Just another day in web development with Safari, I'm not even surprised anymore. I've encountered so many of those "total nonsense" moments.
Now we have "Living Standard"...
On Safari (both iOS and OS X) Safari does not support grid-gap, i.e. "gap" CSS property.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/gap#support...
I use the fullscreen API to give prototype demos of a product to clients, and iOS [iPhone] Safari doesn't support the fullscreen API.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fullscreen_...
As someone who does not primarily do web development... no. No I do not :). I am trying to get it to do what I want in Chrome and I find I hate it only slightly less than older CSS.
Anecdotally, friends have told me I shouldn't use grid, I should use flexbox instead.
Clearly I'm not meant to be a web developer. Some people like it, I gather.
Supporting multiple browsers is a uniquely annoying aspect of web development, and almost every developer uses Chrome for development (I’m a Safari user and it’s kind of a running gag at work). This means that for most developers, Safari is the main browser they have to support that isn’t the one they use for development, which is a recipe for resentment.
Also, I bristle at this comparison a bit because Safari is wayyyyy better than IE ever was about adopting (and helping to draft) standards. They’re slower than the Chrome team and adopting new standards, but that’s because Alphabet and Apple’s business models are different, not because it’s an inherently good idea to adopt every new standard immediately (especially when many are focused on turning the web into a crappy replacement for native app platforms).
IE wasn't mainly a problem because it didn't support things, rather because it was - in the beginning - superior, but also had all sorts of non standard behaviour that Microsoft pushed and that made competition crazy hard.
Oh, and also because they pushed it relentlessly in all ways including - as was later confirmed in court - illegal ways.
Exactly like Chrome today except the multi billion fine and forced changes to Chrome is still only barely visible in the horizon.
But we will keep pushing, won't we? For the record: I think I have contacted local authorities twice officialy over the last 18 months and maybe once over twitter. If two more people do the same here in Norway that is starting to make a difference.
Same if ten people in France or Germany do it. Or if someone makes a story that goes viral or reaches the headlines somehow.
Don't give up everyone! Chrome is an excellent browser but don't think for a moment that Google won't close it down the very moment it has finally crushed competition.
In terms of market share and market power yes it's comparable, in term of tech issues, not really no, it's not even close. Chrome has a very good rendering engine, there's a few quirks here and there, I might have encountered some strange logic once or twice but that's about it.
Safari on the other hand is really comparable in terms of tech issues and the main problem is that you can't even tell people to upgrade on iOS since they are stuck with it.
It's not about tech issues. It's about pushing non-standard behavior. There are so many things Chrome implement and people start using, that other browsers have then to call them "standard" and make a similar implementation.
But even worse, since Google also is controlling some of the biggest websites, they can use this functionality and cripple other browsers for not supporting their "standards". Like YT has been horrendously slow on Fx for years. Not based on Fx being slow, but YT having implementation details that happen to work well on their own browser..
Like with IE that is the next step.
Once competition is utterly crushed, do you think Google "can defend" using tens of millions a year on this?
Microsoft "could not" and they have a much stronger history of maintaining stuff.
Why then would I think that a company that cannot even properly maintain their main public facing property, the search engine?
You know it used to be superior, today it is utterly meh, and no it isn't search spam sites, it is failing to acknowledge doublequotes and the verbatim setting. A billion spam sites cannot break that. Lack of competition can though.
The end result is that the web right now has stuff that works only on Chrome and stuff that works everywhere besides Safari.
And the fact that iOS users can't change their browser forces developers that want their projects to reach the maximum amount of users to have Safari as a baseline instead of the current standard, making Safari a de facto standard.
So yeah, I think that both are the new IE, just in different stages of the life of IE.
Because (Unpopular): I believe the standard should primarily cover how the overlapping functionality works, and refrain from limiting or prescribing the extent of functionality.
Comparing: If I build a HTTP API, I don’t have to support the DELETE verb for any endpoints. I can support ENCHANT if I want magic that other servers don’t have. But if I use GET, the endpoint handler should be idempotent. That’s the kind of standard I appreciate.
I don’t see any realistic win-win otherwise. Either you hold Chrome back from implementing new crap, or you force Safari to implement stuff they don’t want to. The efficient number of browser vendors seems to be small, so I think the standard body has just overplayed it’s hand.
But that is how web standards work already? Vendors are not prohibited from adding additional functionality.
There is standard, and standard as previously Chrome only feature that Firefox felt pressured to implement and was then a posteriori made into a standard.
CanIUse reports that it's only available in Safari Technology Preview for now, which is a macOS program: https://www.caniuse.com/webgl2
With WWDC 2021 only ~9 days away, one can hope that they'll announce its support on all platforms in the next major release. If it was already "good enough" last September…
clicking issues https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24077725/mobile-safari-s... (yeah even clicks are broken)
background jank https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9983520/webkit-animation... (not sure it's exactly this bug but I do have fixes in the codebase for that)
round corners https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50995411/cant-set-border... (still happening right now)
And countless other JS and CSS bugs I forgot I have in the codebase. There's scrolling bugs, navigation bugs, layout bugs, form bugs... I'm sorry to say but nothing really "fully works" it's always slightly off one way or another.
And there's all the quirks additionally to all of that.
I suspect you either didn't read those release notes fully or you don't fully understand what they mean.
I develop primarily on Safari, and only occasionally test on Chrome (for my hobby side project), and occasionally I run into instances where Chrome differs. To me, those look like Chrome bugs because Safari is my "default".
If you're using Chrome (or Firefox, which, in my recent experience, tries specifically to be compatible with Chrome because Chrome is the overwhelming default for people like IE was) primarily, and expecting Safari to exactly match its behavior, of course you'll run into various cases where Safari appears buggy. But to use that to claim that Safari is "the new IE6" is just ludicrous.
I don't know how old other people in this thread are—maybe those making the comparison to Safari weren't actually around for the IE era, or maybe it's just been so long you've forgotten how bad it really was—but I was actually doing some web development back when IE6 and even IE4 were common. They were an absolute nightmare. I don't recall the precise details at this late date, but there were fairly basic HTML tags they didn't implement, and others they implemented completely differently. Javascript features were all over the map.
That realusername has to dig up four fairly esoteric edge-case issues to show that Safari is "total nonsense", and then have HatchedLake point out that at least two of those aren't even current, is ample proof that it's the comparison of IE to Safari that's total nonsense.
For the tags I do agree but for the Javascript I have a good bunch of pollyfills just for Safari in place.
> That realusername has to dig up four fairly esoteric edge-case issues to show that Safari is "total nonsense", and then have HatchedLake point out that at least two of those aren't even current, is ample proof that it's the comparison of IE to Safari that's total nonsense.
All of those issues are current and very much not fixed. Yeah they are very old and have been there for almost 10 years I do agree, but it's still broken now, even after 10 years.
There are several questions regarding bugs - how many are there, how difficult are they to find, how difficult are they to fix.
It seems that there are many Safari bugs that are difficult to find, and to fix, which makes them worse than other browsers.
In this case I believe the bug is actually difficult to find, this guy found it but I bet a lot of developers just went and ahead and wrote it down as a bug with safari, can't or won't fix. But now we know it's an easy fix - don't write Welcome Back in a page if you don't want this behavior.
My question is if your language is another one - like lang="DE" will it then have the same behavior on a page with the German version of Welcome Back.
Are there other magic strings that serve the same purpose as Welcome Back in Safari's mind.
on edit: changed difficult to fix to difficult to find.
- SVG background issue from 2016. Tested on my Safari Tech Preview 113 (Sep 2020), can't replicate.
- Clicking issue. This is related to mouse event bubbling on iOS only (will affect both Safari and Chrome since they both use the same WebView). It's theorised that Apple set a specific set of rules when mouse events (on touch devices) will bubble up for performance/usability. Or it's just a bug.
- A rendering issue from 2012. It's explained in your link this is related to pre iOS 7 era performance improvement by WebKit to only redraw those parts of an image that have changed. Sounds like a very reasonable thing to do, taking into account how Apple heavily pushed performance and battery savings on mobile/laptop devices a decade ago.
- Round Corners. Tested on my Safari Tech Preview 113 (Sep 2020), can't replicate.
I don't see how any of these are anywhere close to being "total nonsense", feels like you're being biased and just exaggerating on purpose to bash Safari.
Chrome force logging in you when you use Gmail to hijack your privacy and link your browser history to an account sounds more "nonsense" than Apple focusing on performance/battery on mobile devices a decade ago that created a regression/new bug that requires 1 line to solve. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942252
I primarily use Safari for privacy/battery/performance reasons, and on my web app of 2 years with tons of styling I have 5 lines of scss code with "// safari" comment to make some elements render the same as Chrome.
Never in my career writing a single digit line of additional css made me think "oh my god this is total nonsense". Everyone has to accept there will be differences from one browser engine to another, and from my personal experience, these are minimal and nowhere near IE6 back in the days.
> I primarily use Safari for privacy/battery/performance reasons, and on my web app of 2 years with tons of styling I have 5 lines of scss code with "// safari" comment to make some elements render the same as Chrome.
You are within your own right to use Safari but you should not expect everything to work perfectly in return, treat it as "best effort" web browsing.
On my case I have about a dozen lines of CSS and same in JS for all the Safari quirks. All of those took time to investigate and fix (especially with their awful debugger...), maybe there's more Safari bugs, I just cannot guarantee everything works.