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by npolet 3199 days ago
Sure, a few years ago the difference between browsers was really quite large. But we're in 2017 and most of the most used browsers are mostly in line with the supported features and expected behaviour of them.

But... safari is now the one that has weird behaviour that does not occur in Firefox, chrome and edge. Just because historically there was a massive split in behaviour doesn't mean that Safari gets off free. It's the one browser I hate testing because there are usually edge case and unexpected behaviour.

2 comments

Again, I'm not seeing this.

I look at Firefox and some of it's inconsistent behaviours around flexbox compared to other browsers (mind you, some of these are due to the spec). Just today I had an irritating render bug in Chrome.

I know, this all comes down to hearsay and individual experiences. But I still strongly believe that 'Safari is the new IE' is nothing but baseless FUD.

How have you not noticed any of them? Most obvious is local storage throws out of space exceptions if Safari is in private mode. I'm not even a web developer.
Honestly, not really. The only one I can think of is your localStorage example.

Regardless, that's not the point. I'm not saying that Safari is perfect, I'm just saying that while it might have some implementation differences and bugs, so do other browsers.

No service workers, web rtc, Stream API or any other feature that can make web apps a viable replacement to app store installed native apps.
As of iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 Safari does support WebRTC and streaming API. And I don't see them supporting service workers any time soon because that's a stupid fucking idea.
Clients ask me to develop carousels much more than I'm asked to make a P2P video conferencing app.
Because private mode is for porn? Who'd try normal apps there?

(only kidding, but it's not the most obvious thing to check and optimize for if you're a web dev. If that's what Safari's problems are, it's pretty solid.)

Can you provide examples of "weird behaviour"?

Im also a Safari user, and in the majority of cases the reason it is not supported is because the page/app uses some custom Chrome-only, non-standard feature. Like this one.

Sure. This one https://s.codepen.io/joshhunt/debug/ZKyYNz. It differs to IE, Safari and Chrome in the way it treats height:0 padding-top: 100% on a flex child. In Safari, the grey box expands properly to contain all divs. In Firefox, it doesn't.

Granted, this is more of a flexbox spec issue (last time I checked this behaviour is intentionally undefined), but it's still an annoying case of one browser doing something all the others don't.

Widevine is not a "Chrome-only" feature. Firefox, Edge and even Opera have Widevine support.
Is it a standard? Did it originate from Google?

"Widevine, a Google company" sounds neither standard nor very open to me: http://www.widevine.com/