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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

by 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)
  - cycomachead 11y ago
    Speech Recognition and Synthesis are in Safari -- though I don't know to the extent that it's as complete as Chrome. Safari definitely lagged behind though...
- dspillett 11y ago
  A lot of that is new features that are later implemented in competing browsers though, sometimes features that aren't even officially declared stable in Chrome yet. I'll happily allow "works best in X" for a tech demo. For a site/app I want to use for doing something, this is different of course.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  I have to support IE11 for corporate software, websites, etc. I'll used it as my main browser for a day or so to test things out and its just incredible how its become a 2nd class citizen and how you pretty much need Chrome or Safari nowadays to get by. I'm partial to Firefox and it works well enough, but designers only have so much time and they'll hit big targets first - Chrome/Sarafi and leave IE be with FF support just working because Gecko and Webkit render very, very alike. Things are pretty much the opposite they've been just a few years ago. Obviously, supporting standards are good and IE11 is better at standards than anything before, but there's still bad blood here. That said, I was just playing with Edge on Win10. Its like a pre-bundled Chrome. Fast, compliant, etc. It hilariously even breaks MS software, for example, I can't open the address book in Outlook Web Access because some deprecated html control that Chrome no longer supports. So if Chrome no longer supports, Edge doesn't either! I guess we'll see if extensions ever take off for it. If they do I could see it hurting Chrome's marketshare. Personally, the Chrome/Google juggernaut needs to be knocked down a peg or two. I hope Edge gets popular just to keep Google's sometimes anti-consumer ambitions in check. For example, using FF in Android means Play Store links don't work right and a million other things. Google isn't incentivized to make alternative browsers work well in Android. They want use to use Chrome and all of its spying/tracking/marketing stuff cooked in.
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    My pet peeve with Edge is that it still doesn't fully support IndexedDB and the developers have no ETA for when that will change. But it's still better than Safari's IndexedDB support, though, even though they've basically not touched it since IE10!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - smitherfield 11y ago
    Nothing personal, but people complaining about how "I have to support IE11" starts the world's smallest violin playing for me - I have to support IE8!
- Klathmon 11y ago
  It's one thing to be the first to implement standards, it's another to completely ignore them for years. The "Chrome Experiments" was a way to show off the WebGL capability in chrome that no other browsers had at the time. (Now those demos will mostly work in all browsers) Plus you are forgetting that those are experiments. They were never really meant to be actual "apps". Making an experiment/demo for one browser is fine IMO. Especially when only 1 or 2 browsers have implemented the standard currently. It's like webRTC. I made a "demo" webRTC app about a year ago, and it only worked in chrome OR firefox (but they couldn't talk to each other). That's not chrome or firefox breaking the web, that's the other browsers not being at the cutting edge, but i don't blame them. WebRTC was (and still is) VERY new, it wasn't even finalized and i was using the app as a bit of a tech demo to see what may be possible in the near future. The chrome experiments were the same way. WebGL wasn't fully finalized, it was one of the first implementations of it, and people wanted to try it out, so Chrome Experiments was born.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    WebRTC is not really new any more - a couple of years old (and existed in other forms long before), and still not widely adopted. In fact, not adopted in a single further browser in that time, and the original two are not compatible. I'm thinking, its almost time to consider WebRTC 'failure to achieve traction'?
    - Klathmon 11y ago
      I'm sure as hell not married to the idea of WebRTC, but i desperately want something like it. The ability to do peer-to-peer communication from the browser is an amazing tool. It allows the creation of client-side-only web apps which can easily send massive amounts of data to others. With WebRTC (or any other service like it) you can add video chat to a web app with very little work, and no real server side infrastructure that is more secure than the alternatives. If it needs to be re-done in the name of getting it implemented widely that's fine with me and i welcome it, but if it's just NIH syndrome at microsoft holding it back, that's not okay.
      - 11y ago
jfoster 11y ago
If it lacks very basic functionality, isn't the effect the same as breaking the web? I think one unfortunate aspect of the article is that it focuses on some of the less common deficiencies of Safari. I would have called out mobile Safari being unable to download files, or Apple's insistence against video codecs that all other vendors are aligned in agreement on when it comes to video.
- adamlett 11y ago
  > If it lacks very basic functionality, isn't the effect the same as breaking the web? No. If what worked before continues to work, it means it's not broken. Also: What "very basic functionality" doesn't the latest versions of Safari support?
  - magicalist 11y ago
    > No. If what worked before continues to work, it means it's not broken IE6 continues to work fine for what it supported originally as well.
  - jfoster 11y ago
    Well, I mentioned the two that I am most keenly aware of. I only know what I've come across, so I'm assuming there's lots more. To my knowledge, file downloads worked in all browsers prior to mobile Safari being initially released. So Apple did release a browser that broke some quite basic web functionality.
    - adamlett 11y ago
      I don't know how I missed that part of of your post. Sorry about that. Still. I find it quite a stretch to argue that not supporting file downloads "breaks" the web. Users don't perceive websites to be broken just because they can't download files. It would be akin to claiming that a device with no camera breaks the web by not supporting the camera API. Or that the Lynx browser breaks the web by not supporting CSS and JavaScript. Regarding Apple's insistence on not supporting Ogg (Vorbis|Theora) (I assume that's what you're alluding to), those codecs were briefly recommended by the HTML5 standard, but were later dropped.[1] Again, I think its a stretch to say that Apple broke anything, simply because they resisted a proposed standard. I know a lot of developers were disappointed, but that's how committees work: You don't always get it your way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Ogg_formats_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Ogg_formats_in_HTML5
streptomycin 11y ago
What rules that had been there for tens of years were broken by IE6? IE6 was the best browser available when it was released, and the web standards ecosystem was nothing like it is today. I think the analogy is very clear. If you want to code like it's 2000, supporting IE6 is easy, because IE6 is a very good 2000 browser. If you want to code like it's 2010, supporting Safari is easy, because Safari is a very good 2010 browser. But in both cases, if you want to use any new features that have been standardized and are supported by other browsers, you're fucked. The main difference I see is that IE6 didn't get any updates at all. Safari gets updates, but many new features are missing or broken. EDIT: Another difference is that MS never blocked you from installing a better browser, but Apple does that on iOS. That policy is becoming increasingly ridiculous...
- anonymousguy 11y ago
  Perhaps the biggest thing is that IE6 had a broken CSS box model.
  - smrtinsert 11y ago
    It's so easy to be cavalier about random popular facts. I would love for someone to go back and load up the alternative browsers available at the time on some vms and take stock of their featuresets. Factoring in popularity at the time I'm pretty sure not much would have changed.
  - strmpnk 11y ago
    Also ironic given that most people have adopted some of that "broken CSS box model" in their CSS. box-sizing: border-box; Now there were many other problems but I'm not sure people appreciate how such features eventually got standardized. Similar issues happened around DOM serialization with APIs like innerHTML, which Netscape refused to adopt because of "series of pointing at standards". Developers ended up adopting the idea and it was later standardized. XHR is another case. There are many more. In the case of Safari, I can think of canvas, touch (love or hate it vs pointer events it was before any of the alternatives), DPI independence, &c. It's some of these quirks that seems to show how newer web standards might be rushed through by increasingly aggressive vendor involvement. Apple hasn't changed all that much from when it first released Safari. It's only our expectations for the pace of new additions that has.
zamalek 11y ago
I had to do some work[1] with, basically, HTML4. Eventually I reached the stage whereby the feature worked in every other browser (IE8+, including Opera), using clean and completely hack-free code. In 3 days I had done my work. Then I tested it in Safari. Two weeks later I gave up and basically had to `if (Safari)`. I don't know if the code still has that, but it probably does. This wasn't anything 'lacking'. Sure, it was contenteditable-related but the fact remains that I found a consistent subset in every browser except Safari. So, yes, Safari broke my web - and it wasn't something that was missing, it was something that behaved very differently compared to other browsers. I can't remember what specifically broke it, but even ~2 years ago I had a significantly better development experience with IE than Safari with no new HTML5 features in sight. [1]: http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/k2smartforms/userguide/1.0.6/content/Picker%20Control.html http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/k2smartforms/userguide/1.0.6/c...
- ninkendo 11y ago
  If your target browser is IE8 and you write a bunch of html4 that looks great in IE8, I would expect it to not work anywhere else. Not only is IE8 a snowflake but html4 is particularly hard to get a good layout working. Lots of nontrivial layouts in pure html4 (and css 1/2) require tons of browser specific hacks.
  - swsieber 11y ago
    You missed his point. He mentioned IE8+ and Opera as working targets to highlight the fact Safari was being lame. He said every browser - that would include complaint ones like firefox and chrome. He also specifically said he avoided browser specific hacks.
    - ninkendo 11y ago
      Saying "I didn't use any browser-specific hacks" with HTML4 is a strange statement, seeing as how many non-trivial layouts in html4 (and I'm assuming the older CSS standards that would typically go along with it) require browser-specific hacks to work. But honestly, I can't know because he's not naming anything specific anyway, just an anecdote about how IE8 was great at being standards-compliant and safari wasn't. Which is such an extraordinary claim (and is so contrary to established precedent) that without any extraordinary evidence, I have a lot of trouble accepting it. (And it's amazing how many people think "I'm not doing any browser hacks" while they're using something like jQuery, which is a library 100% devoted to doing browser hacks for you while abstracting you from that fact.)
josefresco 11y ago
I built websites during that entire period. I saw the rise and fall of Netscape, the "dark ages" of browser development when Microsoft let IE rot - I witnessed the birth of Firefox and the re-ignition of the "browser wars" when Google launched Chrome, and Apple got serious with Safari by moving to WebKit. The author is right, the details aren't the same but the same attitude exists. The author is simply speaking up before the differences become extreme. Microsoft didn't "break the web" they created their own web and then let it twist in the wind because they were pissed about the government beat down. Apple didn't get their hand slapped, but they did build something so lucrative that evolving Safari became a smaller priority, which some would argue aligns well with their push to the App/closed ecosystem model.
- Someone 11y ago
  "the re-ignition of the "browser wars" when Google launched Chrome, and Apple got serious with Safari by moving to WebKit" Moving to WebKit? Only if you count CyberDog, I guess. Safari was always WebKit based. Also, your phrasing could be read as if Chrome came before Safari, but Safari is from 2003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history), Chrome from 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_release_history).
  - philwelch 11y ago
    Not only was Safari always WebKit based, WebKit is Apple's browser engine (forked from KHTML and open sourced) that Chrome used to use until they forked it.
    - andrewvc 11y ago
      And WebKit was actually forked from KHTML which was KDE's engine.
    - riquito 11y ago
      And it's a fork of the KHTML engine used by the Konqueror web browser for the KDE project
hullo 11y ago
Nevermind clicks, got to get Twitter follower counts into the thousands!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mhomde 11y ago
Yes, but before that IE fixed the web! :) Remember CSS on Netscape? IE4 was actually a beacon back in its day. Everything is cyclical: Lean - Average - Bloated - Lean - Average - Bloated
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  Are we currently in the bloated stage? - Chrome sucks up RAM like Photoshop. - Firefox Dev Edition is broken or slow every other build - IE is "ok"but their dev tools are incredibly sluggish and useless.
  - mhomde 11y ago
    Yah, although some more than others. Microsoft looks ironically (or perhaps fittingly) to be the first into the next lean cycle with Microsoft Edge. The browser game has changed and become commoditized. Before they went towards being monoliths with everything from email, to apps and games, various services etc. Those parts are being usurped by stand-alone services and apps and need to longer be integrated into the browser. I think that's good! Browsers should focus at being browsers. Better to be a 'la carte than bundle everything under the sun. Also, I think the vision of HTML as a "universal" app/game platform is slowly dying. We're coming to terms with HTML is really good for somewhat basic presentation and interfaces, but not much more than that. Although doing advanced stuff is possible it seems we're coming to the realization that it's neither practical nor performant
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    I think the Servo engine is going to anchor Mozilla's next transition to "lean".
    - rockdoe 11y ago
      Only in the sense that its missing all the features. People seem to forget when considering current browsers "bloated" that the bloat comes from the webpages containing all the cruft.
  - 11y ago
Pxtl 11y ago
Yeah, I was a big believer in "screw it we'll just use tables" back then. When CSS finally caught on it basically was the end of dynamic-width websites for a few years.
ryanmarsh 11y ago
Given that the author self identifies on his blog as a twenty-something I'm wondering if he's old enough to have ever really had to lift IE v. 4-7. IE was a vast pile of shit for about a decade. It was pile of shit so high that Microsoft took out ads saying in so many words that its latest version "doesnt suck, honest". I tore my hair out for years over IE bugs. Fucking kids these days. Mobile Safari might not be as magical as you would desire but it is not even in the same league as the virtual genocide/superfund/WMD that IE was. GET OFF MY LAWN
- jcoby 11y ago
  Oh the pain of having to use nested tables, various css parsing hacks, browser sniffing, two different box models, and changing significant-insignificant whitespace to support IE 5, 5.5, and 6. All with zero debugging tools.
krschultz 11y ago
And I'm sure using this tone gets you more upvotes, but it feels very ad hominem.
- wutbrodo 11y ago
  What? How is this ad hominen? Do you think that term just means "being harsh"?
  - krschultz 11y ago
    He's attacking the guy's experience and insinuating that the OP is being sensational to get upvotes.
    - wutbrodo 11y ago
      Ha whoops, on mobile it looked like you were responding to the OP article instead of a top-level commenter. Mea culpa. It's just something of a pet peeve that there are people who call 'ad hominem' at every insult.
      - krschultz 11y ago
        Reasonable. HN is the least mobile responsive website I continue to use.
joesmo 11y ago
Considering that Safari fails to start on a regular basis (amongst a ton of bugs and problems with it), I'd say that breaks the web a lot more than IE6.
nkron 11y ago
Nolan is one of the main contributors to PouchDB - http://pouchdb.com/ http://pouchdb.com/
nobleach 11y ago
While the title is a bit click-baity, I think the overall point is: Company sees the value in the internet. Company wants to "play too". Company builds good browser that is fast and feature filled. Company realizes that they can throw their weight around and have company specific features. Company starts to care less and less about accepted standards, and cares more about their pet standards. Company refuses to let other, more capable browsers run on their OS. Company thinks that because they're the biggest and richest, that everyone should get onboard with their choices. It'll last for awhile. Something else will come along and give users and developers a better option. Let's hope Apple doesn't screw around for as many years as MS did before creating a decent browser.
bradleyland 11y ago
Heh. This is the least bad thing about IE. The worst thing MS did with IE was implementing proprietary, and very aggressively protected, solutions to common problems. Developers, excited about the new features, rushed to support what they felt was the next generation of web technologies, only to get caught in Microsoft's trap. Once they held the marketshare majority, they stopped innovating. Safari is nowhere close to a majority player in the market (not even on mobile). Thus, it could never be considered equivalent to the evils of IE.
fapjacks 11y ago
Yeah there would definitely appear to be a generation of developers now on the scene that were doing something other than web development in the 2000s. 100% this. Web development was fucking hard ten years ago.
craigvn 11y ago
What your comment says to me is that you were not actually there back in the day. When IE6 was released it was the best, most compliant, fastest browser. That wasn't the problem. The problem is they then didn't update it for 5 years and people eventually wanted more which IE couldn't deliver, just like Chrome and Firefox really suck at HTML6 at the moment.
andrewstuart 11y ago
The point is that Safari is the browser that destroys the ability to universally use new standards. It is the odd one out that makes it hard for all the others.
andrewstuart 11y ago
The point is that Safari is the browser that destroys the ability to universally use new standards. It is the odd one out that makes it hard for all the others.
nolanl 11y ago
Yep, I have had to support IE7 and 8. IE6 was, thankfully, a bit before my time. And yeah, the title is pretty clickbaity; guilty as charged! But my blog has no ads, so it's not like I'm making money off of it. I'm just trying to draw attention to what I think is an important issue. As others have pointed out, it's all a matter of perspective. If you're trying to build for Web 2.0, then Safari is a fine browser. But if you're trying to build for Web 3.0 (or the "next web" or "appy web" or whatever you want to call it), then prepare to be disappointed.

by NietTim 11y ago

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)
- cycomachead 11y ago
  Speech Recognition and Synthesis are in Safari -- though I don't know to the extent that it's as complete as Chrome. Safari definitely lagged behind though...
dspillett 11y ago
A lot of that is new features that are later implemented in competing browsers though, sometimes features that aren't even officially declared stable in Chrome yet. I'll happily allow "works best in X" for a tech demo. For a site/app I want to use for doing something, this is different of course.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
I have to support IE11 for corporate software, websites, etc. I'll used it as my main browser for a day or so to test things out and its just incredible how its become a 2nd class citizen and how you pretty much need Chrome or Safari nowadays to get by. I'm partial to Firefox and it works well enough, but designers only have so much time and they'll hit big targets first - Chrome/Sarafi and leave IE be with FF support just working because Gecko and Webkit render very, very alike. Things are pretty much the opposite they've been just a few years ago. Obviously, supporting standards are good and IE11 is better at standards than anything before, but there's still bad blood here. That said, I was just playing with Edge on Win10. Its like a pre-bundled Chrome. Fast, compliant, etc. It hilariously even breaks MS software, for example, I can't open the address book in Outlook Web Access because some deprecated html control that Chrome no longer supports. So if Chrome no longer supports, Edge doesn't either! I guess we'll see if extensions ever take off for it. If they do I could see it hurting Chrome's marketshare. Personally, the Chrome/Google juggernaut needs to be knocked down a peg or two. I hope Edge gets popular just to keep Google's sometimes anti-consumer ambitions in check. For example, using FF in Android means Play Store links don't work right and a million other things. Google isn't incentivized to make alternative browsers work well in Android. They want use to use Chrome and all of its spying/tracking/marketing stuff cooked in.
- streptomycin 11y ago
  My pet peeve with Edge is that it still doesn't fully support IndexedDB and the developers have no ETA for when that will change. But it's still better than Safari's IndexedDB support, though, even though they've basically not touched it since IE10!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- smitherfield 11y ago
  Nothing personal, but people complaining about how "I have to support IE11" starts the world's smallest violin playing for me - I have to support IE8!
Klathmon 11y ago
It's one thing to be the first to implement standards, it's another to completely ignore them for years. The "Chrome Experiments" was a way to show off the WebGL capability in chrome that no other browsers had at the time. (Now those demos will mostly work in all browsers) Plus you are forgetting that those are experiments. They were never really meant to be actual "apps". Making an experiment/demo for one browser is fine IMO. Especially when only 1 or 2 browsers have implemented the standard currently. It's like webRTC. I made a "demo" webRTC app about a year ago, and it only worked in chrome OR firefox (but they couldn't talk to each other). That's not chrome or firefox breaking the web, that's the other browsers not being at the cutting edge, but i don't blame them. WebRTC was (and still is) VERY new, it wasn't even finalized and i was using the app as a bit of a tech demo to see what may be possible in the near future. The chrome experiments were the same way. WebGL wasn't fully finalized, it was one of the first implementations of it, and people wanted to try it out, so Chrome Experiments was born.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  WebRTC is not really new any more - a couple of years old (and existed in other forms long before), and still not widely adopted. In fact, not adopted in a single further browser in that time, and the original two are not compatible. I'm thinking, its almost time to consider WebRTC 'failure to achieve traction'?
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    I'm sure as hell not married to the idea of WebRTC, but i desperately want something like it. The ability to do peer-to-peer communication from the browser is an amazing tool. It allows the creation of client-side-only web apps which can easily send massive amounts of data to others. With WebRTC (or any other service like it) you can add video chat to a web app with very little work, and no real server side infrastructure that is more secure than the alternatives. If it needs to be re-done in the name of getting it implemented widely that's fine with me and i welcome it, but if it's just NIH syndrome at microsoft holding it back, that's not okay.
    - 11y ago

jfoster 11y ago

If it lacks very basic functionality, isn't the effect the same as breaking the web? I think one unfortunate aspect of the article is that it focuses on some of the less common deficiencies of Safari. I would have called out mobile Safari being unable to download files, or Apple's insistence against video codecs that all other vendors are aligned in agreement on when it comes to video.

adamlett 11y ago
> If it lacks very basic functionality, isn't the effect the same as breaking the web? No. If what worked before continues to work, it means it's not broken. Also: What "very basic functionality" doesn't the latest versions of Safari support?
- magicalist 11y ago
  > No. If what worked before continues to work, it means it's not broken IE6 continues to work fine for what it supported originally as well.
- jfoster 11y ago
  Well, I mentioned the two that I am most keenly aware of. I only know what I've come across, so I'm assuming there's lots more. To my knowledge, file downloads worked in all browsers prior to mobile Safari being initially released. So Apple did release a browser that broke some quite basic web functionality.
  - adamlett 11y ago
    I don't know how I missed that part of of your post. Sorry about that. Still. I find it quite a stretch to argue that not supporting file downloads "breaks" the web. Users don't perceive websites to be broken just because they can't download files. It would be akin to claiming that a device with no camera breaks the web by not supporting the camera API. Or that the Lynx browser breaks the web by not supporting CSS and JavaScript. Regarding Apple's insistence on not supporting Ogg (Vorbis|Theora) (I assume that's what you're alluding to), those codecs were briefly recommended by the HTML5 standard, but were later dropped.[1] Again, I think its a stretch to say that Apple broke anything, simply because they resisted a proposed standard. I know a lot of developers were disappointed, but that's how committees work: You don't always get it your way. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Ogg_formats_in_HTML5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_Ogg_formats_in_HTML5

streptomycin 11y ago

What rules that had been there for tens of years were broken by IE6? IE6 was the best browser available when it was released, and the web standards ecosystem was nothing like it is today. I think the analogy is very clear. If you want to code like it's 2000, supporting IE6 is easy, because IE6 is a very good 2000 browser. If you want to code like it's 2010, supporting Safari is easy, because Safari is a very good 2010 browser. But in both cases, if you want to use any new features that have been standardized and are supported by other browsers, you're fucked. The main difference I see is that IE6 didn't get any updates at all. Safari gets updates, but many new features are missing or broken. EDIT: Another difference is that MS never blocked you from installing a better browser, but Apple does that on iOS. That policy is becoming increasingly ridiculous...

anonymousguy 11y ago
Perhaps the biggest thing is that IE6 had a broken CSS box model.
- smrtinsert 11y ago
  It's so easy to be cavalier about random popular facts. I would love for someone to go back and load up the alternative browsers available at the time on some vms and take stock of their featuresets. Factoring in popularity at the time I'm pretty sure not much would have changed.
- strmpnk 11y ago
  Also ironic given that most people have adopted some of that "broken CSS box model" in their CSS. box-sizing: border-box; Now there were many other problems but I'm not sure people appreciate how such features eventually got standardized. Similar issues happened around DOM serialization with APIs like innerHTML, which Netscape refused to adopt because of "series of pointing at standards". Developers ended up adopting the idea and it was later standardized. XHR is another case. There are many more. In the case of Safari, I can think of canvas, touch (love or hate it vs pointer events it was before any of the alternatives), DPI independence, &c. It's some of these quirks that seems to show how newer web standards might be rushed through by increasingly aggressive vendor involvement. Apple hasn't changed all that much from when it first released Safari. It's only our expectations for the pace of new additions that has.

zamalek 11y ago

I had to do some work[1] with, basically, HTML4. Eventually I reached the stage whereby the feature worked in every other browser (IE8+, including Opera), using clean and completely hack-free code. In 3 days I had done my work. Then I tested it in Safari. Two weeks later I gave up and basically had to `if (Safari)`. I don't know if the code still has that, but it probably does. This wasn't anything 'lacking'. Sure, it was contenteditable-related but the fact remains that I found a consistent subset in every browser except Safari. So, yes, Safari broke my web - and it wasn't something that was missing, it was something that behaved very differently compared to other browsers. I can't remember what specifically broke it, but even ~2 years ago I had a significantly better development experience with IE than Safari with no new HTML5 features in sight. [1]: http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/k2smartforms/userguide/1.0.6/content/Picker%20Control.html http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/k2smartforms/userguide/1.0.6/c...

ninkendo 11y ago
If your target browser is IE8 and you write a bunch of html4 that looks great in IE8, I would expect it to not work anywhere else. Not only is IE8 a snowflake but html4 is particularly hard to get a good layout working. Lots of nontrivial layouts in pure html4 (and css 1/2) require tons of browser specific hacks.
- swsieber 11y ago
  You missed his point. He mentioned IE8+ and Opera as working targets to highlight the fact Safari was being lame. He said every browser - that would include complaint ones like firefox and chrome. He also specifically said he avoided browser specific hacks.
  - ninkendo 11y ago
    Saying "I didn't use any browser-specific hacks" with HTML4 is a strange statement, seeing as how many non-trivial layouts in html4 (and I'm assuming the older CSS standards that would typically go along with it) require browser-specific hacks to work. But honestly, I can't know because he's not naming anything specific anyway, just an anecdote about how IE8 was great at being standards-compliant and safari wasn't. Which is such an extraordinary claim (and is so contrary to established precedent) that without any extraordinary evidence, I have a lot of trouble accepting it. (And it's amazing how many people think "I'm not doing any browser hacks" while they're using something like jQuery, which is a library 100% devoted to doing browser hacks for you while abstracting you from that fact.)

josefresco 11y ago

I built websites during that entire period. I saw the rise and fall of Netscape, the "dark ages" of browser development when Microsoft let IE rot - I witnessed the birth of Firefox and the re-ignition of the "browser wars" when Google launched Chrome, and Apple got serious with Safari by moving to WebKit. The author is right, the details aren't the same but the same attitude exists. The author is simply speaking up before the differences become extreme. Microsoft didn't "break the web" they created their own web and then let it twist in the wind because they were pissed about the government beat down. Apple didn't get their hand slapped, but they did build something so lucrative that evolving Safari became a smaller priority, which some would argue aligns well with their push to the App/closed ecosystem model.

Someone 11y ago
"the re-ignition of the "browser wars" when Google launched Chrome, and Apple got serious with Safari by moving to WebKit" Moving to WebKit? Only if you count CyberDog, I guess. Safari was always WebKit based. Also, your phrasing could be read as if Chrome came before Safari, but Safari is from 2003 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_version_history), Chrome from 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_release_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_release_history).
- philwelch 11y ago
  Not only was Safari always WebKit based, WebKit is Apple's browser engine (forked from KHTML and open sourced) that Chrome used to use until they forked it.
  - andrewvc 11y ago
    And WebKit was actually forked from KHTML which was KDE's engine.
  - riquito 11y ago
    And it's a fork of the KHTML engine used by the Konqueror web browser for the KDE project

hullo 11y ago

Nevermind clicks, got to get Twitter follower counts into the thousands!

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mhomde 11y ago

Yes, but before that IE fixed the web! :) Remember CSS on Netscape? IE4 was actually a beacon back in its day. Everything is cyclical: Lean - Average - Bloated - Lean - Average - Bloated

at-fates-hands 11y ago
Are we currently in the bloated stage? - Chrome sucks up RAM like Photoshop. - Firefox Dev Edition is broken or slow every other build - IE is "ok"but their dev tools are incredibly sluggish and useless.
- mhomde 11y ago
  Yah, although some more than others. Microsoft looks ironically (or perhaps fittingly) to be the first into the next lean cycle with Microsoft Edge. The browser game has changed and become commoditized. Before they went towards being monoliths with everything from email, to apps and games, various services etc. Those parts are being usurped by stand-alone services and apps and need to longer be integrated into the browser. I think that's good! Browsers should focus at being browsers. Better to be a 'la carte than bundle everything under the sun. Also, I think the vision of HTML as a "universal" app/game platform is slowly dying. We're coming to terms with HTML is really good for somewhat basic presentation and interfaces, but not much more than that. Although doing advanced stuff is possible it seems we're coming to the realization that it's neither practical nor performant
- jdmichal 11y ago
  I think the Servo engine is going to anchor Mozilla's next transition to "lean".
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    Only in the sense that its missing all the features. People seem to forget when considering current browsers "bloated" that the bloat comes from the webpages containing all the cruft.
- 11y ago

Pxtl 11y ago

Yeah, I was a big believer in "screw it we'll just use tables" back then. When CSS finally caught on it basically was the end of dynamic-width websites for a few years.

ryanmarsh 11y ago

Given that the author self identifies on his blog as a twenty-something I'm wondering if he's old enough to have ever really had to lift IE v. 4-7. IE was a vast pile of shit for about a decade. It was pile of shit so high that Microsoft took out ads saying in so many words that its latest version "doesnt suck, honest". I tore my hair out for years over IE bugs. Fucking kids these days. Mobile Safari might not be as magical as you would desire but it is not even in the same league as the virtual genocide/superfund/WMD that IE was. GET OFF MY LAWN

jcoby 11y ago
Oh the pain of having to use nested tables, various css parsing hacks, browser sniffing, two different box models, and changing significant-insignificant whitespace to support IE 5, 5.5, and 6. All with zero debugging tools.

krschultz 11y ago

And I'm sure using this tone gets you more upvotes, but it feels very ad hominem.

wutbrodo 11y ago
What? How is this ad hominen? Do you think that term just means "being harsh"?
- krschultz 11y ago
  He's attacking the guy's experience and insinuating that the OP is being sensational to get upvotes.
  - wutbrodo 11y ago
    Ha whoops, on mobile it looked like you were responding to the OP article instead of a top-level commenter. Mea culpa. It's just something of a pet peeve that there are people who call 'ad hominem' at every insult.
    - krschultz 11y ago
      Reasonable. HN is the least mobile responsive website I continue to use.

joesmo 11y ago

Considering that Safari fails to start on a regular basis (amongst a ton of bugs and problems with it), I'd say that breaks the web a lot more than IE6.

nkron 11y ago

Nolan is one of the main contributors to PouchDB - http://pouchdb.com/ http://pouchdb.com/

nobleach 11y ago

While the title is a bit click-baity, I think the overall point is: Company sees the value in the internet. Company wants to "play too". Company builds good browser that is fast and feature filled. Company realizes that they can throw their weight around and have company specific features. Company starts to care less and less about accepted standards, and cares more about their pet standards. Company refuses to let other, more capable browsers run on their OS. Company thinks that because they're the biggest and richest, that everyone should get onboard with their choices. It'll last for awhile. Something else will come along and give users and developers a better option. Let's hope Apple doesn't screw around for as many years as MS did before creating a decent browser.

bradleyland 11y ago

Heh. This is the least bad thing about IE. The worst thing MS did with IE was implementing proprietary, and very aggressively protected, solutions to common problems. Developers, excited about the new features, rushed to support what they felt was the next generation of web technologies, only to get caught in Microsoft's trap. Once they held the marketshare majority, they stopped innovating. Safari is nowhere close to a majority player in the market (not even on mobile). Thus, it could never be considered equivalent to the evils of IE.

fapjacks 11y ago

Yeah there would definitely appear to be a generation of developers now on the scene that were doing something other than web development in the 2000s. 100% this. Web development was fucking hard ten years ago.

craigvn 11y ago

What your comment says to me is that you were not actually there back in the day. When IE6 was released it was the best, most compliant, fastest browser. That wasn't the problem. The problem is they then didn't update it for 5 years and people eventually wanted more which IE couldn't deliver, just like Chrome and Firefox really suck at HTML6 at the moment.

andrewstuart 11y ago

The point is that Safari is the browser that destroys the ability to universally use new standards. It is the odd one out that makes it hard for all the others.

andrewstuart 11y ago

The point is that Safari is the browser that destroys the ability to universally use new standards. It is the odd one out that makes it hard for all the others.

nolanl 11y ago

Yep, I have had to support IE7 and 8. IE6 was, thankfully, a bit before my time. And yeah, the title is pretty clickbaity; guilty as charged! But my blog has no ads, so it's not like I'm making money off of it. I'm just trying to draw attention to what I think is an important issue. As others have pointed out, it's all a matter of perspective. If you're trying to build for Web 2.0, then Safari is a fine browser. But if you're trying to build for Web 3.0 (or the "next web" or "appy web" or whatever you want to call it), then prepare to be disappointed.