JavaScript Chrome developers did a good job of convincing people that Safari is the new IE.
I love Safari on macOS. I love the pinch/zoom with the tabs. I love that private browsing mode, at least seems to, keep things contained to the tab they started with. e.g. if I open facebook in a private tab then open new tab and go to facebook, it’s going to make me login.
Chrome’s developers didn’t have to say anything. Anyone who’s been trying to build on the latest web features (for me, particularly WebGL, WebRTC, WebGPU and IndexedDB) over the past decade has been bitten by Safari over and over again. They usually come around after being raked over the coals by the web dev community, but they’re still usually years behind.
When “Safari is the new IE” was first published, they absolutely were. They’ve gotten a bit better since then, but all the same it was hilarious to see people who used to rail against IE for flaunting web standards (cough John Gruber cough) suddenly start saying that web standards were a bogus racket once Apple decided to stop keeping up with them.
Safari is far from perfect, but I’m glad they don’t implement everything Chrome does. Many of the complaints come down to “Safari doesn’t even support RunBitcoinMinerInBackground.js. It sucks!”
And on the plus side, it’s vastly better at power efficiency, meaning I can use my laptop longer without being plugged in.
sure if you want to live a life stuck in the App Store and Play Store walled gardens... having a decent web browser is the way towards a truly open web
Safari is the new IE not because they refuse to implement questionable new web “standards”, but because
- It has all sorts of random quirks in their supposedly supported features;
- Mobile Safari has even more quirks;
- No other major browser introduces random serious bugs like Safari does (remember the IndexedDB one?);
- Version updates are tied to OS updates meaning it’s the only major browsers that’s not evergreen, and coupled with the previous points you have to carry workarounds for bugs forever, and of course can’t use new features;
- Extensions are 10x harder to develop and more than 10x more expensive to publish since they’re tied to Xcode, Apple Developer Program and MAS, because fuck you;
- Like another commenter said, it’s the only browser that crashes on me (random “this page has experienced a problem and reloaded” or something like that);
- PWA is another kind of hell in Safari but opinions are divided so whatever. At the very least it’s not conducive to an open web.
It’s a piece of hot garbage, like a lot of other Apple software these days. Sure, maybe it’s battery efficient or something. I don’t give a shit because I work plugged in.
Oh and developer tools in Safari are crap but who cares.
Developers don't convince anyone of anything! They just build stuff according to standards (which are inevitably set not by standards orgs, but by the most popular browsers), and then they expect all browsers to follow those standards and "just work".
When a browser like Safari fails to adhere to those standards, sites will break ... but you can't expect developers (of most sites; I'm not talking about the top 100 or anything) to test in every possible browser ... and then change their code to accommodate them. Certainly not in ones with single-digit percentages of market share, that require their own OS to test (like Safari).
If Apple wanted more web devs to support Safari they should port it to Linux and Windows. The web is supposed to be an open standard, you shouldn't need a devices and software from a specific manufacturer to develop for it (I say that posting from a Mac).
But there isn't anymore, so there's no way for a web developer to ensure Safari compatibility (unless you expect every dev shop in the world to buy a Mac just for that purpose).
I continually try, but Safari is the only browser where I routinely experience crashes once or twice a month. There are also some random incompatibilities with certain websites (related to the CORS issue as mentioned in another comment) that force me back into another browser anyway.
I tend to use Safari on my mac, but I will say that it evaluates CORS slightly differently than other browsers so that sometimes I have to disable CORS protection to get a site to work that works fine in Chrome or Firefox, and it's the only browser I've used where I expect to have it crash hard with a SEGFAULT or something every once in a while.
