> "Want global web compatibility? Fuck you buy a Mac"
Still better than "whatever we throw over the wall is now a standard" that Chrome has, and you can see people clamouring for those on HN.
Still better than "whatever we throw over the wall is now a standard" that Chrome has, and you can see people clamouring for those on HN.
It's easy enough to not use stuff like web USB, and in my experience chrome and firefox "get along" while a page (doing more advanced things) not built for safari simply will not work in safari.
The problem with safari is that Apple makes it so you have to use it if you want your site to work on it. Chrome, I can safely ignore.
I also literally can't use safari if I don't have a Mac.
I've yet to see such a page [1]. And I've been using Safari since 2007
[1] Unless it's built with Chrome's non-standards of course.
Edit: of course there will be pages broken in Safari (or FF) for no reason other than the sheer incompetence of people building them. E.g. we have an internal dashboard page that is literally nothing more than tables and charts. Ooops, "only works in Chrome".
There's also the minor case of nominally open audio and video codecs that Google pushes to device manufacturers on pain of removing access to its services, but even that hasn't affected me, or most people really, that much.
Developers are eating the problems for you because safari support is almost always a requirement.
This is a developer side problem, not a user side one.
> for no reason other than the sheer incompetence of people building them
Safari never breaks, but when it does it's because the developers are incompetent?
The fact it takes a bunch of extra work to support safari (in more advanced cases like graphs and dashboards) is the whole problem. I have every intent to kick safari out of any home game stuff I do.
The problems "developers are eating" are hugely overblown
> Safari never breaks, but when it does it's because the developers are incompetent?
In 99% of the times? Yes.
> The fact it takes a bunch of extra work to support safari
No, it doesn't. Source: web developer myself.
Of course, if you rely on Chrome-only non-standards, that's a different issue.
> in more advanced cases like graphs and dashboards
Graphs and Dashboards are advanced use cases now. Gotcha.
I've been in these threads many times, and it's the same thing again and again:
- Safari is holding back the web! It doesn't. Well, if you think that Chrome is web, then you're entitled to your opinion
- Safari is new IE! It's not. That it doesn't implement the 400 or so APIs a year that Chrome implements is a feature, not a bug. If your site ends up with a "only works in Chrome" badge, that is your new IE
- Chrome split from WebKit three years after WebKit appeared. And the only reason for the split? Well, to do the same thing you accuse Apple and MS of doing: control. And look how well it worked for them. Everything they do is now considered standard and gospel by the gullible masses of web devs.
And so on.
The irony is that it's Chrome that breaks the web often, and badly, but they get a pass because it's Chrome! They have the new shiny APIs!
You should embrace this; this is how the web should be.
I don't mean you need to buy a Mac. Instead, I mean that the web standards effort originally came up out of supporting diversity. There was a wider range of possible clients, on a wider range of "popular" platforms. As developers we had to cater to support diverging capabilities. Progress on API development was slower, but it was more evenly spread out. Today, Chrome lurches ahead of everyone else in terms of API feature count, mostly supporting Google's business aims, and many vocal developers seem to think they should only support one set of capabilities. The slower, broader, way was better, in my opinion.
Unless you have the option to use it for your product then the decision is ship a product using just your web developers and have it not work on Safari/iPads or hire iOS developers and build and maintain a completely separate app.
So it's a 6-7 figure cost to your business that could be saved if they supported that.
The Chrome team happens to throw something over the wall and ship it to production with no oversight. And sometimes complain that that they cannot hide it behind a flag because people are already using it.
There's no end of people right here on HN who scream bloody murder when Safari (and Firefox) refuse to implement some new Chrome-only API.
The way this is supposed to work is an origin trial: you ship something behind a flag, and then allow sites to flip the flag for testing and experimentation. But it's well documented that this is a temporary process, some Chrome visitors you get won't be eligible for trials, and it's not guaranteed that features in origin trials will ship. What are you thinking of where they just shipped something, without an OT?
For something to become a standard they way it's actually supposed to work is for browsers to come up with two independent implementations.
And yet, Chrome frequently ships APIs it calls standard with just Chrome as the sole implementor.
Literally "Note that .adoptedStyleSheets is used on about ~.8% of page loads in Chrome now. Backwards-incompatible changes are definitely an issue here." https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu...
---
WebMIDI allows enumeration of devices without asking the user for permission: https://twitter.com/denschub/status/1582730988118867968 (note this is a part of a whole bunch of hardware APIs that Chrome just shipped, no consensus needed)
Well, what do you know https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-api-owners-...
"this is a case where we're going from no permission prompt to a permission prompt, I think a PSA and developer communication is a good idea. Other chromium-based browsers may want to know as well, via these channels."
Thankfully, there will be a change. At some point.
===
These are two I know of, that's why I said "sometimes". As Chrome releases 400 new APIs each year, it's impossible to track them all.
* With adoptedStyleSheets they're objecting to making backwards incompatible changes, which is reasonable: everyone hates browsers breaking sites. But there are ways to do this safely, like changing the name of the property (as rniwa suggested https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu...) and if that were the only issue I think they'd have done something like that.
* With WebMIDI they're saying they want to do an announcement before making the change. (I do think it's nuts how long they're taking to fix this, and if you look on the blink-api-owners-discuss thread you linked you'll see I've been bugging them about it.)
Which would not be backwards incompatible if they hadn't shipped something that wasn't agreed on in the first place.
Again, slowly: they literally shipped that to production despite loud and explicit objections from both Firefox and Safari. When asked to hide it back behind the flag, "but backwards incompatible change, the framework we're developing is already depending on it"
And since you're quoting rniwa, here's the relevant quote https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu...:
--- start quote ---
I feel like I’ve put so much time & energy into making this feature something sane & useful, and all you did was basically to dismiss many of my feedbacks and go with whatever you like and just ship it. And now you’re saying you can’t make changes because you shipped it?
I’m sorry but that’s just not how standards work.
--- end quote ---
> With WebMIDI they're saying they want to do an announcement before making the change.
Indeed. Once again: because they shipped an API that neither Safari nor Mozilla supported. Now that this issue has surfaced (no thanks to Chrome), they can't just roll it back or fix it because people already rely on this behaviour, which they implicitly acknowledge.