Hacker News Reader

Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

Sure it's nowhere near as bad relatively speaking as IE was at it's worst, but Safari is still consistently slower to make new features available than other major browsers.

This still isn't really a problem (if it gets bad enough, devs will just stop supporting it), except for on iOS where it's the only browser available, so not supporting them is not an option.

View on HN

but Safari is still consistently slower to make new features available than other major browsers.

Safari was the first browser to ship the most anticipated web feature of the last 3-4 years by web developers: the parent selector :has() [1] back in March.

When you check the Interop 2022 dashboard [2], Safari Technology Preview is ahead of both Firefox nightly and Chrome dev for the shipping the latest web features. Safari Technology Preview is passing 97% of the interop tests.

In case nobody noticed, the WebKit team kicked ass by shipping a ton of new features this year:

* dialog element

* lazy loading

* inert

* :has() pseudo-class

* new viewport units

* Cascade Layers

* focus visible

* accent color

* appearance

* font palettes for color fonts

* BroadcastChannel

* Web Locks API

* File System Access API

* enhancements to WebAssembly

* support for Display-P3 in canvas

* additions to COOP and COEP

* container queries

* subgrid

* web push

* shared workers

* CSS Offset Path

* AVIF

* Passkeys

Plus it’s faster and has better battery life on macOS than either Chrome or Firefox. What’s not to like?

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/12445/new-webkit-features-in-safari-...

[2]: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022

> Safari Technology Preview is ahead

My userbase isn’t using Safari Technology Preview, they’re using Safari

> the most anticipated web feature

I’m curious how you measured this - I have yet to be interested in :has(), but I am very interested in AV1 and PWA features...

Another point here: you can't update safari without updating ios itself. That means people who don't update or have old devices won't get new fetures. Also, safari STILL doesn't support a lot of new wasm extensions. So not really the picture GP is painting.

Another point here: you can't update safari without updating ios itself.

True. But each release of iOS gets to around 90% of the installed base by the time the next version of iOS gets rolled out; it’s non-issue for the vast majority of iOS users.

iOS 15 was updated 12 times [1] between September 2021 and July 2022; iOS users either got bug fixes or new features (usually both) in Safari each time, including users of the iPhone 6s, which shipped September 2015, more than 7 years ago.

Also, safari STILL doesn't support a lot of new wasm extensions.

According to caniuse [2], Safari’s WASM support seems to be just as current as Chrome and Firefox.

[1]:

    Version Build          Release Date
    15.0    19A341, 19A346 September 20, 2021
    15.0.1  19A348         October 1, 2021
    15.0.2  19A404         October 11, 2021
    15.1    19B74          October 25, 2021
    15.1.1  19B81          November 17, 2021
    15.2    19C56, 19C57   December 13, 2021
    15.2.1  19C63          January 12, 2022
    15.3    19D50          January 26, 2022
    15.3.1  19D52          February 10, 2022
    15.4    19E241         March 14, 2022
    15.4.1  19E258         March 31, 2022
    15.5    19F77          May 16, 2022
    15.6    19G71          July 20, 2022

[2]: https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm

>Safari’s WASM support seems to be just as current as Chrome and Firefox.

I don't think that tracks individual extensions. For example bulkMemory, simd, saturatedFloatToInt, and signExtensions are not implemented iirc.

SIMD bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222382

> …but Safari is still consistently slower to make new features available than other major browsers

See I’m not so sure that’s a problem. Many of the things they haven’t added I’m glad they didn’t. I like that they aren’t just rushing to implement everything someone proposes or a competitor ships.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

When I say features I mean actual HTML standards, not just random features browser vendors decide to implement.

Safari's priorities are different from Chrome's.

Google is effectively shipping a cross-platform “metaplatform”, for which the browser is the trojan horse. Apple is shipping a web browser that only runs on its OS and hardware.

So Webkit is slow or unwilling to implement features that may hinder battery life, user privacy or that simply have better native alternatives. Webkit is actually on the forefront when it comes to CSS features, like the recent has() selector, or JS memory usage and overall page speed.

What I think is a fair criticism is that Safari is generally tied to the OS and gets outdated when the user is unable to upgrade the OS (or oblivious). Evergreen browsers are a revolutionaty concept, not without its drawbacks, but all in all, were very positive to the web.

I use Safari but I would prefer it wasn’t shipped on the same schedule as the OS. I understand why (I think) but I’d rather have more frequent updates, even if only every 3 months or so.

That’s a problem with most Apple apps. Bug in Mail? Better hope it gets fixed in the next iOS or MacOS point release. Because the fix isn’t coming out earlier.

Yeah, but I think Mail is in a different league.

A browser is so fundamental to modern computing that if you can't run the latest version, you might as well have a paper weight. You can run mail, office, games, all in the browser if the native alternatives fail you.

Chrome still supporting High Sierra is what makes old Macs usable.

Safari Developer Preview is stable and available out of sync with the OS.

It does make sense that it is shipped with the OS since Safari is just a wrapper around the OS WebKit library which is used across many apps and services.

Safari Developer Preview requires the latest versions of the OS, so it's not of much use.

The WebKit library should be always stable. In that case, I don't see a problem with other apps relying upon it.

How many of those "actual HTML standards" in the past 10 years are actual standards and not "whatever Google scribbled on a napkin and pretended it was a standard"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com