Safari is the new IE

http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/

by nolanl • 11 years ago

753 355 11 years ago

espadrine• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

You can of course install an alternative to desktop Safari, just not to Mobile Safari.

sigzero• 11 years 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.

emsy• 11 years ago

By the numbers, mobile is the one that matters.

justwannasing• 11 years ago

It's not. At least not according to caniuse.com, html5test.com or css3test.com.

sergimansilla• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

I'm fine with Safari, but the page refresh on back annoys me to no end

vincentriemer• 11 years ago

in 10.11 it seems like this is fixed and the page won't always need to reload.

dailyrorschach• 11 years 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.

exelius8• 11 years ago

Chrome is bloated and inefficient; even if it's not doing power-saving CPU scheduling. The "one process per tab" model seems great, but it allows Google to ignore performance problems in the browser and push them off to the page itself. That said, Google is a lot more active in pushing the envelope of browser development, so even though I personally stopped using Chrome, I still appreciate the work Google is doing on it.

Totally agree with the speed of Safari. I have Flash enabled, albeit with a plugin that forces click-to-load. Safari is a lot faster than Chrome at this point; it just feels more like the fast, stripped-down browser that I want.

sz4kerto• 11 years ago

Maybe on OSX, yes. On Windows on my PC, basically every browser beats Safari on my retina MBP if it comes to speed.

Cshelton5• 11 years ago

Apple has stopped supporting Safari on Windows. SO yes, you are using Safari 5.0, from over 2 and a half years ago...of course every other browser will beat it.

JohnBooty5• 11 years ago

    However, [Safari] 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.

The performance gap is particularly noticeable on older Macs. Safari feels about the same as other browsers on my recent Mac... but there's a big gap in responsiveness between Safari and the other browsers on my wife's 2009-ish Core 2 Duo. [Edit: I mean that Safari is much more responsive than Chrome or FF]

This doesn't excuse Apple dragging their feet on web standards, of course.

It's just puzzling. Clearly Apple puts a lot of work into Safari. It's not the bastard child that IE was at Microsoft... recall how the IE team was disbanded after IE6 at one point.

And yet, frustratingly, Apple doesn't support modern web standards despite allocating a healthy slice of developer resources to Safari.

netfire6• 11 years ago

Its in Apple's interest to not have Safari work well on older machines (since they want people to buy new machines), or improve it in ways that would make the browser better compete against the app store (especially on mobile).

It is in their interest to have it be a very nice looking document viewing platform, which is where I imagine most of their developer resources are going towards.

fauigerzigerk• 11 years ago

I don't find this puzzling at all. I think Apple wants Safari to be a great browser for the limited role they think the web should play.

They are putting a lot of work into making the browsing experience better on Safari, very successfully I think, but adding tons of features that could expand the role of the web as an applications platform is just not in their interest.

jasonlotito2• 11 years ago

Safari still has some pretty glaring problems. Take going back, for example. Going back, it loads an image of the previous page before it actually loads the real page. This gives the perception that it's loaded immediately, but it's not really loaded. This means the page is not responsive. It also looks fuzzy, and you can see it's fake. It's horrible, and while it's intended to fake being fast, it only serves to remind me that it's not actually fast.

Then their is the problem with black boxes. I don't know why, but all to often, safari loads a page and there are black boxes on that page. Just covering up portions of the web page. I have to resize the window or do something to get Safari to rerender the page so it will go away. This happens frequently.

Couple this with all the other issues OSX has, I can't but make the assumption that Apple is focused on Quantity rather than Quality.

Of the 3 big browsers in Mac, Firefox is still, in my mind, the most solid. Safari suffers some serious problems, not the least of which is that it's only for Mac.

eloisant• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

criswell2• 11 years ago

Absolutely agreed. They want the web to lose.

jenscow• 11 years ago

Hence it being the new IE.

Tloewald8• 11 years 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.

kalleboo2• 11 years 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).

coldtea5• 11 years ago

Which has been stated again and again, but was never an issue with Apple.

First because what they make from the App Store is spare change for them.

Second because they did have the best browser for a while, and did very much to advance the state of the art (from WebSQL, to Canvas, CSS 3D and other stuff, all originating there, along with the original fast-JITed JS engine who started the JS-race to what we have know). And they did that for years after they had an App platform available too.

supster2• 11 years ago

The App Store may not be a money maker, but it definitely is a competitive advantage when selling iPhones over the competition esp. Android phones.

fpgeek• 11 years ago

It's not about the money from the app store, it's about the lock-in from apps, which is far more valuable.

netfire6• 11 years ago

Curious where you are basing your revenue numbers from. Per Apple's reported statistics for 2014[1], developers pulled in $10 billion dollars in revenue from the app store. That means that Apple's revenue from the app store should also be in the low billions (based on the 70/30 cut they take from app store sales and purchases).

All without manufacturing logistics and hardware production costs. Obviously the computing infrastructure, payment processing and software engineering of the app store has a cost, but I'd imagine much less than those involved with building, distributing and selling a computer or mobile device.

It may not generate as much as hardware sales do, but billions of dollars hardly seems like spare change.

[1] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/08App-Store-Rings-in...

2muchcoffeeman• 11 years ago

I'm not sure you can pin this all on Apple.

Back when the first iPhone was released Jobs was all "We have a great way for you to develop apps! ... HTML5!"

All the developers were disappointed and wanted a native API. So here we are.

jfim• 11 years ago

It's not as if it's the first time Apple does it either. They positioned OS X as the best platform to run Java, yet ditched it a couple of years later. Even back then, people were complaining about it [0].

Developing on Mac has always been a chore (at least back in the XCode 1.1 and 2.0 days), with poorly documented APIs and APIs that are just flat out broken (OpenGL comes to mind, and is still broken to this day apparently).

Our running joke back then was that "Macs are very user friendly, except developers don't count as users." Still true to this day apparently.

[0] http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=13058

gwbas1c• 11 years 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• 11 years 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...

swsieber2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

JoeAltmaier6• 11 years 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.

Cshelton5• 11 years ago

The browser will be the main application delivery platform. As a business or startup, you can afford to write an app on one platform at first. Choosing IOS over Andriod, or vise versa can have a severe limitation on your customer reach. However, the web will run everywhere. Mobile, desktop, tablet, all on the same code base written by the same developers. Especially if the app is not some social app where it needs the crazy UX. Most business applications are very good and feature rich in the web alone.

dspillett3• 11 years ago

If you need functionality like you describe, ship a native application via an app store. It’s a much better experience than web development.

That is a faf when you want to be cross platform though. With care I can write an application that covers pretty much all the users I care to cover, i.e. those using desktop or mobile browsers released in the last few years. In fact there are a couple I intend to develop once I've got certain other things out of the way that are eating my "personal project" time currently. Yes native apps have advantages, and for my projects there might be native apps later, but developing for browsers first (well, API first with browsers being the first major client) gives the best use of your initial time unless your app needs greater performance, access to hardware, or something else not possible/practical in the browser.

If Safari lags behind to the point where I can only support iDevices as secondary citizens (web first, followed by native apps for platforms that need them) then I am perfectly happy to do that. Thankfully that is a practical consideration, at least for my projects, unlike at some points in the past where not supporting IE6 locked you out of a much larger part of your potential audience then not supporting mobile safari does now.

If enough other developers take this route (Your platform doesn't work well unless I create something specifically for it? OK, I consider that later when I've got everything else working) maybe the direction of Safari will be forced to change in that respect.

__z• 11 years ago

My business customers strongly disagree with you. They use my (internal) web application to do all their business needs and are very happy with it. A native application would work as well (of course) but a web application is much better for their needs and is much, much better to support on our end. It is cheaper to develop and support which makes them happy. It also is cross platform. My business customers don't have access to any app stores. It's not a simple web app either.

On my end I don't want to have to download an app to do all the things I want to do. I keep as few apps on my phone/computer as possible.

Not all software development is making cutting edge social phone apps.

rescendent2• 11 years ago

The web started with form tags in HTML. Is always been an application platform.

kijin• 11 years 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.

JohnBooty5• 11 years 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."

kalleboo2• 11 years ago

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).

snuxoll2• 11 years ago

HTML5 forms the backbone of Modern (Metro) UI.

Factually incorrect, WinRT certainly supports HTML5 apps but it supports .Net and C++ too, all of the WinRT implementation code is either native C++ or .Net.

benjamindc• 11 years 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.

Tloewald8• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

As stated in the article, often Safari's implementation just sucks.

Touche4• 11 years 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• 11 years 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).

millstone• 11 years ago

Examples are Reader Mode and Power Saver, both features designed to reduce the impact of, let's say, non-central content. Ad-supported browsers are not exactly eager to implement these, naturally.

mbell3• 11 years ago

In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …).

I use Safari for all my general browsing for one reason: It uses 1/2 to 1/5 the power that chrome does.

ben010783• 11 years ago

I doubt it will ever be as good as Safari, but Google is working on this: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/06/12/chrome-os-x-performance-...

atacrawl• 11 years ago

In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …).

I'm a Safari user who develops first and foremost in Safari, and I completely disagree with this. Chrome runs rings around Safari in UI animation performance, it's almost embarrassing.

carussell2• 11 years ago

I read this as a comment about the design decisions in the Safari UI, not how it performs.

shkkmo• 11 years ago

Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different things.

Which is exactly what makes safari the new IE. Going it's own way and not even bothering to try to implement the new standards used in other browsers.

bickfordb• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

ripter• 11 years 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.

tzakrajs2• 11 years ago

Firefox renders pages terribly and is the real dud here.

edit: not speed, but aesthetic quality and parity with Chrome/Safari

tzakrajs2• 11 years 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.

Cshelton5• 11 years ago

Do you have a very outdated version of FF? Firefox is actually starting to beat Chrome on many benchmarks once again.

coldtea5• 11 years ago

He's talking about rendering (quality) not speed.

zecg• 11 years 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...

zimpenfish• 11 years 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-cont...

Cshelton5• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Handoff actually works for you? You're one in a million.

Cshelton5• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Handoff also works with Chrome - it only needs to be the default browser on your Mac.

jug• 11 years 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/releaseno...

dspillett3• 11 years 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).

leejoramo• 11 years ago

From the same era on Mac, IE 5 was an amazing browser.

exelius8• 11 years 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.

LoSboccacc2• 11 years 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

exelius8• 11 years 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.

smrtinsert4• 11 years ago

That's right Apple, can do no wrong. Where do these guys get off criticizing them? How dare they.

dmd• 11 years ago

significantly less power

This is the big issue for most people, I think. I would love to use Chrome, but when I do, (a) thighs burn to a crisp if my machine is on my lap directly and (b) the battery depletes, literally, 1.5x as fast.

leephillips2• 11 years ago

I've noticed this using Chrome on Ubuntu. Is Firefox the best alternative, (is it significantly more efficient?) or can you suggest something else?

chii• 11 years ago

why is that? does safari use some undocumented api, or that chrome sucks up more computing power in the name of rendering speed/responsiveness?

VieElm3• 11 years ago

Nothing you've said here really addresses the problem discussed and really you're looking at this from the perspective of the consumer and not the developer.

Safari is nowhere near that bad [as IE was in the past]

Doesn't address the problems developers are having.

I have yet to run across a page that works in Chrome that doesn't work in Safari.

Try any webpage that uses WebRTC, and there's a growing number of these. But really it's because people are doing what they did with IE6 which is here is code that works everywhere, and here is some code to make it work on Safari so the user is none the wiser. The problem is still there.

Safary, by comparison ... <insert swoon>

This has nothing to do with the post. Great you like Safari, but the problem still exists. Where's the WebRTC support? The Audio API? Right.

As to the original article, I prefer a 4th step not mentioned, just ignore Safari. Apple has a huge iOS userbase, sure, but as the HTML5 disparity between Safari and other browsers increase it's becoming increasingly not worth considering and really do iOS users even expect the HTML5 features that don't work in Safari? They'd probably prefer a native app for that.

Desktop users can use Chrome or Firefox when a site doesn't work in desktop Safari, and if that makes them mad, good. Maybe Apple will fix their shit then.

Edit:

Regarding downvotes: I know engineers are ignoring Safari. I ignore Safari, and other people I know ignore Safari. A convenient sample sure, but as this article points out developers aren't happy. Downvotes or no. Deal with it.

exelius8• 11 years ago

Nothing you've said here really addresses the problem discussed and really you're looking at this from the perspective of the consumer and not the developer.

That's entirely the point: developers and users have different needs. But the developers will follow the users to whatever browser the users feel is best. Apple's priorities are on improving battery life, page responsiveness, etc. If users value Apple's browser development model that prioritizes user-facing features over developer features, then the developers will simply follow the users. If you want to build a product around features that a major browser doesn't support, go ahead.

To use the dreaded car analogy, you don't build a car to be easy to work on just to make the mechanics happy. You build a car that consumers want to buy, and it's the mechanic's job to figure out how to work on it.

butterfi• 11 years ago

Rather then just downvote you, let me say that I (20+ years webdev) and my colleagues use our audience to determine what browsers we support, not our personal preferences. My job is to provide visitors to my clients websites with the best possible experience, not judge them on their technical choices.On the site I support, hundreds of thousands visits a year are from Safari users. Based on your comment ("deal with it"), you pretty clearly are not the kind of web developer I would ever hire. Or your engineer friends.

braythwayt2• 11 years ago

  > 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.

This. As a developer... I sympathize with people who like developing on the desktop with Chrome and for Chrome, but as a user, I prefer the browser that doesn't spin up the fans on my MacBook Air.

As we adulate Tesla for their accomplishments with battery technology, we often point out that battery life is a software problem, and that it involves a specific set of engineering tradeoffs. Apple is simply making those tradeoffs. And it has to.

Google make a browser that runs on everything. If one platform is slower than another, or has less battery life than another, blame the platform vendor. Google doesn't care. But Apple sells hardware. If a MacBook gets so hot it burns your thighs, they lose sales. If the battery life on an iPad is terrible, they lose sales.

Safari gives their users a legitimate way to enjoy web browsing on a cool-running system with long battery life. That sells.

cordite• 11 years ago

It also has better performance with retina, scrolling, less jank, and other user-experience/satisfaction related qualities.

It's dev tools aren't adequate for my use, but for being a user of other sites, it has been wholly sufficient.

orbitur2• 11 years ago

I sympathize with people who like developing on the desktop with Chrome and for Chrome, but as a user, I prefer the browser that doesn't spin up the fans on my MacBook Air

For me it's just video perf, but the worst part is that it's Google own web services that are spinning up the fans, and their video services work 10x better in Safari!

I have a shiny new 15" Retina MBP, which heats up like a stove if I use Chrome to open a video Hangout or watch YouTube. So for work meetings I've made a habit of having my calendar always open in Safari so when I click the video link, I get the Hangout in Safari as well.

And Safari manages to not set my computer on fire, amazing!

toyg2• 11 years ago

IE was so bad because Microsoft tried to go off and create its own standards

That's a common misconception, but what actually happened was that MS implemented draft CSS specs which ended up being a bit different from the final standard. At the time they were extremely eager to pack new stuff in IE (including a state-of-the-art XML/XSL processor!), so they rushed in a lot of stuff before other players had agreed how this stuff should really behave.

IE was then basically abandoned. MS just refused to fix their engine to adhere to newer standards. By the time this became to be seen as a problem, Netscape was dead, IE was dominant, and they were busy trying to plug the ActiveX security sieve, rebuilding on .Net and finding an alternative to Flash.

In this sense, Apple have done exactly the same with Safari: they poured resources into it while they were competing on the desktop. Now they only care about iDevices, where they have no competition at the browser level, the priority is battery time, and stability (aka rot) is preferable over innovation. Look at Safari for Windows: they built it only to support iTunes, and basically dropped it when iTunes on Windows became fundamentally unnecessary.

They went ahead when they wanted to be in the game, now they own the game so their incentives are different. Exactly what Microsoft did back in the days.

mrbrowning• 11 years ago

Safari's speed is a tossup for me, in that opening new tabs and typing in the address bar both are often preceded by several second (!) delays before the UI responds. This persists across multiple instances of clearing all of my browsing data and even migrating to a new laptop. That I continue to use it over Chrome in spite of that implies a lot about the sorry state of browsers in general right now.

NietTim• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.)

jfoster3• 11 years 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#c...

That said, there are some cases where things are Chrome-only simply because other vendors are far behind. (eg. speech recognition & synthesis)

dspillett3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

Klathmon2• 11 years 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.

jfoster3• 11 years 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.

adamlett3• 11 years 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?

streptomycin6• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Perhaps the biggest thing is that IE6 had a broken CSS box model.

smrtinsert4• 11 years ago

Absolutely the truth. There was a reason the only answer was tables for a very long time.

A major source of hatred for IE was the fact the IE team did work prior to the browser standards, a practice which is now standard operating procedure. Where would be without ajax?

collyw• 11 years ago

"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..."

Why has that not resulted in anti competitive behavior lawsuits? MS got in to a fair bit of trouble for similar things. They didn't stop you installing an alternative.

vlunkr2• 11 years ago

You can install other browsers on iOS.

piyush_soni2• 11 years ago

If I'm not wrong, Apple allows you to install Chrome on iOS? Of course for a long time they didn't allow other browsers to use their Nitro Engine (so deliberately forced them to stay slower), but seems now they allow that as well ...

Again, it doesn't allow them to be made as the 'default' browser - which in itself is a big reason to criticize them.

nmesse• 11 years ago

Apple does not block people from installing better browsers (I know a couple). They did, back in the day, when they couldn't find a way to make Nitro (their web engine) secure.

zamalek3• 11 years 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/c...

ninkendo5• 11 years 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.

adamlett3• 11 years ago

Then I tested it in Safari

(emphasis mine)

I use Chrome as my primary development browser and Safari and Firefox as my second and third choice. When I do get around to testing in IE 9+, it's almost an afterthought. Is it surprising then that IE is the browser that gives me the most trouble?

All browsers have quirks. It's inevitable when you have many competing implementations from companies that have different priorities. The browser you use the most is naturally the one whose quirks you will get used to.

josefresco2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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), Chrome from 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_release_history).

gmfawcett• 11 years ago

Offtopic, but your first paragraph sounds like Roy Batty's final monologue in Blade Runner. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate! :)

braythwayt2• 11 years ago

  > 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.

I was around as well. My recollection is that they let it twist in the wind because SaaS competed with their two interdependent quasi-monopolies: Windows and Office.

Which is another instance of the Innovator's Dilemma: How can a successful company embrace technology that disrupts themselves?

hullo• 11 years ago

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

mhomde2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

thanatropism2• 11 years ago

Then, Safari has an amazing energy footprint.

I will readily agree that the evolutionary path of OSX seems to have gone off the rails. But hey, why do I use Safari instead of Chrome?

Pxtl• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

krschultz3• 11 years ago

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

wutbrodo2• 11 years ago

What? How is this ad hominen? Do you think that term just means "being harsh"?

joesmo2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

nobleach• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

craigvn2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

nolanl3• 11 years 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.

mschuster91• 11 years 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.

jackgavigan2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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!

Touche4• 11 years 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?

nolanl3• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

jccalhoun• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

nolanl3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

isaacremuant2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

The difference between IE and (iOS) Safari is that Microsoft got fined for bundling IE ( 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• 11 years 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.

smitherfield3• 11 years ago

99%, actually. (98-99% including both desktops and servers/mainframes).

lostgame• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

More 'X is the new Y.' Wonderful!

framp• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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)

tempodox• 11 years 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.

thanatropism2• 11 years ago

"X is the new Y" considered harmful.

ebbv• 11 years ago

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

hardwaresofton• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

joesmo2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

usaphp• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

nosideeffects• 11 years ago

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

grumblestumble• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

amelius• 11 years ago

This is why I want the following html to work in every browser:

yellowapple• 11 years 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).

smitherfield3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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#issuecomme...

emehrkay• 11 years 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• 11 years 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).

lambdasquirrel2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

web isn't as important as it used to be

How on earth did you come to this conclusion?

aceperry• 11 years ago

I think fanbois just make up stuff to support their argument. Doesn't have anything to do with reality.

azakai2• 11 years 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.

lambdasquirrel2• 11 years ago

The end user doesn't care about IndexedDB. Just because web folks like you push new technologies doesn't mean that those technologies matter. It doesn't mean that the web will stay forefront. People have to want to use those technologies, but most of my non-tech friends don't even surf Facebook on the web. They check Facebook on their phones. A lot of people don't even book AirBnBs on their computers.

Now, you guys can plug your fingers in your ears and call me a fanboi, but I'm just pointing out that non-tech folks don't know the difference, and they couldn't really care. The native experience on iOS massively trumps the app experience on Android, as well as the web experience on iOS and on Android.

Now for me, as a dev, I would rather code for the web than for iOS or for Android. But the wider world does not care about me. The wider world would feel that the web is much too late to the game with all these techs, when the same experience (or possibly better) was available with native apps years ago.

ndesaulniers• 11 years ago

Google is the only company really pushing it as a platform

Who's leading the charge on es6 implementation? [0] Who created asm.js and developed Web Assembly? Not Google.

[0] http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/

rubyn00bie• 11 years 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...

jordanthoms2• 11 years 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.

addicted443• 11 years 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.

Safari is the new IE

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