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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

>only Safari is able to stop this madness now

Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.

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I’m guessing a huge percentage of the lost users switched to Brave since it had 25 million as of February and is affiliated with Brendan Eich.

https://brave.com/25m-mau/

I’m guessing a huge percentage now spends more time browsing on their iPads instead of Desktop/Laptop…

Can confirm. Writing this from Brave on my iPhone.

Does Apple still require using Safari as the engine for all browsers on iPhone or has that changed?

Apple requires WebKit to be web rendering engine for all browsers. Safari is one of 100+ browsers on iPhone.

Tomato, tomato

Not really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_engine

34.4M this past month, now.

> Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything

You forgot mobile, iOS users are big chunk of it and websites want to work on iOS browsers.

The US is not the world.

It’s a big chunk of the world as far as web/software revenue is concerned.

iOS users are still a big chunk of it in Europe and Asia. 20% is a big chunk, and we do indeed often want websites want to work on iOS browsers.

It's not going to stop people from using Chrome on machines where it's not available though, obviously.

Once Safari is gone you're not a web developer you're a ChromeOS developer

That's the already the unfortunate state of frontend development, a Chrome world from development to end-users.

Safari doesn't exist for 80% of the world.

This may change if Apple continues producing great hardware like M1 laptops.

That 20% is still a big enough (and more importantly, rich enough) chunk that developers have to support it.

I'm curious. I'm not "frontend", but I do write code that runs in the browser, and write parts of the visualization UI for our products. I do get to determine how we build our products. I've gone with vue/typescript, and that hasn't caused any problem so far. A part of our software has to be able to run everywhere, and that unfortunately still includes IE11, so there I do take care of using a minimal feature set, but I can't remember the last time Safari caused me a problem. What problems does Safari cause?

The past few years I've been saying "Safari is the new IE" in terms of web development. I can't tell you how many bugs I've had to fix because Safari was doing something weird with JS/CSS.

IE11 is going EOL "soon" and at that point Safari is really going to be the odd one out. Chromium and Firefox are at least _mostly_ consistent with each other, save for when Chromium adds some crazy new feature that's nonstandard (but at that point only niche websites are usually using the new feature).

> It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.

I would say as a Chrome developer then.

Thanks for making this personal. I wouldn't have any issue with Safari at all if I was just a chrome developer would I?

The problem was people pretending to be web developers but only testing in IE.

Being IE only made life a lot easier.

Same today. Some people think it is OK to test only in Chrome. That lets one get away with a lot of bad habits.

Dealing with different browsers is part of what makes one a competent web developer.

The problem with their comment is that they're too busy dunking on people.

I do deal with different browsers, hence why I get headaches from Safari. If I didn't, I wouldn't complain about it.

I've been a web developer for a long long time. I know what a pain IE was, and I'm just experiencing it all over again with Safari, although they've gotten better lately.

My comment was maybe a bit provocative but you didn't just say Safari had a few quirks (like the slow release cycle for bugs like the recent ones with LocalStorage and IndexedDB that is a pain), you said it was your bane. That usually mean using Chrome as the main development browser and waiting years for new experimental API to be (sometimes) implemented in other browsers, particularly Safari. In that case like the parent said the pain is more similar to the one a IE dev would have experienced back in the day (early 00's, not late) when some IE specific advanced features would not have been widely available on other browsers.

No, it's the bane of my existence because of bugs, on stuff that people actually use, like flexbox. I use firefox for the record. IE devs didn't give a shit about any other browser, and never had a problem with using the IE specific features because of that.

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