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Comment by coffeebeqn | Hacker News Reader

I mean maybe the software is less quality than it used to be but so is it everywhere else. Software is more complex than it was.

In OSes.. Windows, Android, Linux GUI are all jankier. Apple Music’s closest competitors are all electron-based resource hogs? Safari is still the best mobile browser

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>Safari is still the best mobile browser

I think it only appears that way on an iPhone. I've long believed that there are extremely subtle problems with Chrome and Firefox on iPhone devices that somehow magically don't appear on their Safari browser. Slow scrolling, strange micro lag... somehow on Safari it's better. Yet on my Android phones Chrome and Firefox work smoothly with no issues whatsoever. Also Safari objectively lacks browser features.

This is likely because Apple makes all browsers use Safari under the hood, so Firefox is a skinned Safari on iOS. They do a great job of making it behave similarly to 'real' firefox on other platforms, but where there are holes and weirdness, it's likely down to this.

> Safari is still the best mobile browser

Ha. https://caniuse.com/?compare=ios_saf+16.1&compareCats=all#re...

This might sound odd, but there is an entirely different axis by which to evaluate the quality of a browser than the web developer axis. If you look at the omissions, while there are some things I would prefer Apple to support (e.g. AV1 decoding), there’s also plenty in there whose omission of I consider a feature (basically anything on there that can be used for fingerprinting).

There is also two completely different axis for 'feature support' and 'security', neither of which need to be mutually exclusive. WebKit is really not the 'best mobile browser' any more than Microsoft Edge is the best Xbox browser.

It's not only about features, there's a lot of bugs on Safari mobile you don't really see because basically web devs takes enough time to solve them. I've experienced SVG bugs, z-index bugs, form bugs and even a few dom events bugs to name a few.

Fortunately nowadays I don't need to support this browser anymore on my new company.

Is the Apple Music app honestly much better? The web interface was pretty garbage last time I tried too, constantly stopping for no reason.

And I'd say Firefox for Android has Safari for iOS beat by mile. I can use add-ons like Ublock Origin and no script, plus stuff like background video fixer to play YouTube videos in the background. And I can't think of a single thing it lacks over Safari.

Honestly the only thing it lacks for me is iCloud Keychain but even on macOS. I'd love to have that support + shared history so I can use it properly on desktop and mobile. I know about FF Sync but still I do prefer the iCloud sync.

That being said FF has made some stupid decisions - like the lack of homepage on Android. Like... WAT?!?!

> Software is more complex than it was.

In some cases software quality suffers not because of the inherent complexity but because it's changed for the sake of change.

One example is the Books app that was updated in iOS 16. The update brought some new features but also changed the UI/UX for no reason, making it unpleasant to use. There's no dearth of similar examples with Google's apps too.

> Safari is still the best mobile browser

I don't really mind having switched to an iPhone when I got one provided because for all the discussion, ios and Android are nearly identical but I miss both Chrome and especially Firefox. Android Firefox has actual uBlock. The experience is miles better than Safari.

I haven't use iOS in a while. What is better about Safari than other browsers?

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