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Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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?

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