I'm mostly a back-end guy, and have by and large worked with Firefox and Chrome being the browsers of choice, and have only had two issues with Safari (see below). As of today, I may have a third, but I may just have a configuration issue. So, please, what do you think about Safari? Is it the new IE 6? Is it considered decent? What do you think?
Look at this URI:
http:/~foo/It's wrong. You stick it in the browser and it doesn't work, but put it in a page and it will just assume the current server. It's just one step away from/~foo/, right? At least that's the logic my coworker had, but it broke the page for some users. When I had this issue in 2012, it worked in Firefox and Chrome and Opera and IE, but, I figured out by the logs, not Safari. The issue is that every other browser supported it — I don't know if they still do — and Safari didn't.HTML5 added an Audio API. To learn it, I created a page where, when you go there, you got an old-school pre-VOIP dial tone, which is actually two tones. But the Secret Masters of HTML decided that pages making noise without us saying "you can make noise" is a bad thing, and so I rewrote it so that, and I asked my wife to check on the iPhone and it wouldn't play. I never fully figured out the issue between iOS Safari and my HTML5 stuff, but I installed a WebKit-based browser on my Linux box to try to work it out, and I don't believe I ever fully did.
So, that's my bits. What do you think about Safari? Do you have any Safari stories?
Oldest comments (19)
In my opinion Safari was almost great, and then Apple just stopped trying. I'm sure the folks working on Safari are putting in a lot of work with good intentions, but their efforts seem starved.
Safari is a pleasant browser which is clean, light, performant software. I think it wins on less bloat vs Chrome, but it seems really late to deliver on APIs everybody else is in agreement on and it ships inconsistent implementations of standards with no obvious public statement about the bug.
(Apple also breaks stuff in WKWebview without notice 😭)
I like Safari as an end-user if I can get out of the mindset of knowing how sloppy it is in that ecosystem due to the focus on performance and such, but I have mostly worse things to say.
This incredibly frustrating afternoon still lingers in my mind 🤪:
Safari's implementation of srcset is buggy, rendering the whole feature basically useless
Ben Halpern ・ Oct 16 '17 ・ 2 min read
I just filed a bug with Webkit and the team was very receptive, easy to work with. I found a bug in Webkit's implementation of the Web Animations API, which happens to be spec other browsers have partially supported. Go figure.
I’ve been frustrated at times with Webkit’s implementation of spec, but every browser vendor has their awkward moments. It feels like Safari has fallen behind, but I have hope for Webkit.
Safari is far better than IE. In enterprise we're probably going to be supporting IE11 at some capacity until 2025. I’d rather work with Safari any day of the week then start debugging issues in a VM running IE11.
Sometimes I feel like I am living in an alternative universe where Google and Microsoft have teamed up and left Apple behind. Oh wait, this is just 2020. Hard to believe years ago Apple and Google's browsers were running on the same engine.
The Dev Tools in Safari look rather nice. I appreciate the Dev Tools when inspecting web apps via the iOS Simulator or connected iOS device, although the initial experience feels clunky when devices don't immediately show up in the browser's Develop menu. After that point everything is fine.
I use Safari as my primary web browser all of the time. I know. Gasp! Using Safari is a pleasant experience. Safari is integrated with MacOS / iOS and typically is more performant than Chrome. The UI is minimal and functional. Websites don't just fall apart when I visit them.
Safari iOS is frequently crippled by Apple wanting the mobile web to be differentiated from mobile apps on which they profit. There is of course an argument for mobile apps, but Apple would rather stack the deck at the expense of their users.
And here I am dealing with every other browser working with brotli compression on server sent event streams - even IE just doesn't accept it and carries on working. Safari, nah...
I agree, web kit browser, feels light to use. But it has truly frustrating faults.
Apple manages Safari in a very conservative way. They add features not because it benefits the ecosystem, but because it benefits them. Remember, Apple makes 30% off all iOS app sales, so the Web is an afterthought for them, almost a threat.
It's not IE6 because they actually do work on it, they're just not playing the same game as say Mozilla or even Google/Microsoft.
As a result, from a developer's perspective it is super frustrating to see how they add features here and there, but skip others, and as a result they hold us all back.
Edit: I feel bad for Safari/WebKit developers because I'm sure they want to do the right thing as much as we'd like, but it's another one of those Apple internal political game things.
Safari is the new Explorer. It's certainly better than Explorer, but if I have a problem with a page not rendering/behaving properly, 9/10 it's Safari.
It sucks. Especially iOS safari. Bring back ie6-ie8 memories after they were dead everywhere apart from those 3% of users that your employer forces you to support.
I used for years to use Safari as default browser for my personal use. For development I rather liked the Chrome debugger. Even though this behavior allowed me to easily test on both browser.
Recently, as I was debugging a website/pwa on my iPhone, I paired it with the USB cable to my laptop.
Because I wasn't sure if the last version was fetched or not, I decided to clean the iPhone cache (from the phone settings).
As a result, moreover than my phone's cache, my all Safari browsing history on my laptop was cleared too 🤔.
I was about to restore backup or continue with it but I actually saw there a chance to switch browser and go back to Firefox 😜.
After now a couple of weeks of Firefox usage, I can say that I'm really please with it 🚀.
Safari is the odd browser and the new IE. I really hate developing something on Chrome and having to redo the whole thing on Safari because they don't support fully some API. Display grid & flex are still buggy especially with some Html 5tags such as the details/summary tag. All in all I prefer if Safari is reworked on Chromium or rewrite their engine to match with Google and Mozilla's.
Well the fact is Safari uses a modified WebKit while Chromium is another fork of WebKit. You can pick a good base for something but Safari is what happens when you build something bad over it.
Front end developer here, almost all browser issues spawn from safari, safari sux.
We call it SafarIE as safari is the new internet explorer. It's the browser most likely to not work due to missing features or obscure bugs