That thread has hundreds of legit replies with bugs (that are impossible to read on desktop Twitter from what I can tell). I saw a few cases of "I published an article about our challenges supporting Safari, the team reached out and then ghosted us", like http://blog.apps.npr.org/2021/08/31/joy-generator.html. Search for Safari on that page... oof.
Dear Safari team, the first step in fixing any problem is to admit that you have one. Please internally acknowledge that Safari has _lots_ of issues like these and has a reputation problem among web developers. It's not just people hating on Safari and being ignorant, I would love to support Safari better, but it's just so frustrating in practice and when filing bugs they seem to go into a black hole. I think a big problem is that bugs seemingly get duplicated into some internal system where there might be some discussion going on, but none of that is visible to the rest of the world and it creates that black hole perception and lack of back and forth discussion with the people who are reporting these issues.
The Safari team has always been pleasant to work with and they clearly care about the web, but something about their resourcing or schedules just stops them from delivering the best browser. They were great partners for the webassembly spec process, but they also frequently were unable to give any commitments or even talk about their perspective. Then more recently at my current gig we were basically unable to get our application to work in Safari - after a lot of debugging, I figured out that their wasm compiler had a bug that was producing massively bloated stack frames. In the end, getting that fixed required us to leverage personal contacts on the Safari team. Once we got in touch with someone they came up with a fix pretty quick!
Back when I was still doing frontend work I frequently found that Safari had crippling bugs, but if you were able to work around the bugs it had good performance and a good feature set. I simply couldn't justify buying a Mac or an iPad to support a small % of the overall web audience. Bring back Windows Safari please :-(
(Apple's patent/trademark battles with Khronos have also been a problem for WebGPU, but that would be a troubled standard even without them)
- In 2021 got a "Thanks for further reporting this bug... This bug is tracked internally".
- Lots of excitement when someone finds it's fixed in 15.4 (of course no feedback from Apple that a fix was made anywhere or released, bug is still in original "New" state)
- Disappointment strikes: "(on 15.4) it sometimes keeps playing, but sometimes stops when you pull down Notification Center or switch apps. Sometimes the Play button doesn’t work. It also stops when you get a push notification with a sound" :(
Now, how much do you want to bet that the "internally tracked" bug is marked fixed, the developer is not aware of these corner cases, but could probably fix them if they only knew. No worries, another developer (the original having long moved on) will probably take a crack at it again in 2024 when this information makes it back to them.
I've worked in organizations just like that, where every bug report is a game of telephone. Everything takes exponentially longer and is perpetually broken because the developer and the user having the problem can't just talk to each other. Throwing bugs (and fixes!) over a wall and hoping for the best just doesn't work.
Those do not accurately reproduce the Safari experience. Many bugs or performance issues will be unique to the way Apple builds and packages webkit, or the specific graphics stack they use.
Back before Windows Safari was killed it honestly was a bad imitation of iOS Safari too - it didn't include the media codecs, etc - but it was better than nothing. Windows Safari still theoretically exists (I was told not too long ago by a little bird that iTunes uses it)
I've long believed that Apple's focus on user privacy was more driven by lack of engineering ability/bandwidth to exploit data themselves, rather than intrinsic belief.
- Lack of proper support for PWAs (this alone would likely take care of most complaints/scrutiny about AppStore monopoly). Especially since WebKit is forced onto any browser for iOS (there's no other choice for developers).
- Lack of proper support for real extensions; the most recent versions have basically neutered extensions for Safari to the point of being useless - as I say: "if it doesn't run uBlock Origin, it's not a real browser"; this is mostly why I've moved to Firefox as my main browser now.
As always: what is "proper support" as there's literally no such thing as a PWA standard. There are dozens (if not more) standards that everyone picks and choses from to call their own selection "the one true PWA standard".
And the "no proper support" usually boils down to "no push notifications".
But you still have to send users to the share menu to actually add to the home screen which is not obvious. In other mobile browsers you can show them a prompt.
It may be a matter of personal taste, but I actually prefer the Share menu over a prompt because it doesn't waste real estate on an already small screen where it's unwanted or superfluous. Giving users the option but not pestering them with it is better UX in my opinion.
In my opinion A lot of these are only necessary due to Apple's App Store restriction. 80% of Apps doesn't need to be Native Apps. A Restaurant food menu ordering shouldn't be an App that requires Apple's approval. Along with events, content consumption Apps etc. However having an icon on home screen is possibly one of the most expensive real estate.
Okay, fine; be on par with the one browser that is an order of magnitude more popular, then.
> 2. What's on par? Define this "on par"
Would an end user trying to use a web app as if it were native be satisfied?
> Example: Safari doesn't implement "Add to home screen". Neither does Firefox.
It... Literally does? Three-dot menu > "Add to Home screen". This is on Android; if it's not present on iOS then it's almost certainly Apple's fault somehow so they can fix it.
> be on par with the one browser that is an order of magnitude more popular, then
So, once again:
- define "on par"
- explain why they need to slavishly copy that one browser without considering whether it's worth doing?
> Would an end user trying to use a web app as if it were native be satisfied?
No, because this is even more ambiguous than "on par".
Example: usb/bluetooth/etc. Native apps use them. Chrome put up some "standards" and rushed to implement them. Both Safari and Mozilla consider these harmful on many, many valid points.
Is this required for a "proper PWA support"? Do they just unquestioningly copy what Chrome does?
So, the more this conversation goes the more I'm convinced you neither know what "PWA support" actually means, nor what Safari actually supports.
> It... Literally does?
I looked it up on Can I Use. It was for desktop versions.
On iOS you can "Add to home screen", too (through the share menu which is now a kitchen sink for everything, not just share)
To your first 2 points: Yes, it's quite possible that some features shouldn't be implemented, and yes, it's unlikely that there is a simple rule to describe all the cases where things should and shouldn't be implemented. But that doesn't mean that they're not drawing the line in the wrong place now; it seems like you're arguing that because something is subjective it's irrelevant.
>> It... Literally does?
> I looked it up on Can I Use. It was for desktop versions.
I answered that after literally clicking the menu item and making sure it worked on my phone. My guess, after reading through https://caniuse.com/web-app-manifest , is that maybe there's something about service workers or background processing that they're not doing, but just sticking an icon on the homescreen, empirically, works fine.
> But that doesn't mean that they're not drawing the line in the wrong place now
And what exactly is that place? I've asked this three times already and you still can't answer what it is that Safari doesn't support and must implement to be "on par" with Chrome.
> and making sure it worked on my phone
You wrote this after I literally said, "I looked it up on Can I Use. It was for desktop versions."
So:
- you still haven't said what exactly you're missing from Safari to consider that it "properly supports PWAs"
- you clearly ignore what I write
At this point I'm no longer interested in this one-sided conversation
> So:
>
> - you still haven't said what exactly you're missing from Safari to consider that it "properly supports PWAs"
You've been repeatedly given answers, but you have decided to dismiss them because you decided they're somehow irrelevant, just like I suspect the people at Apple will dismiss any valid criticisms of Safari, and only listen to the gushing Apple fanboys that claim Safari is all rainbows and unicorns.
> - you clearly ignore what I write
"The hypocrisy is strong with this one" -Yoda
> At this point I'm no longer interested in this one-sided conversation
... aaaand that's how a fantroll ends a conversation he's losing.
Safari also supports it as an option if you tap share. As far as I can recall, they were the first browser to do so. The common complaint is that they don't support an automatic modal prompt that requires interaction to dismiss as Chrome does.
As I wrote elsewhere last week, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to be notified by the apps I do want to be notified by just because there are 10,000 websites I don’t want notifications from.
As I said, just because most people don't want most apps to notify them doesn't mean that nobody wants any notifications from any app.
Here's a list I wrote elsewhere in this thread:
* todos
* reminders
* calendars
* chat
* phone
And the list goes on.
There are many others where the app might be possible, but for many people in many cases those apps are useless without notifications. Stocks, forum apps, etc.
Do I want stock notifications? No, I don't. But if I did decide to start day trading, I couldn't use a PWA unless it could notify me. I'm a member of a dozen forums, most of which I want no notifications from. But one of them I administer, and I need notifications. Another one, I need notifications from topics I'm following.
99% of apps on my phone aren't allowed to notify me, but I wouldn't call my phone a smart phone if it couldn't notify me when I want it. The same goes for apps, whether native or PWA.
As a user, I happily browse in Safari. I use Chrome for interacting with Google, but nothing else. I haven't noticed anything that I want to do that is prevented by my use of Safari. As a developer, I never touch the web, so.
It comes down to: different people -- and organizations! -- have different priorities and respond to different incentives. Why it is so difficult for some to see that their particular way of seeing the world is subjective, and that some people in good faith can disagree?
As a former iOS dev (retired, now doing MacOS/Web only) I also spend most of my time in Safari. Sure it has issues, but iCloud Private Relay is very nice, and iCloud Keychain is very convenient across all my Apple devices.
Chrome might have fewer issues, but feeding the Google Ad engine is not a feature I care for much. I use it when something refuses to work in Safari, like for some reason paying my water bill online.
Except Web developers are the target audience here? As an end user, you're not supposed to be work around Apple's bugs or lack of support. Users don't care how hard it is, what gross hacks hold up the world, or that Apple has a 30% rake; they only care whether the thing works as expected.
The lack of RES when browsing Reddit. But that's more about the developers' choice to discontinue support than Safari (which, as I recall, was about the lead time of getting extension approval, not the browser itself).
Overall, as a user of Safari, I appreciate that it lags behind the bleeding edge. Stability, battery life, and privacy are important things to me.
FYI, it seems that RES is being EOL'd [0]. The linked announcement describes how the contributing developers have dwindled down to only two people. I am curious how this situation will evolve, or if it will, since I also dislike using Reddit without the enhancement suite.
>Overall, as a user of Safari, I appreciate that it lags behind the bleeding edge. Stability, battery life, and privacy are important things to me.
Some features could help with that like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLImageEl... , if Safari is always behind 1 year or two then you always lose battery and bandwidth, so yeah Safari devs are not chasing efficiency if they would then they would have been the first not the last to implement this.
Also try to search for "broken/not working in Safari" and you will see is not all about some nightmarish privacy invading APIs.
> they would then they would have been the first not the last to implement this.
Look at it this way, too: It's quite possible that before you get to performance savings by implementing `loading`, you may have a list of things a mile long that are higher on the priority. So, you solve those first.
> Also try to search for "broken/not working in Safari" and you will see
mostly people who develop and test on nothing but Chrome.
>mostly people who develop and test on nothing but Chrome.
Most developers can't test on Safari , I use Ff for dev (my colleagues use Chrome) nobody owns a Mac to test on it and there are Safari only issues or cool features that work in Ff and Chrome but not in Safari.
Except, when my phone switches automatically to dark mode, the text color switches but not the background. So I get white text on a light grey background which is illegible:
The only fix I've found is to force-kill Safari. But then at sunrise, I get the opposite problem: black text on a dark grey background, and I have to force-kill Safari again.
I've been force-killing Safari twice a day on my phone since iOS 15 came out. :-(
Manually toggling light/dark mode does not exhibit the problem, nor does it fix the problem when it's in this state.
I have some possibly non-default accessibility settings: reduce motion on, button shapes on, on/off labels on, increase contrast on. Also in Safari: single tab, landscape tab bar off, allow website tinting off.
Have you filed this bug or reported it to the requested Twitter thread? If anything else, a link to your HN comment posted to them would be enough — and then they’d realize there’s bugs here to find.
In another tweet[0], Jen Simmons asks the question:
> Do we really want to live in a 95% Chromium browser world? That would be a horrible future for the web. We need more voices, not fewer.
It's difficult to become a voice for Safari, if Safari is hiding behind a hefty price tag.
Debugging Safari issues on Linux or Windows machines make it easy to grow a disliking for the browser. There are ways to do it effectively, of course, but no simple or pleasant ones.
> It's difficult to become a voice for Safari, if Safari is hiding behind a hefty price tag.
This may be a cause for a lack of voices, but it's hardly the only (or I'd argue even the most prevalent) cause. 99.9% of the developers at the company I work for are on macbook pros, yet they only support Chrome. And the reason is simple: they don't want to support more than the one browser.
The decision was, of course, backed up by numbers, harvested after our product's use of Chrome-only features and "best on Chrome" style "help" answers.
Doing your primary development in Chrome
or Firefox and testing in Safari would still be testing in Safari. Or is it apparently no longer possible to debug code that you don't have a debugger attached to? I'd contend that it's your job. And if it's slightly harder in Safari, that's a reason to ask for better tooling, but not a reason not to do your job.
If the goal is to avoid a mono-culture (as called out by the OP of this thread), then switching to Firefox is perfectly acceptable - perhaps even better than switching to Safari. You've got my encouragement to do so.
On this specific issue: scrolljacking is always bad because the web simply doesn’t expose the necessary primitives to make it not bad for at least some people. Search my comment history for a little more detail and discussion.
This is how it is where I work, too. We offer first-class support for Firefox and Chrome, but we really only have one person ever testing anything on Safari, because we only have one person with a Mac.
But instead they force you to buy an M1 Mac mini for testing, or rent one on AWS or other Cloud. They will spend PR resources attacking those site that doesn't support Safari, which may harm their user on iOS. And force them to support Safari by spending money on Apple. Brilliant strategy by Tim Cook.
Edit: I know you could use other webkit browser on Windows for testing.
I avoided this portion of the argument earlier, but…
Given the yearly cost of your average software development team and their budget for development laptops/desktops, a $700 mac mini for Safari testing is pocket lint for your average corporation.
Even for independent contractors, that cost is pretty trivial in the scheme of other tools and software that designers and developers pay for.
I feel it's difficult to have good discussion if that's the stance their developer evangelist approaches this topic from. Not only is it tacitly offensive to men, but it marginalizes the women who develop for Safari and have experienced all the same frustrating issues the men have.
I'll say your statement seems strictly worse than the one you are quoting. She had a valid point and a way of characterizing those making the other point that doesn't even seem insulting. You, on the other hand, want to devolve the conversation entirely into irrelevancy.
It's not likely your post will change her tweet, but hopefully this post can salvage this part of the thread.
To that end: Chrome seems to currently be in a more dominant position than IE ever was. Even Microsoft was unable to build a competing browser, and they threw real
resources at it. The only thing that is holding the line is Safari (I use Firefox, but its a rounding error). I think it's vitally important we don't let Google keep leveraging their control until they own the entire internet. AMP seems to have imploded, which is good, but it won't matter if for 99% of the people it's opening Chrome or Chromium, going to Google and typing in where they want to go.
I don't see how bringing up gender in an effort to dismiss criticism helps in anyway. It is irrelevant, unless the point she is trying to make is something like "men are often mean on twitter" which could be true, but doesn't have anything to do with Safari.
It is insulting, because any man who reads it will think their criticism of Safari will be dismissed, not because its invalid, but because of their gender.
> Debugging Safari issues on Linux or Windows machines make it easy to grow a disliking for the browser.
Hell it's not just debugging Safari issues themselves... the Developer Tools are no match for Chrome's.
It's really noticeable that Google invested (and still invests) a lot of money on them... because developers will prefer to work in an environment that makes development easy. I personally shifted to Chrome many years ago for that reason - Firebug was an insane resource hog, not to mention slow as molasses, and Chrome was a breeze to work with in comparison for years.
Something that would have helped break the Chrome monopoly is if Microsoft had chosen non-Chrome for Edge. I would have liked Firefox, because that would have added technology weight so there was one giant behind each major engine.
Using Blink/Chromium is effectively Microsoft supporting Chrome's technology monopoly.
It’d be nice if they rewrote Safari on Chromium. I think we’d all be better to pool our collective resources to work on a single browser vs. a whole bunch of competing standards and implementations
I mostly agree. Having a healthy browser landscape is important for user privacy and accessible/equitable access to the internet, but I'm not seeing the evidence as to why that same argument extends to multiple independent engine implementations.
The computing world would be better off if governance of Blink/V8/etc were handed over to a neutral third party. Similar to Linux. Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Brave, etc can all still exist and differentiate on the implementation, just like how Amazon Linux differentiates with Ubuntu.
History is funny. KHTML (a KDE project) was repurposed to WebKit by Apple and integrated with Safari. Which in turn was taken by Google that built Chrome on it. They later diverged more and now other browser are being built on repurposed Chrome. It would be funny if Safari was really replaced by Chromium as that would mean the offspring has eaten the parent.
Prior to now-ish, we didn't have a bunch of companies working on a single browser, we had a bunch of companies making a bunch of browsers. With a core open source browser that everyone steals from and adds their own flare to, I'm way more open to that. That is the best of all possible worlds, IMHO.
> There are ways to do it effectively, of course, but no simple or pleasant ones.
What are they? I was mulling this over a few days ago, as there are occasional things I want to check on Safari or iOS Safari (also on macOS in general occasionally, but that’s far secondary), and so I looked into macOS VMs (expensive, because Apple’s software EULA requires any such provision to have a minimum of 24 hours), second hand late 2014 Mac Minis (the oldest that run the latest version of macOS), more special-purpose browser VM arrangements like SauceLabs which used to be not terribly expensive, that kind of thing.
I use Firefox primarily, and I’d like to be able to test things on Safari like I can with Chromium, but as far as I can tell, there is no free or inexpensive alternative: the alternatives are things like US$25 for a day or possibly month of an inferior experience (and try to make head or tails of the utterly deceptive pricing at https://checkout.macincloud.com/), or buying at least AU$450 (more typically AU$600) of second hand physical hardware (Mac Mini Late 2014, iPhone 6s, if you want to go with the oldest and cheapest, regardless of how much longer they may be supported; and that’s skipping an iPad; if you wanted to go with the cheapest new products, AU$1,778).
Look, if I cared about Internet Explorer still I could even download a VM from Microsoft specifically for the purpose of testing in IE! I wish Apple would likewise give me macOS and iOS VMs for Safari testing.
We decided to throw a 2017 Macbook Air in the on top of the developer servers and make it accessible by VNC (through the built-in Screen Share option). Its not ideal, but it is COVID proof (remote working).
… but it looks like they go for somewhere in the vicinity of AU$650 on eBay. A Mac Mini is cheaper.
I’m happy to spend plenty of money on a computer that I will use extensively, but I’m not enamoured of the idea of spending hundreds of dollars for something I use only very occasionally.
I recently discovered that Safari on both iOS and MacOS lack the ability to use a custom search engine. You're stuck with the few options Apple has hard-coded into the app.
A few Safari extensions exist that try to skirt this limitation by watching your browsing for a Google, DDG, etc search. These extensions grab the query from those search engines then redirect your tab to your preferred custom search engine.
Of all of the missing common features to implement, I feel like custom search engine is incredibly simple:
* User entered string for search URL with some marker for "the query".
* User entered string for the label of the search engine.
* Option to edit/delete already entered custom engines.
* In the search engine selector, also allow users to choose any custom engines.
Sure, there are specs out there for making this a cleaner customer experience. For instance, OpenSearch lets web sites tell browsers if the website is a search engine, and what query string pattern should be used with it. But at the bare minimum, Safari (on iOS and MacOS) should implement the simpler "just enter a query string pattern" feature.
Jesus, I feel like she's just like any support assistant from official support forums that I ever interacted with:
User:
> Can we get support for using any search engine we want? This is my biggest annoyance with Safari. I use it everyday, but being locked into a fixed set of engines sucks.
Response:
> You can change your default search engine.
> On macOS, go to Safari > Preferences > Search.
> On iOS, it’s Settings > Safari > Search Engine.
> There are lots of cool things you can adjust in these preferences.
I see some here are asking for Safari on Windows and Linux. You can get most of the way by just running Webkit builds on those platforms. BUT! That would only solve a small fraction of issues. Most of the issues my team has to work around are only with Safari on iOS and ipadOS. Plenty of those issues are so OS/hardware specific that they need to be debugged with actual devices since they can't even be reproduced in Xcode simulator. Those issues are mostly related to audio, webrtc and touch.
You also need to have an (IIRC old) Itunes installed for some dependencies. Run MiniBrowser.exe when you've extracted the archive you downloaded from S3.
If they change the builds (e.g. 67 isn't Win anymore) you'd look for "Apple-Win-10-Release-Build" on the Builders list.
It seems like they're getting what they asked for, people are posting a bunch of bugs.
My personal pain point was when I figured out that Safari supports only a subset of the Date format standard (RFC which is a part of an ISO or something like that, basically there are some dates that only Safari can't parse).
Now it's up to them to live up to the purpose of the thread, if it means anything.
I just tried it in my Safari and it seems to give you an "Invalid Date" which it doesn't in Chrome.
Not sure if it's a bug, maybe a design choice. Anyway, in my case I received dates from a backend and was supposed to visualize a chart with them and some supplementary data, so I had to parse them and at some point we learned that the chart was broken for users in Safari because they'd get "Invalid Date" after parsing.
Dates are weird in JS/browsers so I wouldn't be at all surprised if some browser was strictly adhering to a standard, and the other browser... also strictly adhering to a standard, but a different one. Or both being lax. Or one of them being lax. Or...
Safari needs a way to actively sync tabs between iCloud devices. I'm not sure how it syncs now, but it does not work correctly. On desktop Safari, I have tabs from my phone that I visited six months ago.
The only solution to sync them correctly, as far as I know, is to log in/out of iCloud on each device.
Seems fairly simple. Here's a step-by-step tutorial to solving Safari's issues, if some Apple developer finds their way here. You're free to use it, I don't even want any consultation fees.
The HTML5 video player using MediaSource is a mess on Safari. It’s not enabled on iPhone and quite broken on iPad and Mac. Like sending the wrong events, not starting again on the same video element, or returning no data when you use the api to extract an image from the video.
Does anyone use Safari exclusively for all their browsing? I've heard great things about DuckDuckGo's browser, Firefox Focus, (Vanilla) Firefox, Brave, Opera, etc. I try to minimize the apps I have installed, but when it comes to browsers, I like to have a fair amount of them installed, not because I especially like certain browsers, just that it minimizes the attack surface, and compartments browsing sessions, which is essential these days. I still leave a footprint, but having your browsing insulated from other browsing sessions is a good practice. Anyone else do this? Multiple browsers === Privacy win?
I stopped using multiple browser for exactly that purpose. It actually increases your attack surface. While compartmentalization of browsers helps somewhat against tracking you now have to keep all of them updated. RCE bug in one of them already compromises everything you have on your machine, so having multiple browsers just means the attacker can pick from a wider array of targets.
I meant the attack surface of browsing sessions. Yes I agree, having multiple browsers increases the attack surface of the device, which is why I try to minimize the amount of apps installed. But browsers are an exception.
I haven't really looked at the comments, quick search of "you tube". Nothing of my issue.
On you tube the "homepage" or algorithm page, none of the thumbnails are working. The only thumbnail image that shows up is the Avert on the first top left area.
I am on a brand new Mac M1 from 2021. It's only a few months old.
Other stuff in YouTube works but the images don't come up. Hover now won't work either. Is Youtube aging on Safari? LOL.
In the Safari menu, there may be a Feedback option that lets you report the broken site issue to them directly, without having to use Twitter. I’m not sure if it’s a developer thing or not, but if it’s not there, I imagine it’s present in the latest tech preview build.
Doing that form. I figured out that my Mac doesn't have the latest OS. I'm running on 11.3.1 I thought it was supposed to "update" itself. I don't see any new OS updates on the App Store or whatever it's called. I think it's BS the updates just take up more memory space on the computer AND make the computer run slower.
Our computers immediately depreciate like cars. I was able to make my older Mac Laptop from 2012 last 9 years and I am running on version 10. Now it's dying again. A clean install might fix it. I also had some upgrades to the hardware and fixes.
Making your car and computer run as long as possible saves a lot of money. Buying the newest stuff is wow expensive.
This reads like a manager who has ignored feedback for years and when criticized expects a formatted list of every problem they ignored.
I don't see any point in doing this on Twitter other than this dev wanting confirmation bias their product is good. Overwhelmingly only apple users whom like apple are going to be following apple employees and participate in their discussions. This by its nature excludes a significant amount of criticism. It's a poor forum for actual content.
Take something that works on Chrome. Does it work on Safari? If not, fix it. There you go. I googled and found plenty of contemporary css bugs, js oddities/lack of support and feature differences.
> Take something that works on Chrome. Does it work on Safari? If not, fix it.
Why is Safari responsible for slavishly copying what Google developers dream up and shove in production? Does Safari not having FLOC indicate they are missing a vital feature?
A bit of a strawman, there's a big different in user benefit between certain CSS/JS features and FLOC. The web as a whole would be better if Safarai/iOS supported PWAs.
> there's a big different in user benefit between certain CSS/JS features and FLOC
Yes, there is. And the method I'm responding to doesn't distinguish between them. Hence, it's a bad method.
If only there was some group, some committee, that could form a consensus on what was important. That way every developer wouldn't individually disagree with specific decisions Apple made.
For example, I'm not sure of any CSS/JS features Chrome has and Safari lacks that I want.
Please provide proof of the assertion the web would be better if Safari suppored PWAs. I want to see graphs from the user side, not from the revenue side.
Personally, I suspect the only thing which would be better if Safari supported PWAs would be that some companies would see more engagement with notifications. But this is just opinion.
> Without notifications, they cannot really be called PWA’s, in my opinion.
Ah yes. "Your opinion".
There's no such thing as "PWAs". There's a dozen or more standards, most of which are supported by Safari. Of course, everyone hails their own subjective subset of those standards as "the one true PWA support".
If Safari ever supports push notifications, there will be some other standard that Safari must support to "properly support PWAs".
My point is that notifications are a basic part of apps in general. We aren’t talking about some esoteric api that will let you do 3d gaming and isn’t useful for anything else. There are huge numbers of categories of apps that are impossible without notifications.
* todos
* reminders
* calendars
* chat
* phone
And the list goes on.
There are many others where the app might be possible, but for many people in many cases those apps are useless without notifications. Stocks, forum apps, etc.
I’ll tell you what, I’ll offer you a smart phone that doesn’t ever allow you to get notifications for any reason. Then when you object, I’ll just tell you that there’s no such thing as a standard feature set for smart phones.
I only remember reading it on HN. Did I misread it or misremember it? I'll be honest, I don't currently need to worry about push notifications, so I wasn't super aware of the details.
Bungie, another tech company, has been making this exact request of its community for years now, and their community has for years now found every excuse under the sun to ignore it. Bungie asks “tell us what’s broken, tell us what feels wrong”, and their community responds instead “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”, and then complains that bugs aren’t getting fixed in Bungie’s products. This self-fulfilling prophecy of refusal, complaint, and outrage repeats on an annual cycle, and yet these users continue to ignore pleas for useful feedback.
As of when I posted this comment, most of HN’s discussion of this post is a stellar example of this Internet forum social behavior. Safari asks “tell us what’s buggy and broken, not about recurring feature requests”, and this community is responding with “recurring feature request X, cynical dismissal of intentions”. There are three or four actual real bug reports in this discussion, but they’re drowned out by the non-curious ‘feature’ and ‘cynical’ repetition.
I’m kind of disappointed that they got a hundred plus viable bug reports on Twitter, but only a couple from HN. Given how much so many of us sneer at Twitter, it’s upsetting to see Twitter dramatically outshine us technically. We’re Hacker News, this ought to be a piece of cake.
For example: I wish that Elon Musk wasn’t prideful and troll-y online (these are feature requests that his personality team has refused us), but if he asked me to name a bug in Tesla’s cars that he isn’t aware of, I’d point out that Tesla cars allow you to drive at unsafe speeds when the fog lights are turned on, which is wasting untold megawatts of Supercharger time per year because drivers either don’t know that fog lights aren’t effective above a certain speed and because there’s no chime or automatic-off setting to prevent energy waste. Yes, Elon’s a jerk, and yes, I have feature requests and cynicism about that — but I’d leap for the opportunity to even have a chance at posting one paragraph that cuts all Teslas’ watts per mile by any amount at all. I wish others here found that as rewarding as I do.
I find it ironic that you criticise feature request feedback for big report requests and then your Tesla example "bug report" is arguably an enhancement request, not a bug.
Maybe the real lesson here is that the line between bug and enhancement is sometimes fuzzy and subjective.
If Tesla said “working as designed”, then that would definitively confirm that it’s not a bug. Apple has said “working as designed, not a bug” about the most common feature requests (such as “uBlock support” and all the underlying capabilities to deliver that), leaving no uncertainty about them. So I do appreciate your point in the generic “any” case, certainly, but that uncertainty can easily be voided in specific cases — yet we’re ignoring that when it occurs. (I assume this is because framing feature requests as bugs is a common persuasion tactic, as any software maintainer would confirm, but I don’t have any certainty on that view yet.)
Bungie does that out of organizational incompetence. You should not have to rely on "community" to tell you your bugs. That's what QA testing is for. From my friends whom work in QA testing it is completely the fault of the game company for bugs and bad changes. They're almost always reported upfront before the game or patch is live. Guess what? Money is more important than a good product.
Jen Simons used to work for Mozilla and recently jumped ship. She's a CSS expert, that what I knew her for before this post, and I expect her followers are from varied backgrounds in the Web dev scene.
Having Apple publicly engage with the dev community like this is a very welcome.
It's alarming how insular the Safari team is at Apple. They legit think it's the best browser. To gather some data, I quickly skimmed through 20 MacBook unboxings by regular people on YouTube and the first thing they do is download Chrome. Every single one of them. Google would've taken over the iPhone and iPad as well because regular everyday people want and like Chrome but Apple's anticompetitive practices are not letting people access it.
> I quickly skimmed through 20 MacBook unboxings by regular people on YouTube
I am curious which videos you watched. The first four hits for 'macbook unboxing' on youtube for me are[0][1][2][3]. Of these, only 0 installs chrome; 1 does not seem to use a web browser at all, and 2 and 3 both use safari.
> It's alarming how insular the Safari team is at Apple.
Do not confuse "not wanting to spend spending billions of money on advertisement and having dozens of talking heads" with "being insular"
> They legit think it's the best browser.
Quotation needed
> To gather some data, I quickly skimmed through
You skimmed through videos of people who've been subjected to continuous and relentless advertisement campaign across multiple properties that has been going on for over a decade.
> because regular everyday people want and like Chrome
They've been told they want and like Chrome. Continuously. As another data point: Google's Apps regularly "forget" my choice to use a browser and once a month or so propose I open external links in Chrome. Subject a "regular user" to such behaviour long enough, and they will "want Chrome".
Dear Safari team, the first step in fixing any problem is to admit that you have one. Please internally acknowledge that Safari has _lots_ of issues like these and has a reputation problem among web developers. It's not just people hating on Safari and being ignorant, I would love to support Safari better, but it's just so frustrating in practice and when filing bugs they seem to go into a black hole. I think a big problem is that bugs seemingly get duplicated into some internal system where there might be some discussion going on, but none of that is visible to the rest of the world and it creates that black hole perception and lack of back and forth discussion with the people who are reporting these issues.