Hacker News Reader

Comment by unilynx | Hacker News Reader

120KB of javascript and still the accordion doesn't open on OSX Safari.

I recently found out that the sidebar menus on pages within https://developers.google.com/web don't work with JS off (usually a trivial thing: show sub-items by default and hide them with JS). Almost every Alphabet website has something like that.

So yes, minor anecdote, and I genuinely appreciate the hundreds of Google employees who really help the Web and share useful knowledge (and don't lead developers into using techniques best suited for billion-user websites, as FB often does) but I'll reserve to right to side-eye anything Google says.

Also the site claims to about “web fundamentals”, but the content pushed out are all articles about cutting edge, experimental features in Chrome. There’s nothing wrong with documenting new features in your browser, but calling it fundamental is fundamentally misleading.

Not working with JS disabled is bad, but not working on a major modern browser is ridiculous.

Safari is the new IE8.

Every web dev I know bitches about it.

It's not. I'm a web developer and it's my browser of choice.

Every bad web dev bitches about it.

There's nothing about Safari that makes it "the new IE8". Ironically, the very same HN that bemoans every new thing as "why should devs jump onto this shiny new things, just slow down already" criticises Safari for not jumping onto every new thing.

Ironically, the very same HN that bemoans every new thing as "why should devs jump onto this shiny new things, just slow down already" criticises Safari for not jumping onto every new thing.

HN is quite diverse and I'm pretty sure those are two disjoint sets of users. (I'm in the former group myself --- not a fan of presenting information in such a way as to decrease its accessibility while also increasing resource usage.)

I bet I could make those accordion sections work in all browsers going back to IE5 without much effort, and use nothing near 120KB of JS to do it... but no, most "modern web devs" would rather pile on the bloat of their libraries and "best practices" to make something that works only in the very latest version of the one browser they personally use.

> I bet I could make those accordion sections work in all browsers going back to IE5 without much effort, and use nothing near 120KB of JS to do it.

<summary>/<details> tags with JS polyfill is all you'd need.

https://caniuse.com/#search=summary

Your post shows the big difference in mentality that's partly responsible for why we see so many broken sites --- I haven't ever used those tags before and would just go for plain old DOM style manipulation with JS (which has been around for a very long time), whereas you started with something much newer and took backwards-compatibility as an afterthought to be added on. Your solution requires less initial effort (providing you knew about the new tags) but then additional effort to work on older browsers --- that might not even be done --- whereas my solution may take a little more effort initially, but then naturally doesn't need any further considerations for backwards-compatibility.

My mentality is to make the website usable without JS for most people (with the reasonable effort of installing FF or Chrome at most), then use as simple and compatible JS as possible if needed. Thus, old-style DOM fiddling isn't the first choice - and if we're talking very old browsers, it was also tricky to get right due to all the incompatibilities.

Why you think something would be broken when a polyfill is used as fallback, I don't know.

Why would anyone use an older browser? (Other than IE in old firms - but this is probably becoming rarer and rarer) I guess everyone should upgrade their browser regularly, at least to get security upgrades

It's not so much jumping on new things, it's implementing accepted features which has slowed down very considerably since the Blink fork.

Google was really carrying a big part of the webkit development.

> it's implementing accepted features

Define "accepted". Hastily implemented and shoved down everyone's throat by Chrome doesn't mean "accepted".

> Google was really carrying a big part of the webkit development.

Nope. Google is dominating the development space with utter disregard for public/dev opinion.

It's support for video codecs is pretty limited, and has been for a long time, but I think you're right about most of the other things being very new "standards".

It's annoying that it throws exceptions when you try to access LocalStorage in Private Browsing.

And, hilariously, iOS Chrome, because it uses the same renderer as Safari.

Also, the navigation and some other parts aren't usable with ad blocker enabled, since there are no non-JS links/anchors. Embarrassing for an entity that once tried to position itself as a supporter of usability and user-friendly web pages.

If you're not supporting their ad business, you don't matter to them.

You may get a kick out of this...

Google Support

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:53 PM Thank you for contacting Google Domains. My name is <SUPPORT_PERSON> and I'll be happy to assist you. Let me quickly read your notes here.

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:54 PM Hi there

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:54 PM How are you?

<ME>12:54 PM Hi. I'm trying to read your website but it's broken in one of the dominant web browsers in the world.

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:54 PM Hi you said that the link https://domains.google/tld/dev/ doesn't work on Safari?

<ME>12:55 PM The accordion links are broken.

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:55 PM Have you tried in Chrome already though or maybe a private window in Safari already?

<ME>12:55 PM "Is this a one-time payment? Will I still need to pay $12 every year to keep my domain?" click (nothing happens)

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:55 PM It's just maybe a cache

<ME>12:56 PM It's not just a cache

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:57 PM Alright but have you tried other browsers maybe?

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:57 PM I've checked it here and the link you sent works just fine

<ME>12:57 PM Did you test in the latest Safari on the latest macOS? Because it doesn't work fine.

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:57 PM Sorry, not using Mac

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:58 PM But we'll look into it if we get feed backs similarly

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:59 PM We apologize for the inconvenience but please take a look into it on a different browser like Chrome for the time being

<ME>12:59 PM here are other reports https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19178833

<SUPPORT_PERSON>12:59 PM Oh alright thank you

<SUPPORT_PERSON>1:00 PM Let me check that

<SUPPORT_PERSON>1:04 PM We are already looking into it <ME>

> Hi. I'm trying to read your website but it's broken in one of the dominant web browsers in the world.

Don't we all hate reports like this one. "Yeah I know what information you need but my high horse told me to write this crap instead."

> <SUPPORT_PERSON>12:54 PM Hi you said that the link https://domains.google/tld/dev/ doesn't work on Safari?

Where exactly do you think that came from? Kindly note the words "you said".

It's almost as if there was a "please tell us what you're asking about" field that you fill in before being connected to a chat agent or something.

It works great in Edge, Firefox, and Chrome on my PC. I think he's too high up on his horse to realize that the problem may be on his beloved religion/platform.

Made for developers, by developers!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com