[cuddlecake]

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.

[0]: https://twitter.com/jensimmons/status/1490747578526404608

[falcolas]

> 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.

It's a self-reinforcing loop.

[ehutch79]

No, it's because the safari developer tools are crap.

Also, I can't get things like the vue dev tools in safari. I'd be more likely to switch to firefox

[HWR_14]

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.

[ehutch79]

occasionally opening safari for testing is far different than using it as your primary browser for development.

[falcolas]

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.

[kitsunesoba]

Exactly this, I’ve observed it as well. MacBook-toting devs often won’t test on anything but Chrome, likely for convenience.

Firefox suffers from this too.

[wlesieutre]

I've definitely run into websites where you can tell the developers only ever tested their work with a smooth scrolling multitouch trackpad.

Clicky vertical only mousewheel scroll? Sorry, spent $6000 on the maxed out laptop but can't get a $10 mouse to go with it.

Enjoy scrolling two pixels per wheel revolution because our scroll hijack only works right on trackpads.

[chrismorgan]

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.

[simion314]

At my company most are on Windows the rest are on Linux, so nobody actually tests in Safari or Safari Beta.

[notriddle]

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.

[ksec]

They need Safari on Windows, Developer Edition.

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.

[falcolas]

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.

[tantalor]

> there seems to be an angry pocket of men

Nice, very respectful and fair minded. Definitely going to encourage an honest discussion now.

[CoastalCoder]

If we can agree to just ignore that part, I think there's still a good discussion to be had.

[Steltek]

I dunno, she sounds pretty combative and started the thread acting aggrieved. It's not a great look for a "developer evangelist".

There's a good discussion here but maybe it shouldn't involve her.

[015a]

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.

[HWR_14]

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.

[tantalor]

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.

[HWR_14]

Wait? It's the "men" that people were objecting to? I thought it was the "angry group".

That's even stupider than I thought.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[vintagedave]

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.

[withinboredom]

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

[015a]

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.

[mulander]

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.

[chaosharmonic]

It actually extends further -- QTWebEngine is now a stripped-down version of Chromium.

[dmitriid]

Competition is good, actually.

You really don't want a monoculture of a single browser engine pushing badly designed and often poorly implemented "standards".

w3c (and whatwg?) have a rule of "two independent implementations before a thing can become a standard" for a reason.

[withinboredom]

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.

[chrismorgan]

> 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.

[easton]

I've heard some web developers use GNOME Web, which uses WebKit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web

It's not 100% the same, but it's close.

[sebazzz]

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).

[chrismorgan]

… 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.

[HWR_14]

It does make me sad Safari is no longer on Windows. It used to be trivial to get people to test on Safari/IE/FF/Chrome