybe they haven't bothered because its really not such a great solution in general? So where's their alternative spec?
nolanl 11y ago
I still have a soft spot for WebSQL over IndexedDB - way easier to work with, incredibly powerful, brought the speed and reliability of SQLite. However, WebSQL only ever managed to have one implementation (Chrome and Safari shared WebKit at the time), and the other vendors besides Opera didn't want to touch it. So it's long since time to accept that it's dead. What bothered me most about the IndexedDB fiasco with iOS8 is that Apple not only held out for so many years, but then they deployed a broken implementation. Anybody who had written an app using an IndexedDB shim either had a crashed site at best or lost user data at worst. YDN-DB author Kyaw Tun had the best quote: "I don't understand how they can release this." Whether you like an API or not, a browser vendor should at least release it in good faith if they're going to release it.

biturd 11y ago

What if gmail or another large service implemented a reliance on these new features. Safari would be forced to add them in?

jccalhoun 11y ago

"There was one company not in attendance, though, and they served as the proverbial elephant in the room that no one wanted to discuss. I heard them referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain fruit company.” Their glowing logo illuminated nearly every laptop in the room, and yet it seemed like nobody dared speak their name. " Why wouldn't people just say "Apple?" Is this hyperbole or is there some reason why people are afraid to directly criticize apple at a conference that apple isn't even at?

michaelwww 11y ago
Happy thousand day anniversary on HN! (I accidentally clicked your name.) The author is exaggerating, like he did with the title. IE was until recently a big drag on web dev, but Safari is not. Speaking about Apple in hushed tones seems like a joke by the author, because it seems to me that some devs who use Apple products really over-rate Apple's importance. I don't use Apple products and don't feel I am missing anything. Most important innovations in web dev are in the much bigger eco-system outside of Apple. My only concern is that Apple is onboard with WebAssembly, because it would be unfortunate if they did not implement that, but as the author said, WebKit is open source and someone will do it.
- nolanl 11y ago
  Nope, people literally did say things like "a certain company in California." But yeah, I'm exaggerating a bit, because the name "Apple" did come up occasionally. The problem is that when everybody wants to discuss the hot new browser features, mentioning Apple is just a big downer. We all know we're going to have to polyfill at best, or just not support Safari at worst. Nobody wants to be reminded of that sad fact when you're trying to get excited about the potential of the web platform.

advanderveer 11y ago

Here is an unpopular opinion: Maybe we should chill down on the constant innovation of "the web". I think we are at the point that we need some stablity, such that technologies (and companies!) build on top of it get some time to focus on maintainability, safety and usability instead of having to constantly spend time playing catch up.

smhg 11y ago
I wouldn't say it is an unpopular opinion. I can imagine most have had a similar thought at one point or the other about some technology. But what looks like constant innovation to one, is probably a long awaited feature to someone else. Don't feel like you have to catch up. You don't have to (and probably can't) follow every single innovation. Rather try to limit what you follow. Yes, you might miss out on things, but that's happening anyway.
isaacremuant 11y ago
It's not unpopular but unrealistic. It's like asking scientists to "improve, standarize and organize" what exists instead of seeking new knowledge and making more experiments that confuse everyone even further. You can't force companies to stop innovating. Specially when history shows that, the best innovations survive in a sort of tech-evolutionary process.

pjc50 11y ago

The difference between IE and (iOS) Safari is that Microsoft got fined for bundling IE ( http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/microsoft-vs-doj/ie/DOJSuesMS.html http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/micros... ) while Apple get away with not only bundling a browser but banning competing implementations on their platform.

josephlord 11y ago
At the time Windows had more than 95% (pulling percentage out of thin air but I think it is realistic) of the desktop operating system market. Apple is less than half of the mobile market. This doesn't mean I agree with the limitations but it is certainly legally relevant to whether they are "get away" with doing it.
- smitherfield 11y ago
  >99%, actually. (98-99% including both desktops and servers/mainframes).

lostgame 11y ago

Uh... Comparing a webkit-based browser of any kind to the agony of supporting something like IE6 back in the day is like comparing a paper cut to a stab wound. Nice clickbait title, though, got you to #1, aren't you proud. :P

tsax 11y ago

More 'X is the new Y.' Wonderful!

framp 11y ago

Today news: browsers sucks. The real thing I'm worried about is that no one is working on an open app ecosystem. The only thing we have are browsers - which are horribly inefficient and have huge discrepancies with one another. We're so terribly behind. Really, Safari's problems are just a symptom. The real problem is browser existence.

outsidetheparty 11y ago

>I heard them referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain fruit company.” Oh, come on. Nobody does this. Why would anybody do this? Hyperbole for effect is all well and good -- and the clickbait title makes it quite clear that that's what we're wading into here -- but this borders on self-parody, like saying MICRO$OFT or chanting "don't be evil!" or "WWSJD" it makes you look like a partisan rather than someone with a valid point to make. Safari does lack IndexedDB, and their 'powersaver plugin' thing has caused me headaches. Firefox is the most likely to go unresponsive under CPU load, IME, and a nasty growing habit of pushing new monetization strategies into their toolbar. Chrome has poor performance, broken video event handling, and is the one that seems most likely to break my app every time they push an update. IE8-11 have various issues with animation and SVG, and most irritatingly there are four versions of it still in active use, each with their own quirks. Edge is, I'll guiltily admit, not really on my radar yet, but I'm sure it'll have its advantages and disadvantages as well. None of them are the new IE. Even IE isn't the new IE. There's never going to be another IE6 for the web -- we've all, developers and customers alike, learned the lesson about proprietary extensions and platform lock-in.

venomsnake 11y ago

People cannot opt out of mobile safari - so in a way it is order of magnitude worse than even IE at its peak shittiness.

hiou 11y ago

> As recently as 2010, back when Steve Jobs famously skewered Flash while declaring that HTML5 is the future, Apple was a fierce web partisan. Web partisan or just trying to eliminate the biggest cross platform competition to native applications at that time? (flash)

digital-rubber 11y ago

Nolan, LOL WORDPRESS.

tempodox 11y ago

It would be easy to interpret Apple's behavior as a declaration of war on the browser. They want to force everyone into their brave new native app ecosystem where it costs you three tithes (30%) of your revenue. They certainly don't want to give you any encouragement to circumvent that via browser. And web apps become ever more attractive in the appleverse: You stay in control, not Apple, and you get the revenue, not Apple. It's quite clear why Apple doesn't want that.

thanatropism 11y ago

"X is the new Y" considered harmful.

ebbv 11y ago

Failing to support newly proposed APIs != making your own non-standard implementations of things and refusing to care about compatibility.

hardwaresofton 11y ago

This might be crazy, but... Maybe Apple is working on a new browser? Maybe that's why they're not working on Safari any more?

likeclockwork 11y ago

Well.. that's certainly one way to make sure developers own an Apple computer and an iOS device. As long as one browser sticks out like a sore thumb you have to make a conscious decision to either pay attention to it and its ecosystem or ignore it.

joesmo 11y ago

I think the title is right, but mainly because of the multitude of Safari bugs and its incredibly slow performance. This is for Safari of OS X: assuming it doesn't crash on startup (so for me, about two out of three computers these days, up from one out of three), Safari is a piss poor browser even when it manages to run. I have a lot of code that runs incredibly slow on Safari yet has no problems in other browsers. Sometimes it drops connections randomly. Sometimes pages just crash. Sometimes it just won't render anything. The exact same code works fine in Chrome, FF, etc. and is pretty typical angular code. In other words, it's cross-browser code. Luckily, I don't think we have many Safari customers and at this point, if things don't work in Safari, the bugs I find are filed with the lowest precedence (ie: they will never get fixed) and that only because we have a person on our team who insists on using this broken browser. The lack of support for the APIs mentioned in the article only serves to drive the point home for me. The developer tools are also substandard compared to either Chrome or FF. IE at least had market share. There is nothing that makes developing for Safari (OS X) worth the time spent.

Grue3 11y ago

Except Safari's market share is not anywhere near IE's. How many times have you seen a website that works only in Safari? I never did. However I've seen "only works in Chrome" many times. So if anything, Google Chrome is the new IE.

nosideeffects 11y ago

Harvey Lubin, why did you have to be THAT Apple fanboy and ruin the constructiveness of any comments on this blog post?

usaphp 11y ago

What is happening with safari swipe to go back functionality, every time I swipe back it shows me a cached version of a page and then reloads it making it unusable and irrational, what is the point of showing a cached version for split of a second if you are going to reload it again ( happens on both iOS and OS X , Adblock is not installed)

frik 11y ago

You forgot the "6" in IE6. Beside that IE11 is the new IE6 - it's there to stay for a long time, Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise will come with IE11 and Edge!

fixermark 11y ago

From the article: "Although performance has been improving significantly with JSCore and the new WKWebView..." Hypothesis: new features tend to be a distraction from optimization work. If Safari is focused on optimization work, maybe the team is making the conscious decision to get what's implemented right before expanding the scope.

spullara 11y ago

If Firefox and Chrome would render websites as nicely as Safari and integrate with the keychain I would switch (on Mac). As it stands though, neither of the alternatives are as pleasant and as well integrated with the rest of the operating system. Unlike with IE, they could be.

mikhailt 11y ago

I have to agree with the author based on the experience of developing an extension for it. Safari is sadly way behind Firefox and Chrome in supporting latest features. This has not changed since Safari 5/6 in Lion. I think the author is saying Safari is new IE in terms that you need to start adding features to your sites (and extensions) that Safari won't support and blame Apple for not catching up, like Microsoft did at the time with IE. Even Microsoft is planning to duplicate Chrome's extension APIs for Edge.

grumblestumble 11y ago

Absolutely agree with this article. Safari is fast becoming the bane of my existence, to the point where we're considering migrating our entire app to Electron just to lock down compatibility issues. Something the article doesn't touch on is that the maximum version of Safari is locked to the OS version, and on desktop, many A/V professionals have serious PTSD when it comes to upgrading OS X. We have many customers using our app who won't upgrade from Mountain Lion, so supporting Safari cripples what we can do - even flexbox isn't an option.

ytdht 11y ago

that reminds me of this CSS file I once saw on microsoft.com: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/49/119928279_59247e2095.jpg http://farm1.staticflickr.com/49/119928279_59247e2095.jpg

amelius 11y ago

This is why I want the following html to work in every browser: <meta name="render-engine" content="chrome/webkit" />

yellowapple 11y ago

This article leaves out the rather obvious Option #4: ignore Safari and develop to modern standards. Put up warnings about how Safari is broken like we all did when we decided enough was enough with IE, and that - if a user wants one's sites to not be broken - one should use something that isn't Safari (and, in the case of iOS, something that isn't iOS). The more developers who get on board with the "fuck you, Apple; if you want our sites to work for our users, then you need to fix your shit", the more pressure there will be from users for Apple to either fix Safari themselves or allow the installation of real alternative browsers on iOS, and thus the sooner either of those things will happen (or Apple slips closer to its pre-iPod days of borderline-obscurity).

smitherfield 11y ago

As IE11 is going to be the last version prior to Edge with backwards-compatibility with IE-only features, IE11 is going to be the new IE well into the 2020s, even if Safari never receives another update.

scelerat 11y ago

Incredibly hyperbolic, considering the not-uncommon x2.5 cost for developing for both IE and Netscape, pre-IE7 or so. Not even in the same ballpark. But I get it, Safari is lagging on a lot of things, and it's frustrating.

booleanbetrayal 11y ago

perfect example of why safari is the new IE ... they BREAK core Javascript functionality and then let those breakages linger for months and months. example - https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/9128#issuecomment-108210732 https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/9128#issuecomme...

emehrkay 11y ago

I use safari as my main browser, but yesterday I had to add -webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0); So that a relative positioned element would have a higher z-index than a fixed position one. Jesus.

harel 11y ago

Why support it then? As long as people polyfill for safari or hack something to work, you just prolong its life and give Apple the motivation to continue the neglect. The same happened with IE6 - people complained and bitched but supported it, so the users had no reason to change. Until at some point it became more expensive to support IE than it was to lose the users (which of course, then upgraded).

lambdasquirrel 11y ago

Okay, I'm getting on this a little late, but this is where I have to say, Hacker News, you are full of shit. Every time someone comes up with an anti-Apple title, it gets several hundred points. I'm seeing 600+ right now. And the evidence does not corroborate the claim. In the beginning of the article, the author points out this set of techs as stuff that Apple does not support: {Service Worker, Web Components, Shadow DOM, Web Manifests}. Well, you can go to caniuse.com, and see that for all of those (except Web Manifests, which doesn't show up), they are only well-supported by Chrome and Opera. Firefox usually has it disabled by default, and it's noticeably absent from IE. I think the real issue here is something we might all find a little uncomfortable, and it's that the web isn't as important as it used to be, and Google is the only company really pushing it as a platform. Certainly, Microsoft may be repentant, but Microsoft either doesn't care to catch up, or they think it's not going to help them even the ground against Apple. And that doesn't deserve the title or the comments we're seeing here.

demarq 11y ago
> web isn't as important as it used to be How on earth did you come to this conclusion?
- aceperry 11y ago
  I think fanbois just make up stuff to support their argument. Doesn't have anything to do with reality.
azakai 11y ago
I think you are wrong that the web matters less, and also wrong that only Google is pushing it. First, you forgot IndexedDB, another example from the article, which disproves your point. Other examples include fullscreen and WebAssembly. Web Components/Shadow DOM and Service Workers happen to be two technologies that Google is pushing. There are of course plenty of examples where Google is behind: Nested Workers, asm.js, ES6, etc. etc. It might be true that the web matters less to Apple than it used to, and that isn't very surprising - Apple's native apps on iOS are massively successful, and it makes sense for Apple to focus more on that. And that does mean the web matters less on mobile, since Apple is huge there, but the web is still just as important as it always was on desktop.

rubyn00bie 11y ago

I generally disagree with the article, but I was also making web apps ten years ago. Trying to write them for IE, Firefox, and Safari.... It was hell. IE was the centerpiece of it because it was the dominant browser by market share. Now-a-days, I think Chrome was the new IE or rather causing the same type of problems IE created. Why? Developers don't test other browsers by and large. They are choosing to support Chrome, and implement non-standard APIs, because they see it is the browser they use. IE got us into trouble because of its market position, and because it fixed a lot of broken code (so when someone went to use another browser they though the other browser was broken NOT IE). Developers made apps which worked only for IE and not other browsers; most of the time by accident (as their app WAS broken) but still... Now with Chrome, I see this happening again. Websites/web-apps are needlessly broken in Firefox because the devs simply didn't even try it. Maybe, I'm wrong, I fucking hope I'm wrong, but it feels like the shit winds are getting ready to pick up again...

jordanthoms 11y ago
The big difference is that both Chrome and Firefox update very regularly, and a high percentage of users keep at least reasonably up to date - the biggest issue was really that IE had massive market share and was also not updated. We use a lot of chrome-specific APIs, and they allow us to achieve things that otherwise we couldn't (e.g OCR running in the browser through Native Client with no performance penalty vs a native binary). We're often implementing improvements with APIs that are a few weeks or months old. We do test on other browsers though and make sure things either degrade cleanly or we provide an alternative implementation.

addicted44 11y ago

I would have hoped that as web devs we would have learned our lessons from the IE6 fiasco. The only browser web devs should be supporting and evangelizing is Firefox. Admittedly Firefox isn't always the best browser, but it has always been good enough, and if the people spending time, money and effort improving WebKit or Blink spent that effort on Gecko and Firefox instead, it would be a better than it is now. Personally, Firefox has become my only browser on every platform but iOS and it isn't even for ideological reasons but simply when combined with extensions it is the best browser around. Once it (finally!) incorporates isolated processes for tabs, it's gonna be head and shoulders above its competition IMO.