[munk-a]

Safari is terrible and I applaud all applications that are broken on it, when Apple breaks down and actually offers a cross-platform version of their browser for testing then my various things might start working on it... Until then, if you have an iPhone, download chrome.

[jwr]

Ok, so I honestly do not understand this "safari is terrible" thing. I develop a fairly large web app (it's an inventory control + MRP system for electronics, https://partsbox.io/) and feature-wise Safari is on par with Chrome. I have no Safari-specific problems. Speed-wise, Safari is the fastest at running my JavaScript code (compiled from ClojureScript).

I have firefox-specific problems, I have Chrome-specific problems, but I don't remember the last time when Safari caused an issue.

[lern_too_spel]

People say Safari is terrible because Safari is the last to support useful web features. They only just added support for a non-royalty-encumbered video format. If you are not directly affected by these issues in your own applications, that's fine, but if you care about the web platform in general, it's hard to ignore how terrible Safari is.

[jwr]

I can understand (sort of) that thinking, but from my very practical point of view: I care about delivering a working application to my users, who should have a good experience. This is what they pay me for. And Safari delivers the best experience of all modern browsers, without any additional effort on my part (I do not have any Safari-specific workarounds, while I did require fixes for Chrome, and Firefox causes problems regularly).

[munk-a]

I appear to have hit by a wave of downvotes so this comment may too be hit but I wanted to clarify that I don't think that Safari is actually more broken than any other browser but the ability to verify that features _aren't_ broken requires a higher investment - the lack of a compiled safari on windows makes it difficult to test features during development without using a browser emulator which honestly isn't worth spinning up for simple things.

[jwr]

That's not what you wrote. You wrote:

> Safari is terrible and I applaud all applications that are broken on it

What you meant to say is that testing in Safari is inconvenient for you, so you don't like it. Which is fine, but does not mean that "Safari is terrible".

[munk-a]

Eeeeh, yea that was terribly worded, my bad.

[PascLeRasc]

Hey that's a cool site! I'm bookmarking it for later projects :)

[9935c101ab17a66]

1) I think you can build webkit on Windows? Either way, webkit is available on multiple platforms. 2) It goes both ways, Microsoft only recently announced that new versions of Edge are coming to macOS in the future, and only because they are moving to Blink/Chromium. 3) Chrome on iOS uses webkit, soooooooo

What actual complaints do you have about safari? I definitely don't think it's perfect, but Chrome has it's own weird issues and inconsistencies (and is much less efficient on macOS). Chrome is widely chided for its poor memory management.

[deskamess]

I thought there was an HN post recently about how browsers on the iPhone need to use WebKit. They were not allowed to be better (from a rendering perspective). Or perhaps I misunderstood that.

[sciurus]

You're right. Chrome and Firefox on iOS are WebKit-based.

[perardi]

What is broken in Safari compared to Chrome and Firefox?

I occasionally hear “Safari is the new IE”, but as a designer, I could use a little developer education as to what is actually deficient.

[9935c101ab17a66]

I've been doing quite a bit of webdev recently, and I've been testing things in both Safari and Chrome (on macOS and mobile), and both browsers have their own weird edge-cases, bugs and unexpected behaviours, but anecdotally I really don't find that one is better/worse than the other. I suspect the 'safari is a bad browser' notion is based on people's past experiences, rather than accurate view of the current state of the browser landscape. I also wonder if a lot of the safari-haters are developers who work on windows/linux, and just resent having to support another browser in general.

[chrisweekly]

Proper PWA support is a huge, legitimate complaint...