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Comment by strombofulous | Hacker News Reader

I own a business and recently had to change all the pictures on my website from webp to png because safari both refuses to render webp and pretends to accept them. I hate it so much and see very real costs in increased bandwith (every image is around 3-4x bigger) but I have no choice because I want people with iphones to be able to buy things from me. Safari is honestly just as bad as chrome but for different reasons (ios safari was arguably the single biggest cause of the death of flash, for example). I also had to go through and fix a few other pseudo css classes that only safari didn't support which was really annoying, what a waste of time.

I don't think many people would consider "Don't use safari" banners a valid option unless the website was somehow really focused on non-apple users or not trying to sell something.

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> safari both refuses to render webp and pretends to accept them

weird, i haven't had that issue! i run a site that's set up¹ to redirect image requests to a WebP version if the Accept header allows it; half our team uses Macs w/ Safari and no one reported any issues with images.

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¹ wordpress + webp-express: https://github.com/rosell-dk/webp-express i guess it's possible they special-case Safari, i'll check later

It could've been my setup, to be honest I had just finished fixing all the pseudo classes and was kind of frustrated and decided to just switch to png after I couldn't figure it out in 5 minutes hahaha

But whatever the case is, Safari definately does not support webp and special exceptions need to be made to support this edge case.

> https://caniuse.com/#search=webp

Nope you are right, when reading the linked issues, safari doesn’t have webp support.

Yeah, but that’s not the issue/question. Not supporting webp is fine, the important thing is that it doesn’t send an accept header that includes it. I don’t believe it does.

just had a friend with a Mac test it. when requesting foo.jpg (from an <img> tag), it sends:

  Accept: image/png, image/svg+xml, image/*;q=0, video/*;q=0.8, */*;q=0.5

the server responds with foo.jpg.

i also tested it in Firefox, which sends:

  Accept: image/webp, */*

the server responds with foo-converted.webp.

honestly, i'm not entirely sure how

  image/*;q=0
  */*

etc are handled, but it works; i also briefly looked at the plugin's source, and i haven't found any special handling for Safari. btw, here's a test page linked in their docs: http://toste.dk/rh.php

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edit: looking at the generated .htaccess, it appears that WebP is served only if Accept contains an explicit `image/webp` (no wildcards), so that explains it.

> ios safari was arguably the single biggest cause of the death of flash

I count that as a good thing about ios safari.

I use Roll20, a popular web app for playing tabletop games with others over the internet. It doesn't work in Firefox or Safari; it's the only reason I keep Chromium on my machine.

Really? That's very odd. I use in just fine with Firefox weekly.

It might only be the video/audio chat that's broken, but I know something about it was broken

About 6 months ago I remember it being totally unusable on FF, even without using the AV stuff.

For every example you can find me of a website that doesn't support safari I could find 10 that make exceptions to do so. The point isn't that nobody does it, it's just that most companies who want to make money from the general population (aka most of them) have to.

Roll20 is also such a niche thing already it's not really a fair example. People who want to use roll20 will use another browser because they want to play dnd with their friends. Most stores don't have that social aspect.

My point is that if YouTube stopped working on Firefox because they didn't agree to a new standard Google had invented, lots of people would stop using Firefox.

It takes someone who really cares about these issues to bother switching back and forth between two different browsers because you want to use a non-Chromium for most things but have to use Chromium for a couple of things. The vast majority would just say "well, whatever" and switch completely.

I stopped using Roll20 but switched to Zoom chat. Zoom chat has much better video chat support, also has a private chat function, and for our game, we could do without the "whiteboard" and the computerized dice rolling. It also would kill my network connection. It was a horrible experience.

I've been using Roll20 on Firefox for 4ish years. (I was a Kickstarter backer, but I'm not sure when I switched to Firefox from chromium).

And this from Slack: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/958645632620748800?s=20 And Skype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20818750

I've used Roll20 a fair amount in Firefox and the only times I've had to pull out Chromium it turned out the the bug was present there too. Which things specifically don't work for you? (gf knows one of the devs, so I might try to poke at them to fix it)

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