I’m sorry but just no. I’ve been developing on the web since IE6 and while Safari has a few quirks it doesn’t even start to compare to IE at any stage.
The worst I deal with in Safari is lack of certain features (often things that weren’t standardized and Chrome just added) and some minor CSS quirks. In some of those cases when I dig into the “issue” it appears that Safari is handling it in a way that makes more sense. The only Safari issue that I have run into multiple times and disliked is the viewport height issue but new CSS units (dvh I think?) should fix that.
On the other hand IE11 had a whole slew “Why isn’t this working?” Issues that made zero sense. I _loved_ the bugs that would not reproduce if you had dev tools (or what passed for IE dev tools) open or things related to cross-origin that just behaved differently for no good reason. QA found way more issues in IE browsers than Safari in my experience.
And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost. IE6-10 (and 11) caused me immense pain and frustration. Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner? A 1px wide image to display a gradient? Or just images as buttons in general since CSS support was shit?
The gross hacks I did for IE do not compare to what I need to do for Safari and anyone who says differently either didn’t live through that period (as a developer) or has a short memory.
A lot of the things people bitch about in Safari end up being security things, like the viewport. Arguably, the page shouldn't be able to mimic the browser chrome without some user interaction first, and being able to hide the chrome and convince the user that they've just typed their bank url into the browser is an anti-pattern. So, yeah, good job Safari.
Most bugs I've found aren't bugs but valid "defense in depth" agains the bastards who want to steal my grandma's money.
> And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost.
I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.
I find it interesting that folks assume I was comparing to Chrome - I have used Firefox as a daily driver for nearly two decades now. That's what everything got tested in first, and yes - even Chrome had a number of stupid flex bugs at that point in time.
> Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner?
I hope you didn't forget that HTC file to make transparency work...or you'll have nice grey backgrounds on your rounded corners!
>> And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost.
> I compared the versions of Safari I had to support in 2017/2018 to the versions of IE I had to support in 2017/2018 (11) for that specific contract. There is definitely no contest when it comes to the older versions.
Fair, your comment makes more sense when I reread it through that lenses.
I remember the "cut" step I would do in a lot of designs when I got a PSD from a designer. I'd go through the file looking for all the things (assets) I needed and export the PNGs for use. Nowadays I get a Figma and I rarely have to grab anything directly from the figma except for SVGs (and of course looking at things like font-size, border-radius, etc).
Haha, I don't think I ever used that trick but on a number of projects I know I dropped in a `generateGradient.php`-type file that had it's output cached so that in CSS we could just do `background: url(/generateGradient.php?start=XXXXXX&end=XXXXXX)` (and maybe some other params as time went on) to make changes easier.
The worst I deal with in Safari is lack of certain features (often things that weren’t standardized and Chrome just added) and some minor CSS quirks. In some of those cases when I dig into the “issue” it appears that Safari is handling it in a way that makes more sense. The only Safari issue that I have run into multiple times and disliked is the viewport height issue but new CSS units (dvh I think?) should fix that.
On the other hand IE11 had a whole slew “Why isn’t this working?” Issues that made zero sense. I _loved_ the bugs that would not reproduce if you had dev tools (or what passed for IE dev tools) open or things related to cross-origin that just behaved differently for no good reason. QA found way more issues in IE browsers than Safari in my experience.
And while IE11 was the least bad of the IEs I don’t think you get to use it as a goalpost. IE6-10 (and 11) caused me immense pain and frustration. Have we all forgotten using images to display a rounded corner? A 1px wide image to display a gradient? Or just images as buttons in general since CSS support was shit?
The gross hacks I did for IE do not compare to what I need to do for Safari and anyone who says differently either didn’t live through that period (as a developer) or has a short memory.