What does any of that have to do with supporting the WebExtension open specification?
It sounds like, to me, I can't ship a WebExtension for Safari because I don't own a Mac. Is that right?
Does that sound right to you?
It sounds like, to me, I can't ship a WebExtension for Safari because I don't own a Mac. Is that right?
Does that sound right to you?
Do you ship untested software?
The whole point of having standards, conventions and stable interfaces is that developers do not have to test their code on every "platform" (in this case browser). If there are platform-specific differences from the standards, that is the platform developer's problem.
And keep in mind we're mostly talking about individuals here - companies rarely develop extensions and those that do can probably afford an old mac to use as a complie box. Extensions are usually developed by individuals in their spare time and rely on beta testers anyways, as it is already impractical for one dev to test them on every possible config.
Well, we don't have standards for native apps, only partial standards for different APIs and protocols, so there's that.
And the change Apple made, to allow for Chrome-like extensions, is already more "standard" than before (where it was Safari-only extension APIs). It just requires one more step.
Chrome is notorious for building this that are not standards and forcing them into standards bodies later. That's part of "but it works on Chrome" web issue.
So not working on Safari doensn't necessarily mean it's the fault of Safari for "violating the standard". Could very well be for upholding the standards over Chrome ad-hoc/de-facto "standard" additions...
I was actually referring to "your extensions following the standard", but since you can't exactly test against the standard directly, I used testing against both browsers as a good approximation.
I maintain a cross browser webextension (chrome and Firefox) and I would not release it on a new platform without testing. I have already found bugs in the API implementstions on Firefox and confident I'll find more. There are also differences in implemention between just those two browsers that I have to work around.
YMMV, of course
Because there are more browsers than any person could conceivably have time to rigorously, thoroughly test. Yes, things like Browserstack exist.
But why do I have to test my Web Extension differently from my website. Should Safari start blocking websites whose TLS certificate lacks a "issued-to-a-mac" extension?
Sorry, I don't trust extensions or programs from people who won't even own a machine to test them on for that particular platform!
It's completely fair–actually, it should be expected–that extensions targeting standardized APIs should function correctly regardless of platform. If you're coming from a position of trying to incentivize people who largely don't care about a tiny, strange platform to begin with, locking them out entirely based on hardware requirements is frankly about the worst thing you could do to drive adoption.