So which specific features are that critical — for example, do you think most app developers can't work without the battery status API (or that users don't have a vested privacy concern)? I ask because when you drill into things like that there are a lot of numbers which look big until you realize that there are something like 57 tests for a non-standard API which is not broadly used even on the browsers which do support it.
Every feature has the potential to jump out and be critical, even ones that don't appear to be.
Every time I try to use Safari to create something that goes beyond "display text" it's a new adventure in bugs and unsupported features that work in the other browsers.
It's not one of those things you can sit and name, it's a 90/10 issue, and the margins are critical even though they appear small.
Bugs surrounding drag and drop is what lead me to abandon all hope of supporting the browser some months ago.
> Every time I try to use Safari to create something that goes beyond "display text" it's a new adventure in bugs and unsupported features that work in the other browsers.
Do you have any examples which aren't so vague? The only times I've encountered this problem with other developers has been when they were using lots of Chrome-only features and put off testing in other browsers; when starting development in Firefox or Safari the most common case since around the early 2000s has been that everything works in the other two browsers with minimal effort.
> Every time I try to use Safari to create something that goes beyond "display text" it's a new adventure in bugs and unsupported features that work in the other browsers.
Being hyperbolic doesn't help your case; it just looks like you're bashing WebKit because it's from Apple. And while you may have had a bad experience back in the day or don't like that Apple chooses not to implement esoteric or Chrome-only features, that doesn't mean that Safari sucks now.
As I pointed out earlier in the thread [1], Apple has done a great job lately implementing features that they, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have agreed should be implemented and interoperable and have W3C/WHATWG specifications.
Every browser has bugs; the bug trackers for WebKit, Mozilla and Google are public, so we can actually see what they are.
Like the other browser makers, Apple publishes its bug fixes when a new version of WebKit is released.
I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm being quite literal. I tried two or three times to support Safari. I gave up on it and I'm never going back.
Not bashing web kit because it's from Apple, I'm bashing web kit because I had a website, I wanted to make that website support safari, and it was an absolute pain to the degree that I gave up on it.
The only other browser I've had experiences like this in has been Firefox mobile. I have similar feelings about Firefox mobile.
On the desktop, technically maybe Safari is fine on the desktop because I don't own a Mac so I can't test it, but chrome and Firefox are perfectly easy to make work together on the web with no issues. I do it everyday, safari is not normal in this.
The reason you’re getting negative reactions is because you made these huge sweeping generalizations which are untrue for most web developers but despite being so vehement they’re also entirely unverifiable. It’s certainly possible there’s some feature you hit which was buggy but despite hundreds of words we still have no idea where the alleged problem was – JavaScript, DOM, CSS, audio/video, Unicode support or text rendering, who knows?
> I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm being quite literal. I tried two or three times to support Safari. I gave up on it and I'm never going back.
There's nothing special that has to be done to "support Safari" other than writing normal CSS, HTML and JavaScript just like for any other browser.
Even if you used something experimental or Chrome-only, there are polyfills for most features. This only makes sense for a public facing website (e-commerce, for example), since Safari is on over a billion devices and some of those potential customers might want to use your site.
> maybe Safari is fine on the desktop because I don't own a Mac so I can't test it
Other than some minor differences, the latest version of WebKit is essentially the same on iOS, macOS and iPadOS.
It's pretty common to use something like CodePen [1] to demonstrate CSS and HTML features publicly.
