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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Whenever this question is asked Apple is left out, please remember that all browsers on iOS are effectively Safari.

In my market (mostly in the UK), 54% of transactions happen on a iOS device. Nearly 60% of transactions are using the Apple Webkit engine when you also count Safari on MacOS.

Apple absolutely dominates browser engines, I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with Safari then test in Firefox/Chrome. Seems completely backwards to do your development mostly with Chrome.

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Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are absolute dogshit. God have mercy on your soul if you try to use the dev tools for Safari on the phone and/or a cross-platform web-based app on the phone. It crashes more often than not and locks up like crazy. I do everything in my power to avoid using Safari except at the last stage of testing.

> Devtools. Chrome's are bar-none IMHO and safari's are absolute dogshit.

Which is really sad because Safari used to have near-best-in-class dev tools 10-12 years ago.

> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines

Where?

> In my market (mostly in the UK)

Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a bunch of islands. Unless you are building super localised products, the world is a big place with a lot of people who don't use iOS.

In case you didn't know.

>> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines

>Where?

>> In my market (mostly in the UK)

>Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. UK is a bunch of islands. Unless you are building super localised products, the world is a big place with a lot of people who don't use iOS.

You have purposely quoted my comment out of order, implying that I’m unaware of how geography and market effect browser usage, when that’s literally my point and Safari does dominate in some areas.

>In case you didn't know.

Is that tone really necessary?

Yes that tone was absolutely neccesary because you wrote

> I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with Safari then test in Firefox/Chrome. Seems completely backwards to do your development mostly with Chrome.

I do 98% of my dev with a MBP. I hate it but its a work laptop. That being the case, we build products used in multiple continents and Safari has never been first. At best, 3rd. So no sir, we aren't doing things backwards.

> Yes that tone was absolutely neccesary

We will have to agree to disagree on that.

> we build products used in multiple continents and Safari has never been first. At best, 3rd.

So, you have a different experience to me, which is the literal point, and in fact to the global average where Safari is very much second:

https://gs.statcounter.com/

That's really interesting, I also have a feeling that the percentage of Safari users that spend money on the internet, is bigger than that share on Chrome

> Apple absolutely dominates browser engines

Actually, it doesn't. Look at the "usage relative" chart:

https://caniuse.com/?search=localStorage

Safari is the distant second option.

These are my own metrics, which are most important to me. However I believe they are mostly representative of the UK consumer e-commerce market.

Obviously if I was building something like an enterprise/business SASS web app that was mostly used on desktop it would be a different story and Chrome would probably dominate.

My point is people regularly forget about Apple WebKit (due to iOS) in these sorts of discussions.

When it comes to deciding how to test your site and choosing which to use as your "primary" browser while developing, I beleve you should use the one the majority of your customers are using. For us (and allot of people) that's Safari but use your own (not global average) metrics.

I quite like Safari as an end user, but I do tend to do most of my development/manual testing on Chrome first because I just plain don’t understand Safari’s dev tools. If I could just attach Chrome’s debugger, I’d happily use Safari more for dev.

1. I am judged by how it behaves on Chrome.

2. Safari devtools are a lot worse than Chrome.

IMO it seems like "all browsers on iOS are Safari" isn't that big of a deal because 'browsers' on iOS still get to throw all their own features and sync services into their browser app. It'd be like saying you wish you didn't have to use Windows' window APIs to create windows or wished you could avoid UIKit to do anything on iOS.

This is conflating "Browser Chrome/UI" and "Browser Rendering Engine", from a developers/business (and a web standards) perspective the rendering engine is what matters. From that perspective all bowsers "engines" on iOS are Safari/Webkit.

From a purely business standpoint, the UI really is all that matters. Users don't choose firefox over Chrome just because FF has CSS cascade layers[0] (for example), they choose it because they think the sync/PW manager is better for them, or they might like the look of it more compared to alternatives.

0: https://caniuse.com/css-cascade-layers

No, they choose Chrome because it doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, which has everything to do with the underlying tech.

Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere, and Safari doesn't crash (although it only works on Darwin); that doesn't sound like a differentiator.

> Firefox doesn't crash and pretty much works everywhere

Hell, it works more "everywhere" than Chromium (let alone Chrome) does.

Not in my experience. Developers develop for chromium, I find many more rendering issues with Firefox's rendering engine than I do Chrome's.

I meant more in the sense of operating system + hardware combinations on which you can compile/install/run Firefox.

That might well be why a user chooses it, even on iOS. But from my perspective as a business owner and developer, on iOS Chrome is Safari no matter what. When I test my site for use on iOS, I test in Safari. Which variant they use is irrelevant.

Because for anything beyond basic website Safari is a buggy mess, and requires a Mac and maybe had less good dev tooling.

This is hyperbole: if you are developing against web standards, most things work compatibly in all browsers now. In my experience, it's a bit more likely that you'll find a problem with Safari than Chrome or Firefox but not enormously so; the worst I've found are typically cases where someone only developed in Chrome and ended up relying on the non-standard API they started with rather than the final standard version.

iOS Safari (for iPhone) still does not support the Fullscreen API. Works fine on iPad, but not iPhone. Why?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fullscreen_...

And some weird CSS behavior that only exists in Safari right now: like :first-child selectors, limited flex-basis values, the gap property not working in a multi-column layout... It's mysterious discrepancies like this that drive me insane doing frontend for iOS. Apple can't spend a crumb of it's $2T+ getting their browser and dev tools up to par with even Firefox? Please

> Apple can't spend a crumb of it's $2T+ getting their browser and dev tools up to par with even Firefox?

Ugh, please. They've only got a mere 200 billion in liquid cash.

Two things: that's not “a buggy mess” unless you think Firefox/Chrome magically turn into one if you use one of the APIs which Safari supports which they don't or have bugs with. Again, remember that I wasn't saying that there are no problems, only that they were exaggerating the magnitude and degree to which it's specific to Safari.

Second, this is not only not “a buggy mess” but a conscious design decision and one which I generally agree with. Safari supports full-screen video, which is the primary reason why I want this, and the full-screen API is a notorious security risk on touchscreen devices even more than traditional computers because you don't have the equivalent of the escape key or the operating system UI giving you a way to tell that the “Please enter your password” dialog which just popped up was generated by the web page and not your OS. On iOS, Safari is already close to full screen anyway so the extra few pixels is less than what you'd need to account for in different screen heights between devices anyway.

Crashing not just the tab but freezing the whole browse and desktop UI on a non malicious well formed standard compatible pice of wasm...

That (freezing the whole desktop) shouldn't even be possible even if safari has some bug.

also no usable crash report or anything, no way to debug it etc.

Sure that's just one maybe especially unlucky example.

And my comment comes from a "additional cost safari imposes compared to e.g Firefox" point of view. So I'm counting long outstanding missing features as bug (except if missing for reasonable privacy concerns).

Anyway as far as I can tell it's not as bad as IE in it's later days, but not that much better (wrt. cost it forces onto you).

That sounds like you may have an issue with the total amount of RAM used until it eventually failed but that's an edge case, not “a buggy mess”, and it's not like neither Chrome nor Firefox never crash. It's been at least half a decade since one of them has been notably more or less reliable than the others in my experience.

Regarding crash logs, Safari uses the same system crash reporter as everything else. If you want to see those, look in the Console app or use “defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType prompt” or the Crash Reporter Prefs tool from the Additional Tools for Xcode package to make crashes trigger a prompt.

> And my comment comes from a "additional cost safari imposes compared to e.g Firefox" point of view.

Welcome to web development? Preferring one browser always means that you perceive other browsers as a cost because inevitably you will run into a bug or compatibility issue in the one(s) you test less frequently with. It's less common in all browsers these days but it's still pretty much a given that I'll find something unexpected in one of the 3 browsers I end up supporting.

> Because for anything beyond basic website Safari is a buggy mess

As a person who uses Safari as the main browser, I call bullshit.

You use it sure, but du you know how much additional money was sirens just to work around problems with safari so that you don't notice a difference?

How many web apps where cancelled or has to be fundamentally changed because safari?

As a user you tend to not see it as safari is a high profile target and as such devs tend to make sure it works for it.

As a dev who works on a Mac with Safari, I say none: my co’s app, which is quite complex, “just works” on Safari (what I use), Chrome (what the rest of the team uses), and Edge (what our bigger customers use).

Is this because of React? Babel? Webpack? Maybe. All I know is that we happily code away on this complex beast, and everything. Just. Works. Everywhere.

The original statement was "anything beyond basic website Safari is a buggy mess", not "You use it sure, but du you know how much additional money was sirens just to work around problems".

So. As a person who uses Safari as a primary browser, I call bullshit on the first statement.

Additionally, as a person who does frontend for a living (21 years and counting, sometimes just frontend, sometimes fullstack), I call bullshit on the second statement.

> I cannot understand why devs (with Macs) don't all do their initial development with safari then test in Firefox/Chrome

Probably because Safari's dev tools are notoriously worse than what Chrome and Firefox offers.

Perhaps, but I still prefer to develop with Safari then test with FF/Chrome. I'll admit that I'm not necessarily doing cutting-edge JS stuff, but the Safari tools are good enough for my needs.

I don't know any mac users that use Safari willingly anymore

I do, not only for testing as I described but it gives me in significantly more battery time (I believe about 10%).

Yes, the power savings and heat reduction are significant to a large enough degree that one has to wonder why Chrome and Firefox are so much worse in that way.

Curious where you all are going where you aren't plugged in all the time anyway? I don't think I've been away from a charger being within 5 feet of me for 2+ years.

My mom does, but she's getting more and more frustrated with website incompatibilities. I think she knows the onus isn't on Apple, but she still thinks they need to invest more to keep up.

I do. Because for me Safari is a significantly better browser than the alternatives.

Hmmm, every time I have used Safari I ended up frantically looking for a chrome icon. I would absolutely love it if Safari didn't suck.

I just left an org where everyone used Macs (many thousands). Never saw anyone use Safari (except for one project manager expert beginner).

> every time I have used Safari I ended up frantically looking for a chrome icon

No idea what you do in Safari that makes you go to Chrome.

Well. I open the unbearable Google Cloud Console in Chrome. It's marginally faster there. And because I only keep one Google login in Chrome, since none of Google's properties seem to be able to figure out how to work with multiple Goigle accounts consistently.

You might want to look at the stats for whatever sites you work on. For the Mac users of public sites I work on Safari is roughly tied with Chrome with Firefox about 1/5th of either one.

It’s my primary browser because of battery life, tab bar and url bar being the same bar, and it’s reader mode. I’ve tried a lot of chrome extensions and don’t like any of them near as much as safari’s built in one.

I have my whole family using Safari almost exclusively with Wipr content blocker, due to battery life, integrating with keychain and Apple Pay, and I trust Safari for privacy and security more than Chrome.

I do keep Chrome/Firefox around for when I need extensions or Chrome Remote Desktop.

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