Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpuguy83 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who uses Safari on Mac, I can say that compatibility issues are a big deal. Granted many of the issues are simply from sites checking for Chrome and telling everything else to f--- off. I've even seen a site fail to run on (chromium) Edge because it really wanted Chrome. However, real compatibility issues are a thing as well.

That said, I hate electron. I hate that I have to run 4-5 instances of chrome on my machine all day long for various different apps instead of the developer checking that their stuff works across the 3 main rendering engines.

View on HN

You are correct that Safari has major compatibility issues, but incorrect that the problem is simply that developers target Chrome (it happens sometimes, sure). Most things that work in Chrome also work in Firefox, but WebKit is ~10 years behind both Firefox and Chrome because Apple hasn't invested in keeping up to date with web APIs where their competitors have. Hell, even Edge (before it adopted Chromium) was more compatible than Safari.

Personally, I view Safari in 2022 the same way I viewed IE in 2012 - as a backwards browser holding back web development because the company developing it just doesn't care about the web. The compatibility issues aren't as bad, but I have to care about Safari because iOS still won't let any browser use anything other than WebKit, where there was a point where saying "Anyone choosing to use IE11 deserves a bad experience" made a certain amount of sense. No one gets a choice on their iPhone, so Apple makes things harder for web developers, probably because they want them all to be iOS app developers instead.

Personally, I think the last few versions of Safari have caught up a lot.

Safari development does seem to go through spurts, depending on who is working at Apple. Let's not forget that in the past, it's been a major driver of web innovation, particularly in the late 2000s to early 2010s.

To be fair, I hate Safari with a passion. It took until iOS 15 for support for WebAssembly.initiateStreaming and there’s still no support for WebM or Opus on iPhones. Curiously, on platforms where Apple doesn’t mandate a browser engine, Safari is magically able to support codecs that aren’t patent-encumbered…

Just to clarify - WebKit does support Opus, but using their CAF container [1], which is a pain to deal as it requires double the space to store essentially the same encoded audio twice.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/A...

Nobody tests on a Mac. If Apple wanted the platform to be supported they could make it much cheaper to test on, but instead they've made developer hostile moves for the last ten years.

Github actions has Mac runners at the same rate as Linux runners, including the free tier (though the free minutes burn faster, as I understand it).

It's a 10x multiplier to run mac on GitHub actions https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-gith...

Granted many of the issues are simply from sites checking for Chrome and telling everything else to f--- off.

The world has circled back to the bad practices around IE 6! History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com