The most surprising thing for me is that Safari is first with this.
Am I in a HN bubble where everyone are always complaining about safari, or is that genuinely unusual?
Am I in a HN bubble where everyone are always complaining about safari, or is that genuinely unusual?
On the other hand, if Safari doesn’t support a feature Chrome supports, then that’s a problem for Safari because developers are going to be using that feature.
There’s this sort of naive attitude that “all browsers should just implement all the specifications.” But in reality all browsers take a fair amount of leeway with what specifications they implement, what timeline they implement them in, and etc. There are plenty of fundamental differences between engines that effect browser compatibility, that haven’t been addressed for years.
“Safari is behind Chrome” is just way too linear of a narrative. Web compatibility is a patchwork of over a thousand specifications.
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration/retconning. Between NetCaptor, Maxthon, etc., that's the era that gave us huge innovations: tabbed browsing, popup blockers, ad blocking, site groups, search in the URL bar, and so much more. And CSS, and GeoCities, and streaming video and animated applets/games/Flash...
There was so much innovation going on, the real difficulty was in being able to display your content to your audiences. CanIUse wasn't around then and there were huge incompatibilities between IE, Netscape, Opera, eventually Phoenix, etc.
It wasn't the diversity in engines that allowed innovation, it was the market exploring different features and eventually converging on the ones that people really wanted. If anything, having redundant engines slowed down actual development. IE6 was king for a few short years, and in those few years the web was more stable than it ever was before or since, and content was king instead of engine differences.
For now Chrome has the best of both worlds: market dominance and rapid innovation. They have no meaningful challengers anymore... Firefox/Gecko is dead and WebKit is only a thing because of iOS, and thankfully it at least shares a heritage with Blink.
I think your link proves the opposite point: that the web ecosystem is wasting time on interop instead of actual features. We don't need three renderers that do roughly the same thing, but nothing exactly the same. It was Chrome's hegemony over the last 5-10 years that actually gave us huge leaps in web usability, dev specialization, best practices, and content creation. The real changemaker was making Javascript safe and fast enough that native in-browser programming became a reality.
There is no such thing as web standards in reality, only Blink and WebKit's mostly-compatible implementations. If we could move past that delusion and just converge resources on Blink/V8 and just evolve that, the web would be better off for it.
Thanks to Mozilla we then got asm.js, wich evolved into Wasm and ultimately replaced NaCl.
Now imagine there was one engine and Google could implement whatever they wanted? RIP privacy and well-designed standards.
Then Flutter came out of nowhere and reintroduced everyone to Dart again.
Mozilla is largely Google funded anyhow. If they wanted to drop funding and go their own way they could do so anytime.
It would have a far better chance of working if the Chrome/Blink team were spun out of Google into a nonprofit that is protected from the financial influence of Google.
Chrome has been doing some terribly shady stuff with Blink whether we look at their various tracking proposals, “portals” which are a blatant attempt at ossifying Google as basically the internet itself, or the extreme standard-stuffing they continue to participate in to ensure no further competitors can pop up.
But beyond that nearly every point you raise here is completely off.
WebKit is superior to Blink, in almost all ways. It’s simply a much better browser and has been for a couple years now. Faster, lighter, and supports nearly everything you need. Every time I’m forced use Chrome, it’s like having to walk through a shady neighborhood - I literally can’t wait to close it. That thing sucks memory and battery in a way no app should, and Googles numerous shady tactics in trying to get you to login so they can avoid your privacy settings is downright hostile.
Leaps in best practices? Is that a joke? Web Components pushed by them is one of the worst things to happen to the web. Half of the standards they’ve pushed are actually regressions.
And again, Chrome is much slower and more bloated. If anything Safari is far better today for delivering a more native experience.
And your last paragraph is very much the kicker. The funny thing is the Safari thing is the only thing keeping Chrome in check. If this is what they’ve tried to get away with with Safari, I don’t understand how you can be advocating for even less competition. Interop is an incredible project that will save developers massive amounts of time, while ensuring we don’t end up with the most privacy invasive and manipulative company of all time controlling the web for the next 1000 years. Thank god for Safari.
You might want an advertising company to have unilateral control over the shape of that pipe, but some of us feel more comfortable knowing there’s a viable alternative with competing priorities.
I, for one, wouldn't like using the web with a web browser built by an advertising company pushing for Manifest V3 and killing adblockers as a result.
Given the history of those two, that’s amusing.
Safari has consistently been the fastest, more battery and privacy concerned browser.
Safari is WebKit, which historically has given us a lot of the CSS standard niceties we take for granted.
It also supports webp, even though I never use it. It’s a Google thing, not widely supported by image editors and which fails to be consistently better than a properly optimized jpeg.
If you thing you need webp try running it through MozJPEG first
I would like to see a decent true successor to JPEG which does stuff like alpha channels, but the annoying extend-embrace-extinguish approach Google used with WebP has turned me off of considering it very seriously.
To me, a format must offer significant advantages to overtake decades old standards.
Webp does lossy compression with alpha, think photographs with transparent parts. Png can't do that lossily and jpegs can't be transparent.
Dittering, quantization and lots of dirty tricks:
Questions like: will you be able to open them in 20 years, does this version of ImageMagic supports it, are not things I’d want to deal with daily.
Yeah, thanks but no thanks.
Hard to compete with standards with expired patents and equivalent if not better performance when the other side is sponsored by a single company. Especially one not particularly known for long term commitment to their projects.
Typically I've seen webp served at the CDN or client, where a png or jpeg alternative is also available, and where (hopefully) the website owner has the original asset somewhere safe.
Between "now" and "nobody uses webp" anymore, it's still a super useful format to speed up pages for a majority of users. That doesn't mean you should rely on it to be a safe archival medium, but that's not the only consideration.
Of course nobody is going to force you to use that (or really notice if you don't). It's just one image format out of gazillions.
With blurry backgrounds for example JPEG invents new colors. webp just blurs.
I worked on a media heavy fashion site a few years ago and dealing with Safari not allowing you to dynamically add new audio/video elements with auto play (or to auto play at all in low battery mode) was a real headache. By default it’s great, just offer the option to get permission for experiences that require it.
Currently most solutions are to load a number of empty audio buffers when the user first clicks and repurpose those for auto playing content later.
If a user has visited a multimedia focused web site (eg: online catwalk show), why not allow them to opt in for that session rather than force them to have a cut down experience?
There are work arounds? Looks like they need to be even more aggressive.
And yes. Making a streaming application. The CDN that the media is provided through uses cookies to coordinate "side band" metadata. On Safari, there's no way to get at the metadata due to the cookie policy. So, you get the media, but literally no metadata or features associated with it. It's a worse experience for any Safari user and doesn't actually enhance their privacy in any way whatsoever.
The workaround was to get the streaming provider to allow the correlation ID that would normally be conveyed through a cookie to be conveyed through URL parameters instead.
So.. to the extent that I could track you between two sessions, the workaround means I still can. Not that I need to track you, but because I need to correlate two streams between two different servers onto one device.