Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

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IE and Safari are vastly different situations. IE started off with near-total dominance and was truly left to rot, with the teams responsible for it having been scattered across the company because Microsoft was no longer concerned with cornering the market on web browsers. Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities.

If Google got complacent and decided to reallocate nearly the entire Chrome and Blink teams to other projects leaving only tiny skeleton crews on them, allowing both Firefox/Gecko and Safari/WebKit to leave it in the dust in terms of features that would be almost a 1:1 analogue for the situation with Microsoft and IE back in the day.

Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now.

The late 90s early 2000s were a dark period, software-wise. Nothing compares to that, thankfully. People either forget, weren't there or were just oblivious Windows users.

> web standards are really a thing now.

Chrome starts a proposal, implements it and “intends to ship” it before anyone really has time to discuss it. Recently (2 months ago?) they introduced a new WebExtension API that nobody cared about nor really understood the need for, but it’s still there, making it look like it’s a “standard”

It’s far from perfect but no comparison to our lowest point in history.

> Besides, IE was closed source and WebKIt is open source. So are all other engines. And web standards are really a thing now.

Even today, this doesn't mean much if Apple decides to ignore web standards that are harmful to their business model. Web Notifications were implemented by Safari Desktop, Chrome Desktop and Firefox Desktop[0] in 2012 - and Safari Mobile in 2023. That's 9 years that a pretty useful and important API couldn't be relied on by PWAs. And this is just one of many examples.

This has a real effect on what technologies developers can actually use, which is fairly similar to the effect IE6 had on newer APIs during its time.

[0]: Chrome & Firefox desktop because I can't find a way to see historical dates for mobile on caniuse - but it was around that time, or a bit later, for mobile as well

> Safari on the other hand has only ever seen ~20% marketshare, has never been truly abandoned, and at least covers core competencies well (recall that IE couldn’t even handle transparent PNGs without DirectX filter hackery). IE made even basic static pages a pain to develop compared to Firefox, whereas most of Safari’s significant shortcomings have to do with more advanced functionalities.

The definition of what is a core feature and what is advanced functionality changes with time. When IE6 came out it was the most advanced browser available, including support for what was considered advanced functionalities back then. But over the long time IE6 existed expectations changed and things which were once advanced or not even thought of were now core. The same is happening with Safari, with the difference that thanks to Apples blocking of different browser engines people cannot just switch to another browser and light a fire under Apples ass.

My fear is that no matter how good Safari is or gets, it won’t be enough to withstand the crushing force that Chromium has become. Devs would much prefer to test against only one engine if they had the choice, which I believe will ultimately end up stripping choice from the user.

Many choices have already been stripped. My electric company’s payments portal only works in Chrome. When I called their helpdesk to say it doesn’t work in Safari, the person told me to use their iOS app instead of my phone’s browser.

When I told her I’m using Safari from my desktop she was confused. Her helpdesk script literally didn’t have a path in the reply tree for someone using a desktop and not using a chromium based browser. That should tell you how uncommon it must be. I guess everyone’s just using the App now and doesn’t notice.

I’ve encountered this several times in the past few years too, usually in the form of sites acting bizarrely or functions not working in Safari and/or Firefox. There’s been some active useragent sniffing too, though ironically enough in those situations it’s usually enough to spoof the user agent after which the sites in question as far as I can tell work properly.

Either way it gives the impression to non-technical users that non-Chromium browsers are subpar even if site devs are to blame (especially when “upgrade your browser” messaging is misused to equate your up-to-date Safari/Firefox with some derelict version that hasn’t been updated for years) and will only serve to strengthen Chrome’s hold. The only recourse Mozilla and Apple have are to perfectly emulate Chrome’s behavior and in the case of UA sniffing even pretend to be Chrome, which sounds an awful lot like the bad old days of Gecko needing to emulate IE to make sites work in Firefox.

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