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Comment by davidhyde | Hacker News Reader

Safari is the new internet explorer. Too little, too late.

Nope. Chrome is the new IE. Standards don't matter when you have a high enough market share- you can do whatever you want and people have to support it.

IE was the reference browser for the web in the 90s, and Chrome is that today.

Yes, Safari is the new Opera. Technically superior in many ways but also barely competing. Opera went on to abandon their custom technology in favor of Chrome's after losing their dominant position in mobile to Safari and Chrome. As long as the EU doesn't force Apple to accept fair competition on iOS Safari's future looks bright!

IIRC Opera was planning to adopt WebKit – but when Google forked WebKit, Opera went with Blink instead.

Safari is the new IE6, because the version of Safari you have is locked to the version of iOS you have. Features like Pointer Events, visualViewport, ES2017 etc are available on Android 4.4, because Google still updates Chrome on old Android devices.

I struggle to support iOS 9 (Safari 9) and I barely support iOS 7, because we have a number of users with old devices and we are not a consumer app so we can't just ignore our users who cannot upgrade their browser.

I regularly check caniuse and mdn to see if I can use a useful feature that is in Firefox, Chrome and Edge, and I regularly can't because Safari doesn't support it. Or often I try to use a feature and it is buggy on Safari. Safari is the only browser that regularly breaks our web app (most recently Safari 13 changes for the iPad desktop mode). I also see old versions of Safari in use by some of our MacOS users (presumably because they can't or won't update?)

If our users hit a show-stopping bug in any other browser (browser bug or our bug), they can usually try a different browser. But iOS users can only use WebKit, so they are the most vulnerable to serious bugs.

I would say you can pretty much aim for iOS 10 or even 11 as a minimum. The number of devices running iOS 7 is quite small. My moms iPad 2 runs iOS 9 and that’s about one of the oldest Idevices going

You can do that if you don't have any poor users, or you don't have to care about them (e.g. many consumer apps).

Our clients are businesses, and our users are their employees (from a wide range of backgrounds). The employees must use our web app, and our clients mostly don't get to choose what their employees use.

We log how many users are on old browsers, and we try to support users on old browsers if it isn't too costly for us to do so.

In my experience, the majority of people using a iPhone 4 or an Android 4.4 device are doing so because they can't afford to update, and they are often otherwise marginalised. I try hard not to give them yet another kick in the teeth for stuff outside their control.

90s: Netscape 00s: IE 10s: Chrome

It's not quiet that precise -- there was a transition period at the end of the 90s and a period of multipolar quasi-equanimity before Chrome's dominance -- but it's a decent first approximation.

No nothing is the new internet explorer. We don’t have a situation even close to that. IE has over 90% share and wasn’t updated from version 6 for years and was way behind its competitors. Safari is frequently updated and at least on a par with its peers, supports standards.

It's not insightful commentary to just repeat a meme phrase

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The Internet Explorer that is so hated was IE6. It wasn't too little, too late. It was frozen in time, with millions of corporate workers unable to upgrade. In 2010 IE6 was already 9 years old, yet we still had to support it for business customers.

I'm sure you don't have to support 9 years old Safari.

Mobile Safari, yes. At least from a webdev standpoint. Desktop Safari isn't as bad as IE imo.

I think the main problem in iOS is that Apple requires you to use Safari engine, even if you have the resources to create a competing browser (like Google or Mozilla). So all alternative browsers in iOS are simple skins of Safari.

If Apple allowed alternative browser engines in iOS, the situation wouldn't be so bad.

This. I was really hoping for EventTarget constructor to land: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=174313

Safari now is the only evergreen browser that does not support it.

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