
Safari is the new IE - nolanl
http://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/
======
NietTim
Nolan, I'm not familiar with what you do or have done, but have you ever tried
to make a website back in the day? Ever tried to support IE6? 7? 8? IE
literally broke the web. CSS rules which worked in every browser ever wouldn't
work in IE. Entire webpages weren't formatting correctly, having to spend
hours, days, on workarounds. Comparing Safari to IE is just wrong. Safari
doesn't break the web, it 'just' lacks support for some new javascript
functions, not break standards/rules that had been there for tens of years.

But I'm sure this title gets you more clicks.

~~~
streptomycin
What rules that had been there for tens of years were broken by IE6? IE6 was
the best browser available when it was released, and the web standards
ecosystem was nothing like it is today.

I think the analogy is very clear. If you want to code like it's 2000,
supporting IE6 is easy, because IE6 is a very good 2000 browser. If you want
to code like it's 2010, supporting Safari is easy, because Safari is a very
good 2010 browser. But in both cases, if you want to use any new features that
have been standardized and are supported by other browsers, you're fucked.

The main difference I see is that IE6 didn't get any updates at all. Safari
gets updates, but many new features are missing or broken.

EDIT: Another difference is that MS never blocked you from installing a better
browser, but Apple does that on iOS. That policy is becoming increasingly
ridiculous...

~~~
collyw
"Another difference is that MS never blocked you from installing a better
browser, but Apple does that on iOS. That policy is becoming increasingly
ridiculous..."

Why has that not resulted in anti competitive behavior lawsuits? MS got in to
a fair bit of trouble for similar things. They didn't stop you installing an
alternative.

~~~
a_c_s
Netscape used to be a paid product* before Microsoft made IE free. What
Microsoft did was make a free competitor and install it on every machine
running their OS.

So what Microsoft did that was illegal was use their monopoly power to destroy
an existing player. That's how they were "anti-competitive".

While Apple not allowing any competing rendering engines to be written for iOS
is anti-competitive in the dictionary sense that they are preventing
competition to be created, it isn't the type of behavior targeted by anti-
trust law.

(IANAL, but my understanding is that if Apple had removed Spotify, Pandora and
other music apps from the App Store while releasing their streaming music
service, that would be an anti-trust violation.)

*Netscape was $49 in 1996 [http://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape](http://www.fastcompany.com/27743/nothing-netscape)

~~~
bzbarsky
The real issue is just whether Apple has a monopoly or not. IANAL, but as I
understand it what's illegal is using a monopoly in one market to muscle into
another market via bundling deals. Just doing bundling deals if you're not a
monopoly is perfectly OK.

~~~
astrodust
If Apple sold the operating system used on the vast majority of computers you
could have a case, as did the government when 95% of PCs were shipped with
Windows.

Even by the most generous definition of "computer", Apple holds 20% market
share at most.

Samsung won't get sued for anti-competitive practices because you can't switch
the browser on their so-called smart TV for the same reason.

------
exelius
Disagree with this assessment. IE was so bad because Microsoft tried to go off
and create its own standards that were incompatible with Mozilla / Firefox /
etc. (I'm thinking of IE6 specifically). And this was big, core functionality
like page layout and CSS; not some data structures that can be implemented in
other ways (albeit with a performance hit). This was doubly bad because
"enterprise" companies (SAP, SAS, Oracle, etc) built their original web
interfaces against IE6; and those systems are so costly to upgrade that many
companies _still_ run IE6-compatible browsers. Chrome even has an option that
can be pushed out via GPO to render certain pages using an IE6-compatible
renderer. Safari is nowhere near that bad; I have yet to run across a page
that works in Chrome that doesn't work in Safari.

Safari, by comparison, is just behind the curve on some developer-centric
features. But Safari also has some things going in its favor: in my
experience, it's the fastest browser on OS X by a pretty wide margin. Chrome
is so bloated and full of garbage at this point that when I have it open, I
usually have at least one tab sitting at 100% CPU (and this is with FlashBlock
enabled). Safari also manages to feel faster while using significantly less
power -- I suspect Apple has done some optimizations through Grand Central on
this front.

Safari on mobile is a bit of a different story; yes it has problems, but I
don't know that supporting a larger feature set is the answer.

~~~
braythwayt

      > in my experience, it's the fastest browser on OS X by a pretty
      > wide margin. Chrome is so bloated and full of garbage at this
      > point that when I have it open, I usually have at least one tab
      > sitting at 100% CPU (and this is with FlashBlock enabled). Safari
      > also manages to feel faster while using significantly less power
      > -- I suspect Apple has done some optimizations through Grand
      > Central on this front.
    

This. As a developer... I sympathize with people who like developing on the
desktop with Chrome and for Chrome, but as a _user_ , I prefer the browser
that doesn't spin up the fans on my MacBook Air.

As we adulate Tesla for their accomplishments with battery technology, we
often point out that battery life is a software problem, and that it involves
a specific set of engineering tradeoffs. Apple is simply making those
tradeoffs. And it has to.

Google make a browser that runs on everything. If one platform is slower than
another, or has less battery life than another, blame the platform vendor.
Google doesn't care. But Apple sells hardware. If a MacBook gets so hot it
burns your thighs, they lose sales. If the battery life on an iPad is
terrible, they lose sales.

Safari gives their users a legitimate way to enjoy web browsing on a cool-
running system with long battery life. That sells.

~~~
cordite
It also has better performance with retina, scrolling, less jank, and other
user-experience/satisfaction related qualities.

It's dev tools aren't adequate for my use, but for being a user of other
sites, it has been wholly sufficient.

~~~
etchalon
Apple's improving the dev tools in El Capitan:
[https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=505](https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=505)

------
kijin
As a primarily web-based advertising company, Google benefits immensely from a
more feature-packed web. So does Mozilla, both because they depend on ad
revenue and because they are betting very heavily on the web as a platform.
Even Microsoft is heavily invested in web technologies, not only because of
Bing but also because HTML5 forms the backbone of Modern (Metro) UI.

Apple, on the other hand, has no reason to want the web to flourish. They make
money by selling hardware, and by managing a closed ecosystem of apps and
services that revolve around said hardware. iAd focuses exclusively on apps,
not webpages. Cross-platform web technologies that try to close the gap
between web apps and native apps are a threat to Apple's bottom line. The more
people abandon the web in favor of native apps, the more money Apple makes.

At least in the days of IE6, Microsoft didn't really care about the web. Apple
nowadays, on the other hand, has every incentive to sabotage the web. I don't
think it's just technological purism that makes them reluctant to allow
alternate rendering engines to work on iOS. They need to ensure that apps are
the only way for developers to bring advanced features to iOS users. Because
they're not competing _on_ the web like the others. They're competing
_against_ the web.

~~~
JohnBooty

        Apple, on the other hand, has no reason to want the web 
        to flourish. They make money by selling hardware, and 
        by managing a closed ecosystem of apps and services 
        that revolve around said hardware.
    

You have the key thing correct: _Apple makes money on hardware._

So it doesn't follow that they would want to stamp out or ignore the web. The
web is a huge part of what customers use Macs and iOS devices for, and Apple
makes the same amount of money on a piece of hardware whether you use it to
browse the web or use the $0.00 Facebook app.

There's no denying that Apple wants you to buy into their ecosystem of apps:
it helps bind you to their devices. But there's no incentive for them to
extinguish the web.

    
    
        At least in the days of IE6, Microsoft didn't really care about 
        the web.
    

No. The web was directly opposite to Microsoft's goals. Microsoft made money
on _operating systems and applications._ If the web "won" then you wouldn't
need a Microsoft OS any more, and Microsoft would "lose."

------
Cshelton
As a user, I love Safari. The hand off between my macbook and iphone is
amazing, it feels smoother than other browsers.

As a developer, I would say they are just doing a few things differently. I
think the web API and DOM/css should have a standard set that every browser
has to implement in the same way. It's actually way way better than it used to
be. However, I'm fine with additional api features as targeting browsers is
not not difficult and may open up some cool features. Like perhaps native
notifications API on IOS Safari, that would be sweet!

For the base Web API though, Safari has deviated on a few small things, but
it's not really to the point where IE6 was.

Also, people will upgrade Safari. Unlike IE6, where IT shops would not upgrade
because of Active X applications, Safari will at least be upgraded. So I think
it's unfair to compare it to the old IE.

P.S., The new Windows Edge browser in Windows 10 is pretty amazing, it feels
like Chrome. Very fast. And if you are not familiar with the Mozilla Servo
project, it's worth checking out. It still has a long way to go, but down the
line could be very interesting.

~~~
zecho
Handoff actually works for you? You're one in a million.

~~~
Cshelton
Yeah I've never had any issues with it. It also works when I'm using Chrome on
my macbook. Like, a safari tab will show up on Chrome, it's pretty sweet.

------
espadrine
Safari is worse than IE, however. You could install an alternative.

Even if they weren't, I fully agree with progressive enhancement. It is always
going to provide the right incentives for everyone. Only the features most
used (by end-users) will become browser vendors' utmost priority.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
You can of course install an alternative to desktop Safari, just not to Mobile
Safari.

~~~
sigzero
So I should delete my Google Chrome app then? Granted it doesn't take the
default for things but I can still use it.

~~~
spaar
The iOS version of Chrome doesn't use Chrome's rendering and JavaScript
engines though, per the App Store rules it has to use WebKit [0]. So, any
other browser app on iOS would have the same problems as mobile Safari.

[0] [http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-
ios](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/06/28/chrome-ios) (linked by the
article btw)

~~~
smrtinsert
That's amazing. Thanks for reminding me how much contempt they have for
choice.

~~~
dredmorbius
Not quite my area of expertise, but I believe that browsers on Android _also_
tend to use the core Android browser components though they can dress them up
slightly differently.

~~~
Someone1234
Browsers on Android are not required to use Android's built in WebViews. And
several alternative browser engines are offered by the platform[0].

Android has no specific restrictions in place. Although it is the path of
least resistance to use the built in WebView, since you now don't need to
deploy your own.

[0] Including: Blink (Amazon Silk, Chrome, Opera), WebKit (BlackBerry,
Dolphin, et al), Gecko (Firefox, Minimo), NetFront (Blazer). At the moment
WebKit derivatives seem to be most popular, but several browsers re-build it
from the source rather than just using Android's WebKit components.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks, as I said, NMAOE and I was mostly reflecting observations based on
some dated Android builds.

------
lambdasquirrel
Okay, I'm getting on this a little late, but this is where I have to say,
Hacker News, you are full of shit. Every time someone comes up with an anti-
Apple title, it gets several hundred points. I'm seeing 600+ right now. And
the evidence does not corroborate the claim.

In the beginning of the article, the author points out this set of techs as
stuff that Apple does not support: {Service Worker, Web Components, Shadow
DOM, Web Manifests}.

Well, you can go to caniuse.com, and see that for all of those (except Web
Manifests, which doesn't show up), they are only well-supported by Chrome and
Opera. Firefox usually has it disabled by default, and it's noticeably absent
from IE.

I think the real issue here is something we might all find a little
uncomfortable, and it's that the web isn't as important as it used to be, and
Google is the only company really pushing it as a platform. Certainly,
Microsoft may be repentant, but Microsoft either doesn't care to catch up, or
they think it's not going to help them even the ground against Apple. And that
doesn't deserve the title or the comments we're seeing here.

~~~
azakai
I think you are wrong that the web matters less, and also wrong that only
Google is pushing it.

First, you forgot IndexedDB, another example from the article, which disproves
your point. Other examples include fullscreen and WebAssembly.

Web Components/Shadow DOM and Service Workers happen to be two technologies
that Google is pushing. There are of course plenty of examples where Google is
behind: Nested Workers, asm.js, ES6, etc. etc.

It might be true that the web matters less _to Apple_ than it used to, and
that isn't very surprising - Apple's native apps on iOS are massively
successful, and it makes sense for Apple to focus more on that. And that does
mean the web matters less on mobile, since Apple is huge there, but the web is
still just as important as it always was on desktop.

~~~
lambdasquirrel
The end user doesn't care about IndexedDB. Just because web folks like you
push new technologies doesn't mean that those technologies matter. It doesn't
mean that the web will stay forefront. People have to want to use those
technologies, but most of my non-tech friends don't even surf Facebook on the
web. They check Facebook on their phones. A lot of people don't even book
AirBnBs on their computers.

Now, you guys can plug your fingers in your ears and call me a fanboi, but I'm
just pointing out that non-tech folks don't know the difference, and they
couldn't really care. The native experience on iOS massively trumps the app
experience on Android, as well as the web experience on iOS and on Android.

Now for me, as a dev, I would rather code for the web than for iOS or for
Android. But the wider world does not care about me. The wider world would
feel that the web is much too late to the game with all these techs, when the
same experience (or possibly better) was available with native apps years ago.

~~~
azakai
I don't disagree with any of that.

I _do_ disagree with the things you said earlier: It is just not true that the
web matters less, nor that Google is the only one pushing it.

The web still matters a whole lot. And many parties aside from Google are
pushing it - Mozilla, Microsoft, Khronos, Khan Academy, among many others, are
all pushing it forward; Google is behind in some areas, ahead in others, etc.,
just like everyone else.

Perhaps you assume that since mobile is important, it means the web matters
less? I think it just means that in the new space of mobile, native apps
matter more than the web. But that space didn't even exist before, it isn't a
"loss" for the web. Native apps also matter more on game consoles, for
example. But the web is still very important.

------
rubyn00bie
I generally disagree with the article, but I was also making web apps ten
years ago. Trying to write them for IE, Firefox, and Safari.... It was hell.
IE was the centerpiece of it because it was the dominant browser by market
share.

Now-a-days, I think Chrome was the new IE or rather causing the same type of
problems IE created.

Why? Developers don't test other browsers by and large. They are choosing to
support Chrome, and implement non-standard APIs, because they see it is the
browser they use. IE got us into trouble because of its market position, and
because it fixed a lot of broken code (so when someone went to use another
browser they though the other browser was broken NOT IE).

Developers made apps which worked only for IE and not other browsers; most of
the time by accident (as their app WAS broken) but still... Now with Chrome, I
see this happening again. Websites/web-apps are needlessly broken in Firefox
because the devs simply didn't even try it.

Maybe, I'm wrong, I fucking hope I'm wrong, but it feels like the shit winds
are getting ready to pick up again...

~~~
jordanthoms
The big difference is that both Chrome and Firefox update very regularly, and
a high percentage of users keep at least reasonably up to date - the biggest
issue was really that IE had massive market share and was also not updated.

We use a lot of chrome-specific APIs, and they allow us to achieve things that
otherwise we couldn't (e.g OCR running in the browser through Native Client
with no performance penalty vs a native binary). We're often implementing
improvements with APIs that are a few weeks or months old. We do test on other
browsers though and make sure things either degrade cleanly or we provide an
alternative implementation.

------
superiortoyou
If Safari became a little too good, people might stop buying or developing
apps.

~~~
coldtea
Which has been stated again and again, but was never an issue with Apple.

First because what they make from the App Store is spare change for them.

Second because they did have the best browser for a while, and did very much
to advance the state of the art (from WebSQL, to Canvas, CSS 3D and other
stuff, all originating there, along with the original fast-JITed JS engine who
started the JS-race to what we have know). And they did that for years after
they had an App platform available too.

~~~
netfire
Curious where you are basing your revenue numbers from. Per Apple's reported
statistics for 2014[1], developers pulled in $10 billion dollars in revenue
from the app store. That means that Apple's revenue from the app store should
also be in the low billions (based on the 70/30 cut they take from app store
sales and purchases).

All without manufacturing logistics and hardware production costs. Obviously
the computing infrastructure, payment processing and software engineering of
the app store has a cost, but I'd imagine much less than those involved with
building, distributing and selling a computer or mobile device.

It may not generate as much as hardware sales do, but billions of dollars
hardly seems like spare change.

[1] [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/08App-Store-Rings-
in...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/08App-Store-Rings-in-2015-with-
New-Records.html?sr=hotnews.rss)

~~~
coldtea
> _That means that Apple 's revenue from the app store should also be in the
> low billions (based on the 70/30 cut they take from app store sales and
> purchases)._

That makes it around $3 billion, before taxes and infrastructure expenses,
payment deals, etc.

$3 billion is spare change for Apple. They have 200 times than in cash.

~~~
netfire
Again you post information without any sources. A more accurate figure is $178
billion in cash at the beginning of this year.[1] That means they have around
59 times more than that amount in cash, not the 200 you claimed. Also, I think
its telling that Apple themselves mentioned App Store Sales as a main factor
in their revenue earnings for Q4 of their 2014 fiscal year. [2] What's
important is how much of their total annual revenue and profits are derived
from App Store sales, not how it compares to the amount of cash they have on
hand.

As others have mentioned, there are other benefits from native applications,
like vendor lock-in, which Apple isn't going to get with web-based
applications.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-
cash-178-bil...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/investing/apple-
cash-178-billion/)

[2] [http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/10/20Apple-Reports-
Four...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2014/10/20Apple-Reports-Fourth-
Quarter-Results.html)

~~~
coldtea
> _That means they have around 59 times more than that amount in cash, not the
> 200 you claimed_

Still, same order of magnitude, and still many times over their app profit.

> _Also, I think its telling that Apple themselves mentioned App Store Sales
> as a main factor in their revenue earnings for Q4 of their 2014 fiscal
> year._

Telling towards what?

~~~
netfire
I don't see how you can justify being off on your facts by 3-4 times by saying
its still in the same order of magnitude. You overestimated their cash on hand
by about 422 billion dollars. Again, I see the cash on hand as a weak
argument. What really matters is how much annual revenue and profit it brings
in. Apple is going to be concerned about anything that adds or takes away from
their revenue in a significant way.

Its telling that App Store sales are a significant source of revenue for
Apple. One that could possibly justify not making improvements to Safari that
could make it better compete with native applications.

------
jug
It isn't as bad as what led to IE's state that took several years of active
development by Microsoft to even begin correcting. The gap between IE 6 and IE
7 was terrible, and IE 6 wasn't even that much more than IE 5, standards-wise.

Here's an overview of what's new in Safari (WebKit) as it ships with OS X El
Capitan:
[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releaseno...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_11.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016227-DontLinkElementID_58)

~~~
dspillett
What people often forget is that there was a time when IE6 was actually better
than the alternatives (on Windows anyway). Around the time it was released
Navigator was the main competitor and that was getting progressively less
stable and failed to keep up with the way the web was evolving. And by
"evolving" I don't just mean new techniques/standards/whatever - simply the
way the size of things was growing as people started to commonly have access
to decent bandwidth. A key example I remember well is large nested tables
(semantic markup was even less easy to get right cross-browser at that point)
- Navigator would sometimes spin the CPU for a full minute to render a page
that IE would throw out in seconds.

This is the secondary reason IE gained share quickly (the primary one being
bundling, of course). Then Netscpae fell over and it didn't have competition
at all for a while so MS simply stopped trying (why work to improve when there
is no competition and you can use the resources to work on something else?) so
IE gained even more share on Windows (other OSs were not large enough in the
desktop market to figure at that point, and mobile browsing was embryonic)
without any effort from MS. It wasn't until Firefox got to the point of being
enough better to attract a large share that the tables started turning and
even then the change was slow. Opera was significant around the time too, but
it not being free (or not free without adverts) was a sticking point that
stopped it being widely adopted.

That is a key problem that hopefully can't play out the same way these days
though. No one browser, even mobile safari, is so commonly used that if it
fails to keep up it can't start to be ignored, and away from iDevices we don't
have the pure binary choice so if B doesn't keep up with A C and D probably
will and B will be forced to (or it won't matter so much if B dies).

~~~
leejoramo
From the same era on Mac, IE 5 was an amazing browser.

------
benjamindc
Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing different
things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to everything
UI-related (animations, visual effects, …). You might disagree with Apple's
priorities, but it doesn't mean other browsers are "better" per se, they're
just different.

Safari's release cycle, however, is stupid per se.

~~~
Touche
> Safari isn't "lagging behind other browsers", it's just implementing
> different things. In fact, Safari is still the best browser when it comes to
> everything UI-related (animations, visual effects, …).

So then let's name these things, specifically, if you really believe that. I'm
not aware of any new specs related to animations in the last couple of years.
Can you name them?

~~~
yoklov
I'm not really well informed here, but I'd guess that he means how the
animations, visual effects, Ui, etc. actually look and behave, rather than new
specs.

One thing I've noticed several times is that in chrome, many CSS animations
aren't animated across sub-pixel boundaries. I don't know necessarily that
safari does this (again, I'm not well informed here -- for all I know this has
been fixed in Chrome), but if they did, that would count in my book, despite
not being a new spec.

(Honestly, my suspicion is that they aren't though, since a high dpi screen
removes most of the need for sub-pixel accuracy).

------
grumblestumble
Absolutely agree with this article. Safari is fast becoming the bane of my
existence, to the point where we're considering migrating our entire app to
Electron just to lock down compatibility issues. Something the article doesn't
touch on is that the maximum version of Safari is locked to the OS version,
and on desktop, many A/V professionals have serious PTSD when it comes to
upgrading OS X. We have many customers using our app who won't upgrade from
Mountain Lion, so supporting Safari cripples what we can do - even flexbox
isn't an option.

------
jccalhoun
"There was one company not in attendance, though, and they served as the
proverbial elephant in the room that no one wanted to discuss. I heard them
referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain fruit company.”
Their glowing logo illuminated nearly every laptop in the room, and yet it
seemed like nobody dared speak their name. "

Why wouldn't people just say "Apple?" Is this hyperbole or is there some
reason why people are afraid to directly criticize apple at a conference that
apple isn't even at?

~~~
michaelwww
Happy thousand day anniversary on HN! (I accidentally clicked your name.) The
author is exaggerating, like he did with the title. IE was until recently a
big drag on web dev, but Safari is not. Speaking about Apple in hushed tones
seems like a joke by the author, because it seems to me that some devs who use
Apple products really over-rate Apple's importance. I don't use Apple products
and don't feel I am missing anything. Most important innovations in web dev
are in the much bigger eco-system outside of Apple. My only concern is that
Apple is onboard with WebAssembly, because it would be unfortunate if they did
not implement that, but as the author said, WebKit is open source and someone
will do it.

~~~
nolanl
Nope, people literally did say things like "a certain company in California."
But yeah, I'm exaggerating a bit, because the name "Apple" did come up
occasionally.

The problem is that when everybody wants to discuss the hot new browser
features, mentioning Apple is just a big downer. We all know we're going to
have to polyfill at best, or just not support Safari at worst. Nobody wants to
be reminded of that sad fact when you're trying to get excited about the
potential of the web platform.

------
advanderveer
Here is an unpopular opinion: Maybe we should chill down on the constant
innovation of "the web". I think we are at the point that we need some
stablity, such that technologies (and companies!) build on top of it get some
time to focus on maintainability, safety and usability instead of having to
constantly spend time playing catch up.

~~~
smhg
I wouldn't say it is an unpopular opinion. I can imagine most have had a
similar thought at one point or the other about some technology.

But what looks like constant innovation to one, is probably a long awaited
feature to someone else.

Don't feel like you have to catch up. You don't have to (and probably can't)
follow every single innovation. Rather try to limit what you follow. Yes, you
might miss out on things, but that's happening anyway.

------
pjc50
The difference between IE and (iOS) Safari is that Microsoft got fined for
bundling IE (
[http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/micros...](http://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/microsoft-
vs-doj/ie/DOJSuesMS.html) ) while Apple get away with not only bundling a
browser but banning competing implementations on their platform.

~~~
josephlord
At the time Windows had more than 95% (pulling percentage out of thin air but
I think it is realistic) of the desktop operating system market. Apple is less
than half of the mobile market. This doesn't mean I agree with the limitations
but it is certainly legally relevant to whether they are "get away" with doing
it.

~~~
smitherfield
>99%, actually. (98-99% including both desktops and servers/mainframes).

------
mschuster91
> Now, after one year, Apple has fixed a whopping two bugs in IndexedDB (out
> of several), and they’ve publicly stated that they don’t find much value in
> working on it, because they don’t see “a huge use.” Well duh, nobody’s going
> to use IndexedDB if the browser support is completely broken. (Microsoft,
> I’m looking at you too.)

Well, the reason for this is clear: offline web apps are supported in iOS but
without a reliable way to store larger amounts of data, web apps get pretty
much useless and so people have to go through the Crapp Store.

But, I have to defend Apple, IndexedDB is a ridiculous steaming pile of junk
when compared to WebSQL. Writing a single-line SQL statement with multiple
WHERE clauses and a couple ORDER BY, takes metric tons of boilerplate crap in
addition to callback hell because the IndexedDB crap is async.

------
sergimansilla
Agreed. However, it still has the best perceived performance. Just open a page
with a heavy layout and scroll up and down, or type an address or search term
in the location bar and "feel" how fast it loads. Apple really put some effort
in making it "feel" extremely fast.

~~~
krisdol
I agree except for the back button. I hate how swiping to go back takes you
back to a screenshot temporarily while the page reloads. I attempt to scroll
up and down and interact with the screenshot until suddenly the page isn't how
I remember it due to the reload.

It's such a terrible, terrible design and I check every new version in hopes
that this would be addressed.

~~~
jshelly
I'm fine with Safari, but the page refresh on back annoys me to no end

~~~
janinge
I really like this feature. A page redraw generally takes less time than the
time needed for my eyes and brain to re-parse the page. When I have to stare
at a blank page for a varying amount of time after having decided to go back,
the entire navigation process feels very sluggish and slow. Using other
browsers I find myself opening a lot more temporary tabs to account for this.
Swipe and hold is also nice when you just need to go back to reread a few
sentences, etc.

Most pages shouldn't need a refresh when you go back after a few seconds or
minutes. What annoys me are websites that set stupid expiry times or Cache-
Control values.

------
bickfordb
The definition of a web browser is enormous now. Even though Apple has massive
resources, is it really fair to rant against them for not implementing every
possible specification, five years old or not?

If web assembly is supposedly as fast as C, why can't we have web browsers
with a smaller built-in feature set and implement new specifications as
libraries?

~~~
realityking
While web assembly may give us performance, it doesn't give us access to new
platform API. Web assembly can in no way replace Service Worker, IndexedDB or
Web Manifests.

It also won't help with Web Components unless you're aming for a Web where we
just draw on a big canvas.

~~~
verbin217
I want a web where we just draw on a big canvas. That's a pretty simple API
for implementers to get right. Then we could move the scene graph (DOM) and
it's rendering engine entirely into the application language where it could be
more readily hot-fixed. It'd be like PDFJS but for your whole fucking web
browser.

~~~
bzbarsky
Note that PDFJS still creates a DOM, in order to support little things like
selection, accessibility, etc.

------
yellowapple
This article leaves out the rather obvious Option #4: ignore Safari and
develop to modern standards. Put up warnings about how Safari is broken like
we all did when we decided enough was enough with IE, and that - if a user
wants one's sites to not be broken - one should use something that isn't
Safari (and, in the case of iOS, something that isn't iOS).

The more developers who get on board with the "fuck you, Apple; if you want
our sites to work for our users, then you need to fix your shit", the more
pressure there will be from users for Apple to either fix Safari themselves or
allow the installation of _real_ alternative browsers on iOS, and thus the
sooner either of those things will happen (or Apple slips closer to its pre-
iPod days of borderline-obscurity).

------
binarymax
Hey Nolan, It was good to "meet" you at edgeconf (really we were just throwing
the mic back and forth, and I couldnt make it to the afterparty). I really
enjoyed your panel intro and insight.

I agree with your assessment that IndexedDB is laughably bad in Safari, but
maybe they haven't bothered because its really not such a great solution in
general? I'm going to reassert that I think we could do much better - since
IndexedDB is too low-level for what it is, but too specific for alternate
solutions. I've been kicking around a blog post that I haven't got out yet -
but we really need something more stream like and generic than a NoSQL index
in the browser - especially something fundamental to address the future influx
of WebAssembly apps. Cheers!

~~~
Touche
> I agree with your assessment that IndexedDB is laughably bad in Safari, but
> maybe they haven't bothered because its really not such a great solution in
> general?

So where's their alternative spec?

------
Grue3
Except Safari's market share is not anywhere near IE's. How many times have
you seen a website that works only in Safari? I never did. However I've seen
"only works in Chrome" many times. So if anything, Google Chrome is the new
IE.

------
booleanbetrayal
perfect example of why safari is the new IE ... they BREAK core Javascript
functionality and then let those breakages linger for months and months.

example -
[https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/9128#issuecomme...](https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/9128#issuecomment-108210732)

------
likeclockwork
Well.. that's certainly one way to make sure developers own an Apple computer
and an iOS device.

As long as one browser sticks out like a sore thumb you have to make a
conscious decision to either pay attention to it and its ecosystem or ignore
it.

------
scelerat
Incredibly hyperbolic, considering the not-uncommon x2.5 cost for developing
for both IE and Netscape, pre-IE7 or so.

Not even in the same ballpark.

But I get it, Safari is lagging on a lot of things, and it's frustrating.

------
outsidetheparty
>I heard them referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain
fruit company.”

Oh, come on. Nobody does this. Why would anybody do this?

Hyperbole for effect is all well and good -- and the clickbait title makes it
_quite_ clear that that's what we're wading into here -- but this borders on
self-parody, like saying MICRO$OFT or chanting "don't be evil!" or "WWSJD" it
makes you look like a partisan rather than someone with a valid point to make.

Safari does lack IndexedDB, and their 'powersaver plugin' thing has caused me
headaches. Firefox is the most likely to go unresponsive under CPU load, IME,
and a nasty growing habit of pushing new monetization strategies into their
toolbar. Chrome has poor performance, broken video event handling, and is the
one that seems most likely to break my app every time they push an update.
IE8-11 have various issues with animation and SVG, and most irritatingly there
are four versions of it still in active use, each with their own quirks. Edge
is, I'll guiltily admit, not really on my radar yet, but I'm sure it'll have
its advantages and disadvantages as well.

None of them are the new IE. Even IE isn't the new IE. There's never going to
be another IE6 for the web -- we've all, developers and customers alike,
learned the lesson about proprietary extensions and platform lock-in.

------
tempodox
It would be easy to interpret Apple's behavior as a declaration of war on the
browser. They want to force everyone into their brave new native app ecosystem
where it costs you three tithes (30%) of your revenue. They certainly don't
want to give you any encouragement to circumvent that via browser.

And web apps become ever more attractive in the appleverse: You stay in
control, not Apple, and you get the revenue, not Apple. It's quite clear why
Apple doesn't want that.

------
addicted44
I would have hoped that as web devs we would have learned our lessons from the
IE6 fiasco. The only browser web devs should be supporting and evangelizing is
Firefox. Admittedly Firefox isn't always the best browser, but it has always
been good enough, and if the people spending time, money and effort improving
WebKit or Blink spent that effort on Gecko and Firefox instead, it would be a
better than it is now.

Personally, Firefox has become my only browser on every platform but iOS and
it isn't even for ideological reasons but simply when combined with extensions
it is the best browser around. Once it (finally!) incorporates isolated
processes for tabs, it's gonna be head and shoulders above its competition
IMO.

------
mikhailt
I have to agree with the author based on the experience of developing an
extension for it. Safari is sadly way behind Firefox and Chrome in supporting
latest features. This has not changed since Safari 5/6 in Lion.

I think the author is saying Safari is new IE in terms that you need to start
adding features to your sites (and extensions) that Safari won't support and
blame Apple for not catching up, like Microsoft did at the time with IE.

Even Microsoft is planning to duplicate Chrome's extension APIs for Edge.

------
harel
Why support it then? As long as people polyfill for safari or hack something
to work, you just prolong its life and give Apple the motivation to continue
the neglect. The same happened with IE6 - people complained and bitched but
supported it, so the users had no reason to change. Until at some point it
became more expensive to support IE than it was to lose the users (which of
course, then upgraded).

------
usaphp
What is happening with safari swipe to go back functionality, every time I
swipe back it shows me a cached version of a page and then reloads it making
it unusable and irrational, what is the point of showing a cached version for
split of a second if you are going to reload it again ( happens on both iOS
and OS X , Adblock is not installed)

------
fixermark
From the article: "Although performance has been improving significantly with
JSCore and the new WKWebView..."

Hypothesis: new features tend to be a distraction from optimization work. If
Safari is focused on optimization work, maybe the team is making the conscious
decision to get what's implemented right before expanding the scope.

------
framp
Today news: browsers sucks.

The real thing I'm worried about is that no one is working on an open app
ecosystem. The only thing we have are browsers - which are horribly
inefficient and have huge discrepancies with one another. We're so terribly
behind.

Really, Safari's problems are just a symptom. The real problem is browser
existence.

------
jackgavigan
I recently ditched Chrome as my default desktop browser in favour of Safari
because of its lower power consumption. Apple may well have made a conscious
choice to eschew staying up to date with cutting-edge web technologies in
favour of a better overall user experience for the majority of users.

If so, it was a wise choice.

------
spullara
If Firefox and Chrome would render websites as nicely as Safari and integrate
with the keychain I would switch (on Mac). As it stands though, neither of the
alternatives are as pleasant and as well integrated with the rest of the
operating system. Unlike with IE, they could be.

------
ytdht
that reminds me of this CSS file I once saw on microsoft.com:
[http://farm1.staticflickr.com/49/119928279_59247e2095.jpg](http://farm1.staticflickr.com/49/119928279_59247e2095.jpg)

------
emehrkay
I use safari as my main browser, but yesterday I had to add

    
    
        -webkit-transform: translate3d(0,0,0);
    

So that a relative positioned element would have a higher z-index than a fixed
position one. Jesus.

------
smitherfield
As IE11 is going to be the last version prior to Edge with backwards-
compatibility with IE-only features, IE11 is going to be the new IE well into
the 2020s, even if Safari never receives another update.

------
hardwaresofton
This might be crazy, but... Maybe Apple is working on a new browser? Maybe
that's why they're not working on Safari any more?

------
biturd
What if gmail or another large service implemented a reliance on these new
features. Safari would be forced to add them in?

------
thanatropism
"X is the new Y" considered harmful.

------
tsax
More 'X is the new Y.' Wonderful!

------
eloisant
Is he talking about the iOS version? Because I don't think the desktop
version's market share is big enough for developers to really care about it
(unlike IE).

------
nosideeffects
Harvey Lubin, why did you have to be THAT Apple fanboy and ruin the
constructiveness of any comments on this blog post?

------
joesmo
I think the title is right, but mainly because of the multitude of Safari bugs
and its incredibly slow performance. This is for Safari of OS X: assuming it
doesn't crash on startup (so for me, about two out of three computers these
days, up from one out of three), Safari is a piss poor browser even when it
manages to run. I have a lot of code that runs incredibly slow on Safari yet
has no problems in other browsers. Sometimes it drops connections randomly.
Sometimes pages just crash. Sometimes it just won't render anything. The exact
same code works fine in Chrome, FF, etc. and is pretty typical angular code.
In other words, it's cross-browser code. Luckily, I don't think we have many
Safari customers and at this point, if things don't work in Safari, the bugs I
find are filed with the lowest precedence (ie: they will never get fixed) and
that only because we have a person on our team who insists on using this
broken browser. The lack of support for the APIs mentioned in the article only
serves to drive the point home for me. The developer tools are also
substandard compared to either Chrome or FF.

IE at least had market share. There is __nothing __that makes developing for
Safari (OS X) worth the time spent.

------
hiou
_> As recently as 2010, back when Steve Jobs famously skewered Flash while
declaring that HTML5 is the future, Apple was a fierce web partisan._

Web partisan or just trying to eliminate the biggest cross platform
competition to native applications at that time? (flash)

------
venomsnake
People cannot opt out of mobile safari - so in a way it is order of magnitude
worse than even IE at its peak shittiness.

------
frik
You forgot the "6" in IE6.

Beside that IE11 is the new IE6 - it's there to stay for a long time, Windows
10 Pro/Enterprise will come with IE11 and Edge!

------
ebbv
Failing to support newly proposed APIs != making your own non-standard
implementations of things and refusing to care about compatibility.

------
tzakrajs
Firefox renders pages terribly and is the real dud here.

edit: not speed, but aesthetic quality and parity with Chrome/Safari

~~~
zecg
Mobile Firefox, however, is the only way to have a competent ad blocker on
mobile: [https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-
origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

~~~
zimpenfish
Although Mobile Safari will no doubt get a deluge once iOS 9 is released.

cf. [http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/6/24/an-hour-with-safari-
cont...](http://murphyapps.co/blog/2015/6/24/an-hour-with-safari-content-
blocker-in-ios-9)

------
amelius
This is why I want the following html to work in every browser:

<meta name="render-engine" content="chrome/webkit" />

------
lostgame
Uh...

Comparing a webkit-based browser of any kind to the agony of supporting
something like IE6 back in the day is like comparing a paper cut to a stab
wound.

Nice clickbait title, though, got you to #1, aren't you proud. :P

------
gwbas1c
The article misses the point. The browser is a document viewer, not an
application delivery platform. Back in 2005 we all thought that web-based
applications were going to take the world by storm, but now that we have slick
application stores on all major platforms, this isn’t the case.

If you need functionality like you describe, ship a native application via an
app store. It’s a much better experience than web development.

~~~
wodenokoto
I don't fully agree. Apps like gmail and google maps are often preferred to
their native alternatives on desktop.

I have pretty much ditched native office suites in favor of google drive as
well on my desktop system.

And things like Facebook hasn't even considered native desktop
implementations.

So it is safe to say that the web is a great app delivery platform (at least
on the desktop) and as such, I think it is completely reasonable to improve
upon it and extend this benefit to mobile.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Have to parse that carefully. The web is a great delivery platform. But the
apps ... not so much. They can be laggy, unresponsive, render poorly, double-
process user events, and on and on. The apps are _not_ great. In fact, only
their mother could love them.

