Ask HN: Is Safari the new IE? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Safari the new IE?

46 pointsnparsons0829 comments

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Why Safari is the new IE:

- No WebRTC (http://iswebrtcreadyyet.com)

- No Service Worker (https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready)

- No WebM/VP8 support

- No ASM.js

- No MediaRecorder

Combined with the following policy decisions from Apple:

- Almost complete lack of engagement with the community

- Default browser on iOS

- No alternative rendering engines supported on iOS. (This is even worse than IE, as users could always install third-party browsers on Windows)

- Safari updates tied to OS updates, which mean users of old iPhones are stuck on old Safari versions because they don't get OS updates anymore

Let's not forget that both iOS and Android cripple HTML5 apps so as to favor native app development. I'm not a JS/HTML/CSS fanboy, but it's still a move to increase lock-in.

Any evidence to support this?

Oh please. As many of the commenters have said, if you think Safari is the new IE then you weren't around when IE was the dominant browser.

Both WebRTC (https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webrtc) and ASM.js (https://webkit.org/status/#feature-asm.js) are under development.

Service Workers are under consideration: https://webkit.org/status/#specification-service-workers

Regarding community involvement, the WebKit team seems more responsive and accessible than in the past. When one of the developers said he was available to fix CSS bugs (https://twitter.com/grorgwork/status/738486146313773057), I tweeted at him a bug that had been annoying me.

A few days later, it was fixed: https://twitter.com/grorgwork/status/740356645981585408

Things are different now and going in the right direction.

> A few days later, it was fixed: https://twitter.com/grorgwork/status/740356645981585408

However, no iOS users will see this change until iOS 10 is released. (Hopefully this makes it into 10, instead of waiting for iOS 11).

I can confirm--because I'm running the public beta of iOS 10--that the fix (and many others) are in Safari 10, a core component of iOS 10.

And just like we see every year, the latest release of iOS will be released in September, so it's just a couple of months away.

All of those APIs are the gravy on top of cherries. Most websites don't even use them. IE9 and older blatantly ignored and/or reimplemented key browser functionality such as rendering and DOM querying APIs. It was a mess. Whatever Safari is or isn't doing doesn't even compare.

Forgot to add a few more WebKit features:

- Slot-Based Shadow DOM API (https://webkit.org/blog/4096/introducing-shadow-dom-api/)

- Wide-gamut color support (https://webkit.org/blog/6682/improving-color-on-the-web/)

- 100% ES6 support (https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712)

- new JIT compiler (https://webkit.org/blog/5852/introducing-the-b3-jit-compiler...)

- 88% CSS support (CSS1 through CSS4, via http://css4-selectors.com/browser-selector-test/)

It appears that Safari supposedly being the new IE has been greatly exaggerated.

Safari performs much better than Chrome and Firefox, and uses less energy.

Apple releases a major version about every year, so it's a bit less cutting-edge, but it's very standards compliant contrary to IE in the past.

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I believe that for regular browsing (on the Mac) Safari is the superior choice...

Agreed. It also feel more at home on the Mac. Both Safari and Firefox, due to their multi-platform nature, don't quite "fit".

Did you mean Chrome and Firefox don't quite fit?

Yup, that's what I meant.

Safari is not the shittiest browser on the planet that makes all your good standards based code break . They aren't making weird implementations of all the standard / standardized stuff. so no. it's not even remotely the new IE.

Apple contribute to breaking the standards. HTML5 video?

It's definitely hyperbole in a sense because Safari is certainly nowhere near the Enterprise monoculture that IE once had, but it's a fair comparison not in any way to deride the work that Safari does, but to point out the things that Safari could do better to learn from past mistakes to help the web and web developers.

I think it's important to make the distinction between Safari and iOS Safari. It's iOS Safari that is the most comparable to the issues with IE in the past, particularly IE6:

- Updating it is tied to iOS releases, which in turn is tied to hardware model. Thus real world usage of iOS Safari drastically lags behind "Safari latest" as users stick to hardware that works and for various reasons cannot/ upgrade iOS.

- Safari on the iOS is as much as possible intended to be a monoculture on iOS devices.

- iOS still has enough marketshare and share of total browser users and to a lot of people the "smartphone" is still nearly synonymous with "iphone" and "tablet" with "ipad". (That's a lessening concern these days with Android doing well enough, but it was definitely a big problem in early "mobile website design".) So web developers need to develop with it in mind, sometimes from an "iOS first" mentality when their businesses have invested much into iOS hardware. (Some businesses do have an iOS mobile device monoculture and probably will for several years to come.)

That last issue is the one where the comparison to IE has been the scariest in the past and the one where Safari will likely leave its mark on the web "geological strata" in a similar way to classic versions of IE: there will be some things like notable -webkit prefixed CSS rules that will last a long, long time on the web and the other browsers have simply had to adopt checking for the -webkit version. (Edge and Firefox both have lists of -webkit CSS rules they follow.)

The reason to make the comparison is to especially remind web developers to test outside their personal monoculture bubble. To remember that there are mobile devices that aren't iOS out there and there are many users out there not using Safari (or Chrome or whatever the flavor of the month is among developers) as their daily drivers.

"Safari is the new IE" is hyperbole, but it's useful hyperbole.

In what way? The latest Sarafi Development Preview implements 100% of ES6 features which no other browser has done yet. And as far as I know, I haven't ran into any CSS features that Safari doesn't support recently when doing front-end development.

All these ES6 features can be transpilled to ES5.

Web APIs and DOM APIs missing in Safari cannot. You can't polyfill WebRTC (without a plugin and there is no plugin support on IOS obviously).

I would prefer no support for ES6 so they concentrate on implementing APIs such as WebRTC,ServiceWorkers ...

I don't think so. I still cannot watch a 720p Twitch stream on Chrome without lots of frame loss. I can watch those same streams just fine in Safari. In my opinion, Safari might be a bit behind on some of the standards but Chrome and Firefox are behind on performance. IE is bad at both of those things.

Agreed, about streams. Chrome in my experience as with Firefox tends to suck up lots of energy/with the frame loss issue as well. I agree about the web standards comment but I do admire one thing it has embraced, you can regulate which flash content plays on a site and that translates to the "Flash Saver mode" when you're on battery

I've read that, but I feel like it is hyperbole.

Safari is a little behind Chrome/Firefox/Edge but it is only roughly a couple of releases behind, IE6 on the other hand felt like it was a dozen releases behind and they had a much larger market share relative to Safari.

A better analogy might be "Safari is like IE 11." Meaning out of date, but not by a huge amount. Plus their latest dev' builds seem to have picked up the pace a little, so this might just be a blip.

No. If you're asking this question, you don't remember how bad developing for IE was for a while. Safari doesn't have newer features like WebRTC or Service Workers, but the things that it does support, it supports well in a standards-compliant way.

If by "standards-compliant" you mean "sometimes standards-compliant, and sometimes riddled with major, painful bugs" (including bugs that usually have already been patched upstream in Webkit long before the patches eventually trickle their way down into Safari).

Pulling from a comment I posted over on Reddit recently:

Looking back through my painful history of Safari headaches I've personally encountered in building a single-page app, at least it appears that there's some progress:

* It looks like the pervasive, opaque, and seemingly-random "attempted to assign to readonly property" crap that affected only Safari and broke Angular, Ember, React, and others has been fixed, at least in upstream Webkit (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138038#c21). I guess we can take out our Safari-only monkey-patch fix now, so that's nice. Would be nice if I could get that entire work week of debugging and workarounds back, but c'est la vie. Assuming, of course, that Safari has finally pulled this fix in from upstream, which is far from guaranteed.

* Date parsing (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4310953/invalid-date-in-s...) now behaves up to the standard, just like all other browsers; I suppose we no longer need to use Moment.js as "Safari's handicap access ramp" anymore either.

* The broken multi-select bug (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20039194/multiple-select-...) still seems sporadically there.

* It's unclear whether they've fixed adjacent-element selectors in querySelector (https://github.com/jquery/sizzle/issues/290). It's been fixed in Webkit, so maybe in a year or so Safari will have it fixed too.

This is just stuff I've seen in my normal day-to-day of a not-super-complex Angular single-page app. You can see, I'd hope, why I have plenty of room based on Safari's track record to assume their implementation of anything is subtly-but-painfully broken.

Normally, I'd go check the status of these things on a bugtracker, but unlike the Chromium team, the Firefox team, or the Edge team, I guess the Safari team is just too perfect to need a publicly-accessible bugtracker. Or too embarrassed to have one? Yeah, it's one of those.

Having a green (or more often, yellow-green) checkbox on caniuse or kangax doesn't mean the feature is usable, it just means it's technically available.

Okay, but you have to remember that 95% of the internet isn't a single page app. Most websites are still just simple brochure sites that don't need that kind of complexity, but with IE, even those sites would have problems. If you're primarily working on SPAs, I could see how you might be a bit miffed at some of those behaviors, but can you really point to a list of four bugs (that are fixed now) and say it's as bad as IE6 was?

Sure, but only in the sense that for many casual computer users, it's the default and therefore browser of choice. As for comparisons re: stability and usability it's night and day. Safari is a fine browser for OS X machines, and I've found it to be way more battery-friendly than Chrome on my Macbook. It has a decent enough built-in pop-up blocker and is supported by a few big adblocker plugins. I'd say the comparision is more or less unfounded, except on the grounds that it's the default browser for many users, hence its market share.

Safari basically ties with Edge when it comes to HTML5 feature support [0]

  Safari (iOS): 65%
  Edge: 72%
  Safari (macOS): 76%
  Chrome (Android): 79%
  Firefox: 84%
  Chrome (desktop): 87%

Those numbers become much worse when you factor in how long it takes to get rid of old versions of Safari.

[0] (scroll to bottom): http://caniuse.com/#cats=HTML5&compare=ios_saf+9.3

No, I think UC Browser is the new IE.

    According to StatCounter, UC browser is the second most
    used smartphone/"mobile" web browser worldwide, passing
    Safari in October 2015.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Browser

One pain point I have with Chrome is that it eats all of my memory. I often get warnings about low memory. I don't use safari often, but I don't have this problem with Safari.

I have no idea but I ended up using chrome everywhere.

I choose to use Safari on my MacBook

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