Abject Praise | Hacker News Reader

Abject Praise

infrequently.org

This is all very deep in the weeds, biased and opinionated, so it's hard for me to draw my own conclusion with all the missing facts that may or may not exist from Apple's side. What I will say is that it's very funny that Apple, on all of its browsers, does not currently support the squircle corner shape—a piece of flair that is iconically Apple.

The author may get further if they put love of communication over love of language.

"Rubbishing" is a worthless gerund. Is rubbish even a verb anywhere?

"To rubbish" is a very common verb, at least in British English.

Is it transitive? As an American I know the word, but rubbish as a verb is utterly unfamiliar.

Yes. "I rubbished his proposal", i.e. "I criticised his proposal".

(I can't imagine what an intransitive 'rubbish' would mean!)

Thanks, that makes the parallels with "trash" clear. I could have chosen a better example.

It's the UK equivalent of the US "trashing".

https://64.media.tumblr.com/32cb3be24eb46c26ffcaea9bbebc1c62...

Allow me to rubbish your claim. It's a common use.

"v. [with obj.] Brit. informal criticize severely and reject as worthless: 'he has pointedly rubbished professional estimates of the development and running costs.'" New Oxford American Dictionary (2010).

Yow! Well said.

If not all browsers support a feature, don't use it, or make it optional. It's not that hard. If you can't figure it out, ask your LLM.

The article is about how Apple is underdelivering in browser features and compatibility while pretending they aren't. It's about Apple. Apple. The ones responsible for a great many features not being supported in all browsers.

What does a web dev have to do with Apple's choice? How do you improve Safari by not using features it doesn't support? What does your comment have to do with the argument the article is making?

And since outside the EU, all alternative browsers on iOS/iPadOS are just rebadged Safari, this degrades the Web on those platforms. Not entirely coincidentally, Apple has a strong incentive to encourage native apps over web ones.

Exactly. It's fine that Apple don't fix Safari on Mac OS where you can run anything else, but on the mobile OSes you are cooked.

> What does a web dev have to do with Apple's choice?

From the article:

> But how much relief should long-suffering web developers expect? ... Web developers wouldn't have cause ... influential developers like Jeremy ... That chasm is instrumental in trapping users and developers ... That's to say nothing of the heavily requested features no developer can use on iOS

> What does your comment have to do with the argument the article is making?

The article isn't very honest, IMO. There's no need for Safari to adopt all those changes. Almost none is an improvement for the user, and certainly not for users with older browsers (there are quite a few of those, and telling them to upgrade is basically telling them GTFO).

And the author is heavily involved in Blink/Chrome/Edge. There's a section devoted to it, where he blasts nonsense such as "Chromium and Blink are explicitly organised to make and defend space for leadership, but our ability to lead in new areas is tied to quality." No, they are explicity organized to allow Google to stay dominant. It is not in the interest of the user. It is actively working against the user. Complaining about Safari only serves Google's ad kingdom.

Article's author here. Arguments about "older browsers" are specious, particularly on iOS where Apple couples the browser engine to the OS, and forces all browsers to use Apple's binary.

If there is a legacy browser problem today, it is entirely within Cupertino's gift to address. Everyone else already moved to out-of-band, decoupled autoupdates. Even ChromeOS is dramatically more up-to-date fleet-wide.

There are quite a lot of people out there with older browsers. You probably never meet them. I work for a company that gets processes 700k well distributed surveys per year, and there's always a bunch of old Chrome versions. Probably because it's "SamsungBrowser". That doesn't upgrade so easily. There are also people using third party browsers for points: you do a task, you get points. It's totally unclear when those get updated. Last month, there is an entry for Chrome 103 running on some old version of CrOS. I also see the occasional PlayStation browser, and other uncommon devices. And then we're talking Western Europe. The situation in e.g. Slovenia and Chile, where we also occasionally collect data, is different, probably a money issue.

And I wish you wouldn't update Edge so aggressively. Only last month, it turned out that Edge on Android refuses to play a video if it's under 5 seconds.

BTW, Apple does update the browser on older OS versions.

I'm well aware of the data on residual browsers; we have better metrics on the browser side than most public data sets. I also track the high/mid/low device mix, and we see that users on low-spec machines are generally less up-to-date:

https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...

This makes intuitive sense because those users are more likely to be out of disk space or bandwidth limited by geography or metering.

Regardless, while this issue is pronounced in the Android and Windows ecosystems, it's in a dramatically better place than it was in, e.g., the late Naughts when we had to build exotic solutions like Chrome Frame to address stagnation and fragmentation. So I'm not ignoring the issue, but again, to the extent we're discussing platforms that Apple has influence over, the ball is squarely in Cupertino's court. Every iPhone running an unsupported OS could be getting an updated browser, but Apple chooses not to make one or allow anyone else to plug the gap.

Yeah... I've got a whole lot of experience with "you can't do this thing the obvious easy way because iOS is too important." This isn't about fantasies of Apple being your savior. This is about HTML and CSS that Apple has decided not to support.

I don't believe it's possible to work in web dev and not run into this. It's a constant annoyance that semantic markup and declarative layout just have entire swaths of features unsupported on a garbage browser that you can't even say is unsupported because it's the only option on iphones. If it was up to me I'd just tell iPhone users that's what they chose. But businesses don't get to be as petty as I get to. And that's ultimately the point here. Apple is using their market dominance to force working around their poor support of standards on everyone else. They should be shamed for this shameful behavior.

You appear to be arguing that we shouldn't care that Apple provides a consistently bad experience and locks their users into it, because web developers can level the field by degrading everyone else's experience too. There's a nice couple paragraphs in the article that explain why we should in fact care, and you don't seem to have addressed them, so let me reproduce them for you in case you missed them. (also fyi "it's not that hard, ask your LLM" comes across a bit snarky):

These large, persistent gaps matter to the mobile and web ecosystems because Apple is unique in denying access to more capable, less-buggy engines and actively erecting unlawful barriers to choice when forced by legislation to enable it. This is accomplished through eye-watering budgets for legal shenanigans, direct lobbying, and well-heeled astroturf front groups to maintain a capability gap between web and native.4

That chasm is instrumental in trapping users and developers in the extractive vice of Cupertino's App Store. A persistent, material gap in capabilities creates a perception of the web being less-than; a budget option for the unserious. Should users choose more capable, more private, less buggy browsers for a larger share of their computing needs, Apple might lose the leverage that enables it to extract rents.

> eye-watering budgets

What do you think Google and Microsoft have? The writer is an MS engineer, deeply involved in Chrome/Edge. This has nothing to do with being able to deliver for the user or the developer, but only for Google's position in the ad market.

Author here. I work for Microsoft and can assure you I am not invested in Google's ad market position (except, perhaps, in the negative sense).

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