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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitive with the apple store.

The difference between the resources Google and Apple contribute to their respective open source browser engines is night and day, and as any web developer will know - it shows.

In an ideal world two things would change at the same time: Apple is forced to allow other browsers, and webkit gets some genuine love and decent resources to make it a legitimate competitor again, instead of being used as a pawn in a game between Apple and Google.

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"basic browsing experience"

Google pushes out yet another half-baked, poorly considered new feature in Chrome and overnight has mobs chanting about Safari purportedly holding everyone back because of some close to irrelevant fringe thing.

Safari might just be the fastest browser, and it supports a ridiculous, awe-inspiring array of features and standards.

And the greatest indictment of the ridiculous anti-Safari smear is that no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.

This is a misrepresentation, before even getting into lack of modern feature support, webkit introduce a lot of long lived regressions on each release and Apple have changed various behaviours in non-standard ways in Safari over the years then left them broken and unpatched on old devices (looking at you autoheight iframes). This has nothing to do with adopting standards and everything to do with a lack of resources, stagnant release cycle and lack of care and support from Apple.

It's not necessary to talk about chromiums bleeding edge non-standard features, webkit easily has the least support for unopinionated standards released over the last decade and adopted by the other two.

> no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.

What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari. If you install firefox or chrome or anything that is a "browser" on an iOS device, it's forced to use Safari webengine underneath, so it's essentially safari with different UI, and this is apparent in the useragent string so any decent stats will show that essentially every iOS user == Safari user.

Lack of modern feature support? This is beyond parody.

"What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari."

Android users use the browser on their device -- any browser -- less than iOS users use their browser(s).

Read the Google corporate propaganda repeated on here, and other platforms provide a web bliss of PWAs, freed from app subservience. Only, not at all.

>Lack of modern feature support?

Can't harass users with notifications.

Safari can open a pdf up like a native webpage in a tab. Until one of the Android browsers can do this out of the box (without having to use a ridiculous fork of Firefox so I can install extensions Mozilla doesn't want me to and installing pdf.js extension to use their own project), it will always be the superior browser.

I used to think that I wanted firefox on my iphone (as I use it everywhere else) but I'm happy they are helping to keep google at bay. I have to say a lot of developers don't understand that they aren't the center of the universe and I don't really care if supporting safari based browsers is still a must and makes their lives a bit harder. It's rough for all of us out of here, as an embedded developer I have to work around proprietary crap all the time and yet I've been doing it for almost 2 decades and I'm still okay mentally and physically and they will be too.

Please keep the hyperbole to a minimum, without technical argument it just encourages flamewars.

How does HN maintain such a great community?

It doesn't.

Agreed but as a read-only user of HN, I am compelled to say that your comment borders on Reddit-like low brow posts that fills most of their tech subreddits. I come here to get a break from all that and get an idea of purely the technical aspect of stuff.

I have not seen such a great community on the internet before, so if you have any recommendations of forums like HN, it would be great!

Last I checked, iOS users use their phones way more than Android users period, including the browser. That plus (probably relatedly, though other factors are also in play) spending habits are why so many apps choose to go iOS-first, or to prioritize iOS Safari compatibility over Android for web sites or web apps.

You wouldn’t be calling Safari awe inspiring if you had to develop for it. It is hands down the worst browser, filled with application breaking bugs and supports the smallest number of features out of any browser.

Arguably it’s a result of having no competition on iOS.

From idb, webrtc, to scroll to viewheight, to performance issues Safari is the worst to deal with and this is reflected in all the developer surveys.

"supports the smallest number of features out of any browser."

This is a bit like saying India has the smallest number of people in countries named China or India.

It's still an enormous number of features, and it is simply extraordinary what is capable in the browser.

"this is reflected in all the developer surveys"

Remember "Made for IE"? IE was dogshit, yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee's knees and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was just an annoyance in their lives.

Developer surveys on this are worthless, and if we listened to developers as a group it would be an entirely Windows world.

So you obviously don’t build apps for iOS Safari and I can understand as a user why you might be under the misguided impression that it’s a good browser. As our primary target environment it is an uphill battle to get things to work in a way that it’s not on either Firefox or blink based browsers.

It breaks in every major version that’s been released. Simply talk to any developer who has to do a significant amount of work building apps in Safari and they will tell you the same thing.

The webkit team is talented and do great work but this is simply a result of a decade of underfunding and it’s just not possible for them to maintain a modern browser with their current resources.

Ignoring that I've been a professional software developer for 26 years, a large part of that building large scale web applications (every one for the past decade+ targeting Safari as well, and before that I always ensured my teams supported alternative browsers even when various team members were moaning and whining about how much a nuisance it is), let me just focus on this-

"misguided impression that it’s a good browser"..."Simply talk to any developer"

Your experience as a developer, and you dealing with utterly trivial regressions or handicaps, has shockingly little bearing on whether it is a "good browser" or not.

Let me know when Firefox finally supports backdrop-filter. And it already took Chrome forever.

> imply talk to any developer who has to do a significant amount of work building apps in Safari

Don't build "apps" in the browser. Period. It's shitty, underperforming, and breaks all user expectations, regardless of the browser it's running on.

I've yet to see a single app, PWA or not, that wasn't so. Unless it's just a re-skin of a simple website with text and images, and a few forms, but then it's just a website, and if you can't make it run on Safari, go find a different job.

This is the we can't have competition, because otherwise poorer quality products will win argument?

I can't parse this statement

> IE was dogshit, yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee's knees and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was just an annoyance in their lives.

I don't think that's true.

There were loads of devs that thought that ActiveX was the quickest route to the best experiences for the largest market segment and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was something the people signing paychecks cared less about, if at all.

We seem to agree entirely.

Many developers would prefer a single, universal browser. A single platform. A single input mechanism (a single development language, compiler, RDBMS, filesystem, cloud provider, backup system, etc). All for obvious, practical reasons, at least in the short term.

That would be devastating for the future, but if it makes projects easier today, many developers are entirely onboard.

That was very much a dominant position among developers in the IE days. Other browsers were a nuisance, and maybe they should just be cut out entirely.

If Safari weren't such an important part of the market, Firefox would have been cut out long ago and we'd be awash in "Made For Chrome (and skinned Chrome)" badges. It is only the economic necessity of supporting iOS users that keeps cross browser development alive.

> That was very much a dominant position among developers in the IE days. Other browsers were a nuisance, and maybe they should just be cut out entirely.

I don't usually resort to personalised dissection of post, but to be frank, you've taken a giant shit all over this subthread so I think it deserves it... this notion of yours seems to be the underlying theme of most all of your comments - that everyone here criticising webkit or Apple must be against browser diversity, be Google proponents, or not value stability, performance and privacy... We are not this caricature... It might be worth your while to take a second to reflect on that assumption and binary view of reality.

You have left a number of these meta comments now (a sockpuppet account even appeared to lend you support), apparently that injured that someone disagreed with your comment. To say these add no value is overstating their contribution.

Thanks

heh, more insightful perceptions i see... no comment then?

The Safari/WebKit team has made a great deal of improvements over the last couple of versions. I think "compatible enough" has turned into a good "basically the same as Firefox" when it comes to web standards with the release of Safari 15 and 15.1.

I also support the stance that certain features should remain focused where they belong e.g. natively installed apps. But who can decide what should be a web standard and what shouldn't... it's hard to say. I think having a healthy governance and enforcement body is a prerequisite before we look at technical specifics.

Exactly. Not much of an Apple or Safari supporter but credit where credit's due Safari 13-15 has made more improvement each version than previous Safari. If they keep up the pace Safari 16 should be very close to current Chrome and Firefox.

https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/releas...

Safari and Firefox have always been close: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

The vocal minority is a very tiny percentage of web developers who believe that whatever Chrome spits out is the bees knees, the modern standard, and all browsers must immediately have that.

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff Google adds to Blink and tries to push as a standard is often outright bad (e.g. FLoC, WebUSB).

This is true, but not a defence of Apple's behaviour. To be clear I don't think chromium is a panacea either, but Apple has not exactly been webkit's friend and is only keeping a 3rd player barely alive as a side-effect. They are both bad in opposite ways.

If webkit was liberated from Apple I think it would ultimately benefit chromium as well.

there are also other companies working on webkit, e.g, sony.

Apple's investment in safari/webkit goes up and down. They've actually made a lot of investments since 2019 or so. Probably less so for the previous 6 years before that. But again, webkit was very innovative in the early 2010s

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