Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baxtr | Hacker News Reader

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> We carefully monitor startup performance using an automated test that runs for almost every change to the code. This test was created very early in the project, when Google Chrome did almost nothing, and we have always followed a very simple rule:

This test can never get any slower.

That's actually very similar to how Safari was built.

After Steve showed the Safari icon, he clicked to the next slide. It had a single word: Why? Steve felt the need to say why Apple had made its own browser, and his explanation led with speed. Some may have thought that touting Safari performance was just marketing, a retrospective cherry-picking of one browser attribute that just happened to turn out well. I knew better. I had been part of the team that had received the speed mandate months earlier, and I had participated in the actions he now described which ensured the speed of our browser." [1]

[1] Kocienda, Ken. Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

And Safari Story from Don Melton

https://donmelton.com/2013/01/10/safari-is-released-to-the-w...

Safari may be fast, especially on mobile, but it sure is holding back everyone on features. The irony is that with WebGL2 and WASM, near-native-speed applications would be possible.

Also, if there were Safari APIs for all their fancy chip features, developers might actually use them widely.

The problem is that if this happened, Apple would lose its monopoly on a good app experience. They need web technology to be crappy, and poor performance is part of that picture.

You're not talking about developers in general, you're talking about web developers—and holding them back a little is almost a positive thing to do at this point.

Why? There's a lot of stuff getting developed with web technology as the platform of choice. Not because developers want to, but because major stakeholders are pushing for it. It enables cross-device deployment without gatekeeping by platform holders and crusty IT departments. Making the platform worse just makes these applications worse, it won't turn them into pristine native applications.

WebAssembly support is there, but it needs SIMD and threads to really be fast. That could happen soon, now that there’s some consensus on the standards for both.

WebGL2 support is just about ready in Safari. They are just about fully moved over to using ANGLE as the WebGL backend which includes WebGL2 support. I tested it out with my app on the Safari Technology Preview and it was flawless (as expected from using ANGLE in Chrome).

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