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Comment by feross | Hacker News Reader

OP here. This issue broke the website we've been building: https://wormhole.app

The vast majority of the time we spend diagnosing and working around browser bugs is devoted to Safari. As an iPhone/Mac user and lover of all things Web, I really, really want Apple to get their act together with Safari. We sadly keep running into issues like this.

Here are a few more recent examples:

https://twitter.com/feross/status/1386835131780931587

https://twitter.com/feross/status/1392671684419735552

https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464

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I've been facing bugs and non standard Safari behaviors for years.

I've been reporting bugs to WK for years and none have been solved.

Did you know you can't set the dimensions of an iframe in iOS?

Oh man. I have spent 100s of man hours on indexeddb on safari issues. Feel your pain!

Safari is the red-headed stepchild of browsers. The dev tools are weird and different, the bugs are obscure and it's pretty much impossible to do anything on it. I love browser diversity but I wouldn't be sad to see it go away.

You could always port the whole thing over to WASM and run it as a spooky blob of code!

WASM still needs IndexedDB (or other storage) to store data in the browser.

You could serialize the DB in localstorage as yet another mysterious blob of data!

But yeah that's not a good idea, really.

What do you need IndexedDB for?

In-browser long-term storage.

Yeah, but of what? Caching the downloaded file? I wouldn’t think encrypted file links would need long term storage of anything. You receive the link, key exchange is derived from key in link, file is downloaded and decrypted on-the-fly.

> Yeah, but of what?

As far as I understand Google's recommendation for web developers, of anything [0]. Their position is, avoid localStorage because it's synchronous, use indexedDB because it's asynchronous. So anything you would use localStorage for, Google suggests putting into indexedDB instead.

I don't remember whether the browser API was expected to get AsyncLocalStorage like the Node API has, or whether that would change Google's recommendations for developers.

[0] - https://web.dev/storage-for-the-web/

GP’s point is that at first blush it doesn’t seem like the Wormhole app should need any local storage in the first place.

Wormhole.app uses peer-to-peer transfer to send your files directly from your browser to the recipient, in addition to using cloud hosting.

We use WebTorrent behind-the-scenes, so we need random access to the end-to-end encrypted version of the files to satisfy requests from peers. So we try to put the files on disk using Filesystem Access API or IndexedDB, falling back to in-memory if there's not enough storage.

Easy, stop supporting Safari. No-one cares when IE support is dropped (people usually cheer for this) and user needs to download and install another browser. So, stop supporting Safari and concentrate on Chrome (I use Firefox but their market share is even smaller so who cares). If enough people show they don't support Safari, THEN Apple will listen. If you keep complaining about having to support Safari then why would Apple care? Not only are you doing all the work for free, you are paying them money for their devices and software.

On iOS you don't have a choice other than Safari (other browsers are just wrappers around safari die to Apple policies). And most of us can't afford to drop iOS support (and most of us aren't even in the position to make that call).

Chrome has other issues once in a while as well. Ironically, they broke IndexedDB in 2018 when a device had less than 1 GB of available space (which happened surprisingly often in 2018 on Android).

A few months ago, Chrome broke all WebView-based apps. Fortunately, they fixed it within a day. The IndexedDb bug was fixed after 6 weeks.

The difference is Apple doesn't care about reported WK bugs.

I reported a bug in 2016 and it's still open.

Another bug I reported in early 2020 doesn't even have an answer from the team.

Any browser on iOS must use safari browser engine (otherwise won't be approved in app store) - the same issue will arise while using Chrome or Firefox on iPhone. Unless you can afford not support iOS/iPadOS users, devs have not choice but complain about bugs.

> Any browser on iOS must use safari browser engine (otherwise won't be approved in app store)

How can they get away with this? That's like 10 times worse than what Microsoft was doing with ie in 00s and they got fined over it so many times.

Not Safari per se. All App Store browsers must use Safari’s engine, WebKit.

Mostly because iOS isn’t the market leader (and they don’t want to be).

In the US they are the market leader in both profit and volume [0].

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

Because this is a bit technical and regulators are not aware of it and its tremendous implications.

Hopefully the anti-trust investigations in the US, the EU and other parts of the world will change that...

The "tremendous implication" is that it forces developers to test on two browsers (mobile Safari, Chrome) rather than just one. It's the only reason Google is just mostly, rather than entirely, dictating the direction of the Web.

This thread exists because Apple didn't have a single test that creates an indexdb (or releases to users with broken tests) breaking the web and already developed sites.

So foisting the blame on webdevs by calling them lazy feels a bit out of place.

Apple has underinvested in Safari for years. It is clear that they have no intention in setting the direction for the web.

I think it would be bad if Chrome became the only browser worth supporting, as disappointing as it is that Safari has these problems.

Chrome 69.28%

Edge 7.75%

Firefox 7.48%

Internet Explorer 5.21%

Safari 3.71 %

Why would Safari be the one that's important and not firefox?

And why would it mean that Apple gets to be an asshole about it?

Firefox is important too (I use Firefox on desktop and Safari on iPhones), but Safari has a much higher percentage of mobile traffic (20% iirc). Edge is re-skinned Chrome these days.

As for why Apple gets to be an “asshole,” there’s no specific privilege granted, inconsistencies are just the nature of the web platform. They probably don’t devote enough resources to minimizing them, but that’s tangential.

Mobile Safari. If a company officially tests on two browsers, it's Chrome and Mobile Safari, unless they're involved with some place still on old version of IE or something.

Mobile Safari matters because that's where the money is.

There's a story about Apple abusing their power and being worse than 90s Microsoft on the front page every other day. The big problem is that there's a lot of cultish defense of Apple and as the victims are software developers and the software industry in general there's not as much visibility to the public as there otherwise would be. Thankfully a lot of the anti-trust action happening right now is focused on Apple so maybe government will help protect the software industry from Apple.

Yes, make Chrome the next IE. I wonder whther things that "do not work on Safari" are alredy Chrome specific.

On the market-strangling side, Chrome is already the next IE6. On the stuck-in-the-past-and-always-broken side, Safari is the next IE6.

The thing is, Apple WANTS us all to stop supporting Safari. It doesn’t help them make money to keep maintaining and extending WebKit to compete with the other browsers. Their (shareholders’) goal is to get more app purchases. I think the only realizable solution is something like antitrust litigation or class action lawsuit to allow web browser competition on iOS, allowing Firefox and Chrome to outcompete Safari. Then we can all drop support and give them the middle finger like IE

I agree that there seems to be no incentive for Apple to keep Safari up to date with features that make native-like web apps possible.

I suppose if they feel like they are big enough to bully websites into just working around long standing bugs, that may be intentional as well.

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