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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

The web platform doesn’t need to move this fast. Google is, often unilaterally, pushing new features and declaring them standards. In my opinion, the web should not be changing so fast that a truly open source community project couldn’t keep up. I don’t like how the web has become reliant on the largesse of billion dollar corporations.

I recognise that this is a controversial take, but in my opinion what Google is doing is a variant of “embrace and extend”. Traditionally, this meant proprietary extensions (e.g. VBScript) but I think this a subtle variant with similar consequences.

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I know it's fashionable to forcefully shove the same pet peeves about Chromium into any topic even loosely related, but here I'm talking about Safari webcompat fixes, bug fixes, and improvements having very long delays between being written and landing in customers' hands. I would make the same argument if Chrome never existed. Thank you for presenting the 10,001st reissue of this "controversial take".

The behaviour of entities that WebKit is ostensibly told to be compatible with isn't a "loosely related" topic, it's precisely on-point. It's certainly no less on-point than nebulous criticisms of Apple for assumed NIH syndrome or marketing priorities. You criticise Apple for not having a rapid release schedule; I am criticising the very notion of rapid release schedules (other than security patches).

The web platform doesn't need to move so fast.

How can you defend Safari rendering broken sites for long periods due to lack of frequent updates as a good thing?

The ever current adage of distortion field applies here.

Just like Safari not having webgpu was touted as a feature and now that it has support, webgpu suddenly turned into a feature. Apple can do no wrong to some. Whatever they do is a feature. And if they don't do, it's a feature too.

I agree that numerous companies inspire occasional weird reflexive defences from their most enthusiastic supporters. Thankfully, bad arguments have no transitive value.

Implying otherwise is itself a bad argument.

It is true that Safari sometimes lagged in ways that are legitimately open to criticism. There are instances where Safari had incomplete or broken feature implementations. But many claims of “broken sites” are really just evidence of lazy developers failing to test beyond Chrome or to implement graceful fallback. Relying on bleeding-edge Chromium features before they've been broadly adopted by browsers is, IMHO, a infatuation with novelty over durability. It's also, IMHO, a callous disregard for the open web platform in favour of The Chrome Platform. Web developers are free to do whatever they like, but it's misleading to blame browsers for the bad choices and/or laziness of some web developers.

Why do you keep conflating bug fixes with new platform features?

Because such bugs were predominantly associated with then-new platform features.

As a web developer myself, I appreciate the frustration with Safari's flexbox bugs of a decade ago and viewport bugs more recently. I also remember being endlessly frustrated by Chrome bugs too, like maddening scroll anchoring behaviours, subpixel rounding inconsistencies, and position:fixed bugs which were broken for so long than the bugs became the de-facto standard which other browsers had to implement. All browsers have bugs. To suggest that Safari was uniquely bad is to view history with Chrome-tinted glasses.

I'm not saying that other browsers don't have bugs. This thread is about how Safari doesn't fix them for a long time because it ships slowly.

You are assuming that Safari didn’t fix bugs for a long time because it “ships slowly.” Maybe some bugs are just complicated and take time to fix. It took Google years to fix the bugs I mentioned earlier (and many others) despite having the largest budget of any browser project and a VERY rapid release cadence.

No a lot of them are pretty straightforward, this is why I’m upset. I’m talking about, like, “SVGs with this feature don’t render correctly due to an oversight in size calculation” not “can you please implement WebGPU in the next release cycle”.

> But many claims of “broken sites” are really just evidence of lazy developers failing to test beyond Chrome or to implement graceful fallback.

Correct. People test Chrome first and often only. That'll never change because people are lazy and you have a humongously long tail of websites with varying levels of giving a shit and no central authority that can enforce any standards. Even if another browser takes other, they'll only test that one.

The solution is formal tests and the wpt.fyi project. It gives a path to perfectly compatible implementations of agreed-upon standards, and a future where *the only* differences between browsers will be deliberate (e.g. WebMIDI). Brilliant.

That's why I wish the gap between Safari TP's wpt.fyi score and Safari stable's score was shorter. Simple!

> How can you defend Safari rendering broken sites for long periods due to lack of frequent updates as a good thing?

That hasn't been true for a few years now.

Even now, when a site breaks in Safari, more often than not, it's because that particular site is using a Chrome-only feature that hasn't shipped in Safari or Firefox yet. These developers need to be reminded that progressive enhancement is a thing.

There are web developers who only test their sites on Chrome, which makes no sense, given mobile Safari has around 50% marketshare in the US [1] and about 21% globally [2].

> Just like Safari not having webgpu was touted as a feature and now that it has support, webgpu suddenly turned into a feature.

I must have missed this one, but anyone paying attention would have noticed WebGPU had been available in Safari (behind a flag) long before it became official; it was always on track to becoming a real feature.

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/unite...

[2]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

"Google learned from Microsoft’s mistakes and follows a novel embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy by breaking the web and stomping on the bits. Who cares if it breaks as long as we go forward." https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...

That's a good article. Thanks for surfacing.

VBScript is a word I hadn't heard in quite a while! Brings back memories of editing 5k line .asp files to find an if statement and then a 1000 lines of html and such. Sadly, I dont' think web development is actual better 20+ years later, just different...

The web platform on your device needs to be locked to a specific version because the OS stopped being updated. Once the OS stops being updated, you're supposed to buy a new device.

You shouldn't be allowed to use an old device with an updated browser, especially not a browser from a 3rd party, because that doesn't help Apple sell more iPads.

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