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by Mikeb85 1685 days ago
Why should any developer care about supporting Safari? Chrome and Firefox support most (all?) of the current web standards. Every site I use works on both. I don't hear any concerns about Brave, Edge or Opera either. How is it that Safari is the only broken browser these days?

As for 'acceptable' errors, I find software to be pretty reliable these days. I remember way more things being messed up back in the day...

5 comments

Safari - for better or worse - is setting the standard for many privacy updates, especially around 3rd party cookies and tracking.

Those updates broke a lot of websites - you might have noticed SSO failing, iframes failing, or websites confusing unmodified Safari users for adblock users.

Firefox adopted the changes a bit later. By the time they made the switch, I think most had resolved their sites because of Safari. Last I read, Chrome is slated to implement similar for 2022.

Not intended to be a defense of Safari, especially for OP's bug. But at least some breaking changes were deliberate and in the name of privacy enhancements.

Mobile safari… since it’s the only engine on iOS … that ends up being a good chunk of users depending on your user base probably many try to use your website on an iPhone … if blink engine was allowed by apple on iOS - safari would die tomorrow
And if enough developers simply ignored Safari then maybe it would force Apple to either simply adhere to web standards or allow competing browser engines... Catering to them signals that their shitty behaviour is condoned.
It is the Mobile Safari engine... "simply ignored Safari" = "simply ignore iPhone users".
Apple's the one ignoring them by shipping them a broken browser.
This is the kind of thing that only web devs care about. If someone can't use your web app on their phone, they're going to never try your app again, not demand changes to the browser.
It's generally the first thing we check for when trialling new software. Does it work in Chrome/FF/Safari and on iOS/Android. If not then we won't continue the trial.
users won't see it like that
Hard for developers to ignore when the developers' manager is using an iPhone or iPad.

Who will the developers' manager blame: Apple or the developers?

There are no web standards in the era of WHATWG. It’s just a living spec composed of whatever vendors build and convince other vendors to add to their own products. Chrome is constantly spitting out new proposals that are already half-baked-but-live in their browser and then people start using them and complain they aren’t yet in other browsers. Yet when Safari or Firefox add new features we don’t act like Chrome is slow? Chrome’s rapid pace is almost surely an effort by Google to overwhelm the competition so they can make more ad money through dark patterns via Chrome dominance.
Erm. So it works on Blink and Gecko... And Blink, and Blink, and Blink, but not WebKit? That's a symptom of a worse problem IMO.
Simple: iPhones. If you aren't worried about iPhones then ignore safari all you like.