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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

OK, if they are so committed, where is OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan support? Why is Safari so behind that it's now called "the new IE"? Talk is cheap, let them actually do something.

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I'm not challenging your argument, but have you seen Safari Technology Preview [1]? It seems to be under healthy development; for instance, recently it became the first browser to support all ES2015/16/17 features [2]. So it may be just that the standard Safari release is behind.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13133135

This is inevitable when everyone else is on a 6 weekly release schedule (not sure about Edge, but Chrome/Firefox are) and they insist on aligning browser releases with OS releases for marketing reasons.

It does look like they've got a great release coming some time, but it's clear they care more about marketing it eventually than pushing the web forward by putting the latest and greatest in user's hands.

Edge is under a 4-8 months release schedule.

the dozen or so people who use it will be disappointed

Even if Safari catches up, everyone is still forced to use it on their iPads and iPhones as their mobile browser rendering engine and no competition is allowed in that space. So, it will still be "the new IE" but worse than the old IE since competition is locked out at the OS level.

Indeed, that's a nasty problem. One of the reasons I have little respect for Apple.

> and no competition is allowed in that space.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ios/

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chrome-web-browser-by-google...

http://www.opera.com/mobile/mini/iphone

I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space."

Edit: I just saw the remark for "mobile browser rendering engine" -- that is true.

> I cannot agree with "no competition is allowed in that space."

Since it uses Apple's engine underneath, you can't work around their ban on free codecs in the browser for example. Same goes for support for multiple HTML5 features (how about MSE for starters?). So it is clearly anti-competitive.

They still have to use Safari behind the scene.

Not being allowed to run your own engine actually has deep ramifications. For example Firefox on iOS cannot support plugins, whereas on Android it does since the beginning. It also means that Firefox cannot compete in supported web standards or performance or whatever you can think of. And once upon a time these alternative browsers weren't even allowed to run the same JS engine as Safari, which meant they were forced to be slower. This changed fairly recently, somewhere around iOS 9.

Also other browsers on iOS are more restricted than Safari. For example those Safari content blockers don't work in Firefox. So given Firefox's inability to provide plugins, this means that in Firefox you are forced to load and see annoying ads, whereas in Safari you don't have to.

On Android, Firefox is actually a good alternative to Chrome, albeit less well integrated, but then I can't imagine using a mobile browser without uBlock, HTTPS Everywhere, etc. But on iOS the alternative browsers like Firefox are nothing more than dumb shells around restricted functionality.

I'm using Firefox on all of my desktops (MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu), I'm using Firefox on my Android device. Guess which browser I'm using on my iPhone? ;-)

Safari is far behind ? Utter nonsense.

The team simply has different priorities in particular security and battery life which means some eg service workers take longer to implement (if at all).

That's why on my Mac unlike Chrome and Firefox, Safari isn't a memory hog that chews through battery life like it's nobody's business.

I love Safari. The battery life is fantastic and the experience is fantastic.

I find "experience" an odd word here. My browser is a tool, not a theme park or spa day. I want it to do work for me, not delight me. Perhaps I am misunderstanding "experience"?

An experience would be having a track day at Silverstone, not opening Safari.

Everything is an experience with Apple customers. Even opening their wallets wider every year.

Maybe we're both misunderstanding, but I think they meant "User Experience". Surely you agree that this is an important consideration in software development?

Yes that makes much more sense. User experience is possibly the most important thing - what else is software written for?

Thanks for clarifying.

Pretty poor excuse. Apple has enough money to work on many things in parallel. So if they choke their browser development team, it means they are behind. Basically, it's barely important for them altogether.

What are you talking about ?

It's not an excuse but deliberate design choices. That is why Safari is by far the best browser on the Mac.

It's a deliberate design choice to not dedicate resources to a project? And not assigning more resources to the project makes it better? Interesting.

Well, it doesn't matter if it's deliberate or simply lack of thought because of low priority. It is behind in the end. And if it is indeed deliberate - too bad. I don't expect Apple to change for the better until their upper management is replaced. Then may be they'll start moving and even add support for free codecs and allow using alternative browsers on iOS.

> The team simply has different priorities in particular security

IDK, I see people linking me safari PoCs far more often than other browsers. What leads you to believe they're doing better than Chrome?

They wont support Vulkan since they have Metal.

Eventually they might. Or at least if they'll be relevant at that time.

No need when Unreal, Unity, Crytek and every other game engine that matters already support Metal.

I've not heard of any games or VR software released to the market that use Metal yet. I've heard it mentioned about projects still in development but so far that's all.

Do you have any examples of things using it?

Some games:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vainglory/id671464704?mt=8

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/sky-gamblers-storm-raiders/i...

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/radiation-island/id923760656...

https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/asphalt-8-airborne/id6103919...

Adobe After Effects

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/after-effects-cc-2015-...

Adobe Premier Pro

https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/up-next-for-premiere-p...

Apple's hardware can't even handle serious VR, so the usefulness of spending time on Metal for it is quite moot.

Sorry I should have been more specific, I meant macOS. Still it's cool that Adobe are using it.

Both Unity and Unreal Engine (UE4) supports Metal, so any games created in Unity/UE4 for Mac & iOS might possibly use it. If the game doesn't need anything beyond GL 3 support then the creator might choose to not enable Metal and stick with GL.

I don't know what percentage of Unity/UE4 Mac & iOS games have Metal enabled, but it is potentially a very large number.

That's the thing about Metal -- as long as common libraries and game engines add support for it, most developers won't have to do much additional work to use it. Only people who are writing their own graphics engine from scratch would need to learn it.

See example above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13221395

Not everyone is going to spend resources on implementing a redundant API. Apple are just being their usual lock-in jerks by not supporting OpenGL and Vulkan.

That won't help those who don't have resources to add support for a redundant API, and would rather leave MacOS without some features than do the former.

Example: https://www.winehq.org//wwn/404

> An open issue with anything newer than Direct3D9 is that wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 features and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts. With the MaxVersionGL key set wined3d will request a core context, but certain blitting corner cases are still broken. Mesa and the Nvidia binary driver mostly work. On MacOS you are most likely out of luck.

> wined3d still depends on legacy OpenGL 2 and many drivers do not expose some features necessary for d3d10/11 in legacy contexts.

Well that says it all, even if Apple had an up to date OpenGL driver, that wouldn't help.

That phrase is confusing. They can use core profile, but Apple is simply stuck on older OpenGL, so features they rely on to implement DX11 aren't available on MacOS. So if Apple would have provided full OpenGL 4.5+ support, it wouldn't have been an issue.

While some big developers might find it worth the investment to use metal, most of us won't. When you're already invested in OpenGL and you're a cross-platform developer, Metal is not even open for consideration. Vulkan maybe, once it's more established.

What I would really benefit from is updated OpenGL support. Right now, MacOS X is the lowest common denominator, with all the other platforms having 4.5+ as standard. I can upgrade to that with ease. But I'm never going to be able to justify rewriting the stuff with Metal, because it would mean a complete parallel implementation just for MacOS, since we would need to retain OpenGL everywhere else.

Vendor-specific graphics APIs are, for the most part, a legacy of the past which we were lucky to escape from. Apple creating Metal is an anachronism, and I don't think it will have a long life unless they make it portable.

> Why is Safari so behind that it's now called "the new IE"?

As an actual developer, who's been around since the eternal IE-version days, I really don't understand this criticism.

Honestly, Safari as a lot of new really nice browsers features that my clients are actually asking for, like blurred backgrounds[1] and native CSS carousels[2]. Realistically, things like WebRTC is only holding back a very specific subset of development.

[1]: http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-backdrop-filter

[2]: http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-snappoints

So it has it's own non-standard features that no other browsers support? Sounds like IE to me.

On the same level as supported by Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Google (Vulkan is only currently available on Pixie and Samsung S7).

MS is not part of Vulkan working group, and neither is Sony, so they don't do anything to support it. It can be supported on their systems only when they don't stand in the way (like on Windows or Android).

Nintendo on the other hand now has officially confirmed support: https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-prod...

Want to bet who will be next?

Regarding Nintendo, nice to see they are supporting Vulkan, but Nintendo Switch is not yet on sale and it remains to see how it will fare in the market against Apple and Google devices.

All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan.

So nothing relevant in market share for Vulkan.

> All the other devices from Nintendo don't support Vulkan.

No reason for them not to support it on any of their future devices. Older ones might not be possible, since Vulkan support has hardware requirements that not every GPU can fulfill (basically, no compute shaders = no Vulkan). Newer ones aren't a problem though, so I expect Nintendo to support it everywhere they can.

Also, think about it from GPU manufacturers perspective. Not only Nintendo have no need to reinvent the wheel anymore, they don't need to bug Nvidia about making special driver for them as well. They just use their Vulkan driver for their GPU (adapted for Nintendo OS which is FreeBSD based as far as I know). I.e. all win by stopping the pointless wheel reinvention (which costs money as well), and focusing on actually doing useful stuff. So I think Nvidia played a role here in pushing Vulkan through to Switch.

Same thing will eventually happen to Sony with whatever GPU they'll use then (AMD or Nvidia). MS will probably be the last to follow.

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