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Comment by masterof0 | Hacker News Reader

They (Apple) implement the features they believe to be the most useful to the users, saying that a browser is killing the web, because for any reason they don't want to play catch up with another company's browser, is a little bit over the top. You can either develop apps with disregard of Safari compatibility, or just use APIs that are compatible with Safari. Safari performs better than Chrome in MacOs and consumes less energy. Regular MacOs users don't care about Safari supporting some CSS property , most websites people use, load just fine. As a dev, I agree with you, Apple should have Safari in a different place, and the API compatibility should be way better, but, saying that is "killing the web", dunno about that, this article seems like a hate piece.

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If anyone is "killing" the web, it is web developers using shitty frameworks and gimmicks on their i9 development machines, resulting in multi-second load times on 90+% of devices in use.

You know what gimmicks web developers use? They use babel and other transpilers that add code bloat in the final asset since they can't use standard JavaScript because a browser doesn't implement certain apis. Or having to use third party shitty libraries as workarounds because again a browser decided they are not going to include functionality that has existed in all other browsers since 5 years.

While that may be necessary for complicated webapps, most sites display text, images and a some video. The tools to display images and text have been available since the 90s. The tools for video (without flash) have been available since HTML5, so a decade.

New recently introduced gimmicks only solve problems that were already solved. There is no reason that a site such as reddit should have to run scripts for 11s on page load, when a pretty much feature-identical site such as HN manages the same with 100ms of scripts running.

Modern webdev is, for the most part, creating new problems that didn't need to be solved. It's a job placement program, nothing more.

> There is no reason that a site such as reddit should have to run scripts for 11s on page load, when a pretty much feature-identical site such as HN manages the same with 100ms of scripts running.

The really disheartening thing about this dichotomy is realizing that all of this extra effort, code, and time are in service of the banality of tracking and ads.

If it was just tracking and ads it would be a lot more performant honestly.

The transpilers aren't really the problem. The real problem is developers adding in all sorts of libraries for every little problem, and each library added is adding tens or hundreds of kilobytes to the final assets size.

I certainly don't mean it to come off as a hate piece - I would really like Safari to do well, and I'm definitely not a fan of Chrome's approach.

My concern is that the approach you describe - if Chrome goes further & further forwards and Safari refuses to keep up or engage whatsoever and more sites start to use those features - eventually leads to a world where everybody _must_ to use Chromium to use the web.

If we get there, the whole browser ecosystem collapses, and the open web is in very serious trouble.

I would rather a world where Safari actively leads web standards, and ensures that they are designed from the start with a concern for privacy and battery life.

Except that we're seeing a world where folks are sometimes deciding to leave Chrome for Safari (or others).

Even in my non-web-dev circles of average folks, they're saying "I hate Chrome" and going somewhere else for their browser.

Even if Chrome "goes further and further forwards" it won't matter if it becomes the de-facto hated browser over time. Safari is banking on the fact that security and stability are more important than "some new flashy CSS" and it is possible they might succeed by following this strategy.

Yet Apple gave up on Safari on Windows and isn't present on Android phones. Unless Macs and iOS devices take over the world (which may happen years from now), Safari will continue to be outnumbered and pushed aside.

Depends where on the globe one is.

There are markets where iOS is pratically 0% and there are markets where it has almost all the market for itself.

So it depends to whom certain business want to sell.

Right now, it's the top browser engine by a long long way, and its market share is either stable (on desktop) or slowly increasing (on mobile).

I don't think either of our circles are representative of the wider world unfortunately.

> If we get there, the whole browser ecosystem collapses, and the open web is in very serious trouble.

I'm not so sure about that. It doesn't seem to me that users are demanding ever more features in their browser. I'm personally just interested in relatively dumb websites, and the only features that could improve the experience is those that improve speed (so I did see some features on the list I wish Safari added, but not many).

And I'm not sure that approach is even sustainable in the long term. How big should the collection of web standards be? Maybe it's come to a point where it's good that a browser holds back a bit? I think that makes it easier for Firefox to keep up with the common standard. It's clear that they're a few years behind on a lot of things, but if Apple really tried Firefox could be the one browser that was always behind, and since nobody is really encourage to use it by any big corporation, it could easily die. I make a point of supporting Firefox on my Windows devices (and it's my back-up browser for Mac as well).

I think the Web being such a gigantic standard that only one or two big megacorporations has the chance to make a browser engine for is much worse for the open web, than Safari lagging a few years behind.

Google (WHATWG) putting "HTML living standard", "URL standard", etc. as heading on their their phone-book-sized monstrosities and calling it a day, then leveraging their power over Mozilla to bless it, then putting pressure over others as the media powerhouse they are, thereby driving browser vendors out of business, can hardly be described as "standard" or other process of finding consensus.

> If we get there, the whole browser ecosystem collapses, and the open web is in very serious trouble.

I don't get this take. Everyone says if Apple doesn't catch up to Chrome then Google will control the web... But like... If Apple is implementing everything Google releases in Chrome to "stay up to date" then don't they already control the web?

Isn't Apple staying back and saying "Nah, we won't be implementing that stuff" making sure that Google doesn't control the web?

> I would rather a world where Safari actively leads web standards, and ensures that they are designed from the start with a concern for privacy and battery life.

We can assume Safari is leading.. but is Chrome following? :)

I think the issue here isn't that Safari is lagging behind in features. IE did that too, and we know where it is today. It is the fact that Apple does not allow any other browser (to use it's own engine) on it's platform.

I don't mind telling users that a particular software doesn't work on Safari and to use Chrome/Firefox. and Many of them will switch too.. if they could.

Chrome aims to be the new Flash. Apple rejected that “engine” first.

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