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Comment by tims33 | Hacker News Reader

Great news! What is the next big piece of software that needs to be retired to make the Internet a better place?

Safari?[0] It's especially a problem when Apple don't allow other browser engines on its devices, although governments are looking into that.[1]

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/safari_risks_becoming...

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/10/uk-antitrust-agen...

My only wish is that Apple make it easy to run Safari, both latest version and older version, on non-Apple device.

I have had a design that broke only on Safari, and I would be at my wit end on how to fix it if I didn't have a Mac on hand.

Even Microsoft still provide VM with IE8 [0] for testing purpose.

0: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...

> I have had a design that broke only on Safari, and I would be at my wit end on how to fix it if I didn't have a Mac on hand.

I use BrowserStack for it; for just one issue a trail account is enough, if you use it for an open source project you can request free access, and for a business it's relatively cheap.

I've got a pro account for a few of my open source projects; I don't often use it, but have on occasion (for things like you describe, and I don't have a Mac on hand).

I have a macbook on my desk. The only reason it's here is to run Safari a couple of times a year when something crazy happens.

Some time in the last couple of years, it needed an OS update that took a couple of resident Apple experts to get through.

Moving to a monobrowser internet... What could go wrong?

Edit: oh, I should add:

The main data from your first source is out-of-date... Here's the dashboard today: https://wpt.fyi/compat2021?feature=summary&stable

Your second source is more of an argument to keep Safari around. If the Chrome/Safari duopoly on mobile is a problem, getting rid of Safari makes it worse.

I dunno, then there would only be 2 actively maintained browser engines, Chrome and Firefox.

Webkit is doing pretty good on https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 so I'm not sure why Safari should be retired.

The problem is a mountain of older ipads and iphones and ipods that aren't eligible for the latest major ios upgrades, and thus get stuck with an outdated safari/wkwebview/webkit implementation. This is only going to get worse as the EOL'd ipads these days are quite powerful and usable otherwise. And due to Apple policies banning bring-your-own-html-engine, firefox or chrome can't save them either :(

Most of my Safari compat issues are on older iOS devices that don't get Safari upgrades, for better or worse those devices do last a long time and a lot of people resist upgrading Mac software.

At least it definitely shouldn't be the only available browser. So we could say that the Safari monopoly should be gone

I guess in the spirit of the open web, Chrome might be a good candidate for retirement. There is even a growing consensus that "Chrome is the new IE".

Nimble Storage devices warn you if you try to administer them with Firefox instead of Chrome.

I'd choose to kill some social networks... which are so social that you can't even read them without an account.

Windows server, use Linux instead, it is possible to do this with samba for long time, I had this setup with samba for 50+ hosts with AD/GPO/Storage all working, this was more then 6 years ago.

My current career (VDI/DaaS stuff) depends on Windows Server still being a thing. Maybe I should switch to make it depend on Linux instead?

I don't know about cloud stuff much to be honest, if I would do it today, Linux server would also PXE booting Windows hosts (well samba servers are also PXE booted), that are cheap Mini PC's, I like having everything on premise, dual cheap servers + pfsense router (used would do it) will easily support 100+ hosts, with offsite full backup to rsync.net, I can see how samba servers can be in closest data center, instead of on premise.

The only companies that make this work are engineering their own solutions. I hope that broadcom acquiring vmware will inspire the competition to be a little better in this regard, but it'll be awhile and lately the market has been swinging towards cloud desktops instead of onprem vm hosts.

Edge up until version 18 is pretty bad, not far from IE11. It is the last Edge browser using EdgeHTML.

Chrome.

Outlook/Exchange.

Outlook still used IE11 for some of its functionality up to Office 2021, until Microsoft recently patched it to use Edge. 2013 to 2019 still use IE11 for rendering some functionality inside Outlook. And of course MS Word (!) for rendering emails.

bind

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