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Comment by soraminazuki | Hacker News Reader

So I read your comment expecting to be mad at Apple, but a quick look at the Wayback Machine [1] disproved almost everything you wrote.

> They just updated it

Last month would be a more accurate description [2].

> but it used to compare against a one-year old version

What actually happened is that they hadn't updated the data on their website for a year. That's very different from "comparing it against a one-year old version." They were at no point comparing the latest version of Safari against a year old version of Chrome.

> Apple is very willing to intentionally make skewed comparisons

It looks more like you're willing to make intentionally skewed projection of facts.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.apple.com/safari

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20211026001113/https://www.apple...

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> They were at no point comparing the latest version of Safari against a year old version of Chrome.

They tend to update that page after a Safari update, which is yearly. They tend to highlight benchmarks that Safari looks good in. If Chrome and Firefox then optimize these highlighted benchmarks and catch up on these benchmarks within a month, Apple still has that page show the old data for a year. And for next year's release they again pick the benchmarks that look best for them at that moment in time and keep the numbers up for a year. Even though this update cadence guarantees that the numbers are outdated and misleading for the majority of the time they're up.

> They tend to update that page after a Safari update, which is yearly

So you very well knew Apple weren't "comparing against a one-year old version."

> And for next year's release they again pick the benchmarks that look best for them at that moment in time

They're using the exact same benchmarks as last year, and the numbers seem to be improving for Safari. May I remind you I actually checked the past version of Apple's website on the Wayback Machine?

I'm not the GP author, but I don't think they actually said that _exactly_. I agree it was a bit vague, but the latter point of them using an old version of Chrome for their most recent update was more pertinent. They are comparing a pre-release to a stable in both cases and then not spending any effort to contrast that later.

Maybe both of you are right?

I'm sure Apple's page was factual and up-to-date at the time it was posted, but Chrome's faster dev cycle means that the Chrome data is outdated long before the next year when Apple updates Safari.

That's very different from "comparing it against a one-year old version.

The outcome of Apple not keeping their page up to date is that they were misleading the user by comparing Safari to a version of Chrome that is no longer current, or relevant. The action (or inaction strictly speaking) might be different, but the result is the same.

Apple have enough staff that they could keep a page up to date if they wanted to. They chose not to.

> misleading the user by comparing Safari to a version of Chrome that is no longer current, or relevant

If they had continued to update the version of Safari in their comparisons without updating the version of Chrome I agree that would be misleading. But leaving the comparison frozen because they haven't updated their page is just the normal difficulty of keeping things up-to-date.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

The updated numbers generally seem to favor Safari. The outdated numbers were only misleading in the sense that it benefited Chrome, not Safari.

That's not how that works when Safari gets much more infrequent updates.

What you're implying is highly unlikely since browser performance doesn't change so dramatically every few weeks as to make your claim possible.

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=3...

It changes over the course of 6 months. So after 6 months the comparison is very outdated, and the comparison wouldn't benefit Chrome.

Multiple updates for Safari are delivered over the course of six months. And note that the graph I've shown you plots the daily performance of browsers for the past year.

I agree with you that there was nothing wrong with Apple posting a page after a Safari release, comparing it with the Chrome version at the time, and then not updating the page until their next significant Safari release.

However, it is true that Safari gets feature updates much less frequently than Chrome or Firefox. Historically, there's the integer update in the fall (13 to 14 to 15) followed by the .1 update in the spring. Those are when features are added. The Safari updates that happen in-between are only bugfixes; some bugfixes may have performance implications but they don't include improvements to language support (HTML, CSS, JavaScript).

Safari 15.1 is already out but I think they only used that version number because it includes a significant UI change (to tabs), it's not an indication that they're moving to a faster release cadence for features.

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