Hacker News Reader

Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

> Nothing you've said here really addresses the problem discussed and really you're looking at this from the perspective of the consumer and not the developer.

That's entirely the point: developers and users have different needs. But the developers will follow the users to whatever browser the users feel is best. Apple's priorities are on improving battery life, page responsiveness, etc. If users value Apple's browser development model that prioritizes user-facing features over developer features, then the developers will simply follow the users. If you want to build a product around features that a major browser doesn't support, go ahead.

To use the dreaded car analogy, you don't build a car to be easy to work on just to make the mechanics happy. You build a car that consumers want to buy, and it's the mechanic's job to figure out how to work on it.

View on HN

> then the developers will simply follow the users.

That didn't happen with IE6. I think the web as platform is bigger than Apple as big as it may be. It's amazing to me that you're OK with a single company holding back the entire platform because of a single device. People use the web with machines that don't even have batteries.

Really to a developer who cares about the open web and standards, just throwing the whole concept of the web out of the window for the sake of Apple's priorities is so, so bad and it will never happen. At least that's my hope and prediction. The open web as a platform will guide my behavior with regards to how I engineer applications that run in the browser, whether Safari is on board or not.

> That didn't happen with IE6

Yes it did...but anyway, the detail is irrelevant; it's the point you're refusing to acknowledge:

A developer, building a product, is obsessed with growth metrics, OR, a slave to the pedantic demands of a client they're working for.

Either way, those demands require that a site be available to as many people as justifiably possible. The questions you have to ask are:

1) Is the the $ value of a customer using IE6 worth the time taken to make the site work in it? (No, almost certainly not)

2) In IE8? (Hopefully not, but you know, there are still a lot of these guys, and it's almost always a demand in the .gov space...)

3) In Safari? Yes. There are tonnes of these guys, especially on mobile where they don't have a choice, and no matter what fancy javascript 0-day API you're in love with, you can work around it without any significant effort.

The point:

Is safari holding things back? Yes.

Is it OK? Not really. It sucks.

Can you ignore safari and pretend it doesn't exist, and lose those customers? No. No you can't.

We're webdevs, sucking it up is what we're good at. We've had years of practice.

Suck it up.

The path forward, I think we'll find in the long run is going to be less native apis, more WebAssembly-style low level polyfills to implement new 'universal' features that run on all js runtimes.

> Can you ignore safari and pretend it doesn't exist, and lose those customers? No. No you can't.

Actually we can, and where I work we do. Never has anyone complained about it. SO everything is just fine. So I don't need to "Suck it up".

Maybe you can, because either you work for yourself, or you work for some who doesn't care... but you're mistaken if you think you fall in the majority in that.

> That didn't happen with IE6.

Yes it did. That's the entire reason IE6 was such a headache: IE6 was by far the worst browser platform out there, but everything in the corporate world was written with IE6 in mind. This made it a nightmare to support these sites -- because they didn't work in Firefox or Chrome. So when IE6 was finally deprecated, it was a mad scramble to try to patch internal tools (or hack an unsupported install of IE6) so your HR person could access payroll.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com