Obligatory "HN post about Safari" note: Still waiting on MSE and fullscreen (for elements) API on iOS, both supported on macOS and ipadOS for years.
MediaSourceExtensions are vital for supporting media in Safari (and already available in iPadOS and MacOS [and under the hood on iOS for VP8/9 support]) and the fullscreen API for arbitrary elements is necessary to support video + slides (or other sideloaded material) and to support captions/subtitles that need features not supported with regular textracks.
“Safari is the new IE” has been the meme for years, despite the fact the situation is totally different. Any time Safari is mentioned or gets a new feature it’s just posts from people complaining Safari doesn’t support WebUSB or whatever their pet feature is.
So Safari added the one I see people complaining about more than anything else. The top complaint on HN for literally years.
And you just switched your complaining to something else. Most people here are celebrating they got something they’ve wanted forever.
Personally I’m just tired of all the bitching. There is no escaping it, it seems.
You could have framed your comments much more positively. Perhaps that would have helped.
My 2¢ guess.
The situation with Safari and IE is very different. What is not different is that they were the most damaging browsers for progress of the web platform in their respective eras.
Safari isn't the new IE, Safari is the new Netscape.
Chrome is the new IE in that danger period. All the web developers complaining about Safari and Firefox "being slow", that's the danger signs. That's the warning flags. That's the new IE damaging browser progress by locking people into single-browser "web standards" that aren't standards. I don't know if the web will reap the same consequences this time, if there will be a Chrome stagnation to follow this Chrome danger time. I do know that the warning signs aren't what a lot of people think they are. The warning signs are the complaints about "Safari holding back the web" because they tend to imply that Chrome is the web when it isn't.
It had a garbage collector that made very rich webapps nearly impossible. https://vinaytech.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/garbage-collectio...
It had CSS bugs that weren't fixed for years. https://css-tricks.com/ie-css-bugs-thatll-get-you-every-time...
It didn't implement features that web developers asked for and didn't even join the working group formed to standardize those features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
It had security issues that made it dangerous for people to use the web.
Safari suffers from the last three of those problems, and Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd.
I notice you don't mention ActiveX as being something that "pulled the web forward".
XHR, just like MSE, which the person who started this thread is asking for, expands the usability of the web in a vendor-neutral way. MSE, better than XHR, went through a standards process to ensure web publishers wanted it and browser vendors agreed on the API. There is no reason for Apple to drag its feet on implementing MSE on iPhones, aside from protecting Apple's profits. It is ridiculous to see people defending Apple about this.
While the web eventually standardized things like XHR and CSS box-sizing, they were done in ways that made migration of those "single browser apps" just slightly uncomfortable enough so companies especially procrastinated staying on the stagnant browser as long as possible to avoid paying down tech debt in their "legacy" apps.
Today's "bleeding edge" apps are tomorrow's "legacy apps", and people aren't building "bleeding edge" apps for Safari [0], but they are building Chrome-only "bleeding edge" apps using all the little things that are like XHR in their own ways (WebUSB, Speech Recognition, what have you). The danger is that there are far too many of them.
Again, I can't predict the future and I can't assume that Google execs are dumb enough to do the exact same thing that Microsoft did: check their (current!) marketshare, declare themselves the winner, and decide to finish Chrome as a project, moving the development team to more important tasks to the corporate bottom line. I want to believe that the pursuant stagnation would be less overall a dark period for the web because plenty of Chromium forks exist, but the install base is huge and convincing them all to switch to a fork would still be a massive marketing effort that wouldn't happen overnight. But stagnation is the consequence of the danger of people building single-browser apps, it's not the danger itself.
The canaries (Safari, Firefox) are dying and blaming the canaries for being weak is avoiding asking hard questions about if the web is currently safe or not.
> Apple makes them even worse by preventing other renderers on its platforms. If I had an iOS device, I'd want to run Firefox. I can't. That's on Apple, and pretending otherwise is absurd.
That is a different, unrelated problem than comparisons to IE. Even when pre-installed on Windows IE never stopped people from installing other browsers or setting them the default. It got real unfriendly about it in some versions of Windows, but it never (could have) blocked them entirely.
That's still a problem to deal with, and maybe even a major problem, though these days iOS and Android are pretty neck-and-neck in the market and iOS does not have the domination it once had even in the US. But it's not at all the same problem as IE was.
[0] Anymore; I will admit there was a brief period early in the rise of iOS with -webkit- prefixed everything where it was a small concern.
It doesn't matter that iOS isn't dominant to the extent that Windows/IE was. The fact that roughly half of users are stuck using a buggy and outdated browser is enough to prevent the web platform from being useful to people like the original commenter.
Nobody is facing yet.
That is my point. It's a huge danger that people aren't appreciating enough. If we want to use the history of IE as a warning lesson lest we are dumb enough to repeat it, it's a warning on letting a single browser get too much marketshare. It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable.
It feels like the problem is "all these other browsers are buggy and outdated", but that isn't the danger, that's the symptom of the danger. People said the same thing about Netscape/Pheonix/Firefox when IE was "winning" that those browsers were too slow and "preventing the web platform from being useful". That's the dangerous cycle here.
Maybe we'll be extremely lucky and the Chrome hegemony will never be the same problem that IE was. But blaming Safari for being "slow" in this scenario is putting the blame on the victim of the hegemony problem.
And nobody ever faced with IE. That wasn't the problem with IE. That is my point.
> It's a warning on relying on "bleeding edge" features that aren't yet stable.
MSE isn't bleeding edge or unstable. Apple itself implemented it years ago on Safari for Mac, where it has no App Store revenue to protect.
The feature this article is about isn't bleeding edge or unstable either. Apple is implementing it exactly the same way all the other browsers already have.
Then MS stopped doing anything. For YEARS. Just sat there.
Everybody wanted the web to improve but the browser everyone was using didn’t.
IE 6 was fine at release. But JS didn’t improve. Bugs didn’t get fixed. It just sat there.
Not only has Safari never had that kind of market share, Apple has continue to improve it since the day they released it. Safari seemed to peak around 45% (mobile only) just a few years after the iPhone release.
Safari has never been IE. Unless you mean “that thing that isn’t chrome and doesn’t include every single chrome feature the day it’s announced”.
Safari is even worse in one key respect. When IE was bad, your website could tell users to use Phoenix instead. With Safari, there is no such option.
I certainly know the noise in the comments here when Safari is discussed. And that's why I only gripe on these two features which are available in every Safari for several years now, except on iOS, with no apparent reason.