Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

The joke isn't "works best in IE" the joke is "Safari is the default browser that ships with the OS, few people get a better browser, and even though it's a piece of shit you have to continue supporting it."

>I find Safari superior to every other browser on any platform in every possible metric except for dev tools

I could remove nearly 15% of my CSS if I stopped supporting Safari at work and I wouldn't need a hundred different quirky workarounds to make the sites look even remotely how they're supposed to look. It fights me every inch of the way and then has some of the worst dev tools for debugging where any issues are.

I'd rather support IE8 for eternity if it means I never have to write another `@media screen and (min-color-index:0) and(-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {}` in my CSS again.

View on HN

I've been writing CSS for years, everyday, don't remember the last problem I've had with Safari or any other modern browser, as a matter of fact.

I do get an ocasional glitch with Firefox, but it's very rare.

Perhaps if you described the problems you experienced instead of the hacks you are using to identify Safari this could be a more fruitful conversation.

Safari is a freaking amazing browser, lots of people use it by choice.

>I'd rather support IE8 for eternity…

I don't think you know what you're saying.

I create websites for the healthcare industry. I know exactly what I'm saying. There are some clients that I still need to write IE7 fallbacks for - and a single client that I still write IE6 fallbacks for. Lucky for me our contract has dropped IE7-9 support by default unless it is specifically requested by the client.

Apologies, but offhand I can only think of flexbox issues (specifically related to wrap/min-width, which has been fixed in version 11) and with interactive form validation (which was only just fixed in version 10 or 10.1). I run into various issues when testing on iPhones and the largest section of edits caught in any internal QC are always iPhone/Safari related. With relative certainty nowadays - if it works in Firefox, it works in Chrome and Edge. But then I always need to write some workaround or another for Safari.

The biggest issue is that even when these bugs are fixed - I still need to support them for an extended period of time because for whatever godforsaken reason, Safari updates are tied together with operating system updates. Want the newest Safari? Buy a new iPhone. It's the Windows XP/IE8 problem. Where IE8 had to be supported only because many users were still using XP and couldn't upgrade to IE9 even if they wanted to.

Safari is not an evergreen browser and that's a fair criticism.

However, you can run the latest browser and OS (and most people do) on a 5 year old device, which is about as much as the battery will last anyway. The situation is much worse on Android.

>I create websites for the healthcare industry.

OH BOY do I know your pain.

Ah well, it's not like those XP machines that the NHS loves so much were an attack vector in a recent, prolific cyber attack, no no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com