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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article, and well researched.

I have to disagree with the view point of the article however. I view technology as serving users. The author makes a great argument that Safari makes life more difficult for developers. I believe that Safari makes life easier for users. The latest privacy features and reporting are great.

I love my Linux laptops where I run Firefox and Chrome, but for day to day work, writing, and consuming books and digital content, I rely on the limited ecosystem of MacBook, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch.

If companies or web developers really want to use features not in Safari, please do show me a message that warns me to not use your web site. The digital world is a big place, and we all get to make our own decisions.

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> I believe that Safari makes life easier for users

Except when it doesn't. I use Safari iOS (because there's basically no choice since only their engine is allowed) and I regularly come across webms that don't load or that decode atrociously. It would not be that bad if only they would allow other browsers to ship their own engine.

> webms that don't load or that decode atrociously

But why are you blaming Safari for that instead of the site choosing to serve up that particular format rather than something more well supported?

because [WebM is a web standard](https://www.w3.org/TR/mse-byte-stream-format-webm/) so it's natural for developers to expect browsers to support it. If Apple didn't like it they could have pushed back before it was standardized. If people don't like Google dictating so much of web standards, they should be asking Apple to step up and be a bigger player in deciding those standards. It benefits everybody for there to be some amount of cooperation among these big players

> This document was published by the HTML Media Extensions Working Group as a Working Group Note. [...] Publication as a Working Group Note does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.

Specifically not a standard?

https://w3c.github.io/mse-byte-stream-format-webm/ is better in that it's now an "Editor's Draft" but still says "This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress." which strongly implies to me that this is far from a "web standard", no?

ah you're correct, I misunderstood the meaning of Working Note. It seems like Safari is adding support for WebM this year, but even so since it's still an editor's draft I think it's reasonable to expect websites to provide alternatives to WebM if unsupported. I guess that's why it was not included in the list of complaints in the origjnal article

> it's natural for developers to expect browsers to support it.

Well, one important part of the web developers job is to /not/ expect their production to work on every browsers. It’s even an important singularity of this job.

I see too much webdevs folks around me who conveniently work with Google Chrome on their 32 inch screen on a $3k+ workstation.

The web is meant to work everywhere and fail gracefully when it can’t. And this rule applies also if you despise a browser.

Make life easier for users at the expense of developers could very well be Apple's mission statement, and I say that as somebody who did a long stint as a primarly Apple developer. Sometimes the needs of devs and users are at odds, and when they are Apple sides with the users. I'm glad there's at least one company in the market that takes this view.

Can you tell me how do I not use Safari on iOS ? Some help appreciated!

You are conflating a browser (Safari) with a web rendering engine (WebKit). You can not use other web rendering engines on iOS, but you are free to use any of the 100+ different browsers that exist on iOS. Some of them are privacy respecting, some are not, some of them are ugly, some are beautiful, some of them are free, some of them are paid.

You don’t deserve the downvotes here. Chrome used to be based on WebKit now it uses a different engine Blink. It didn’t suddenly become a different browser.

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