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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> It's difficult to become a voice for Safari, if Safari is hiding behind a hefty price tag.

This may be a cause for a lack of voices, but it's hardly the only (or I'd argue even the most prevalent) cause. 99.9% of the developers at the company I work for are on macbook pros, yet they only support Chrome. And the reason is simple: they don't want to support more than the one browser.

The decision was, of course, backed up by numbers, harvested after our product's use of Chrome-only features and "best on Chrome" style "help" answers.

It's a self-reinforcing loop.

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No, it's because the safari developer tools are crap.

Also, I can't get things like the vue dev tools in safari. I'd be more likely to switch to firefox

If the goal is to avoid a mono-culture (as called out by the OP of this thread), then switching to Firefox is perfectly acceptable - perhaps even better than switching to Safari. You've got my encouragement to do so.

Doing your primary development in Chrome or Firefox and testing in Safari would still be testing in Safari. Or is it apparently no longer possible to debug code that you don't have a debugger attached to? I'd contend that it's your job. And if it's slightly harder in Safari, that's a reason to ask for better tooling, but not a reason not to do your job.

occasionally opening safari for testing is far different than using it as your primary browser for development.

Exactly this, I’ve observed it as well. MacBook-toting devs often won’t test on anything but Chrome, likely for convenience.

Firefox suffers from this too.

I've definitely run into websites where you can tell the developers only ever tested their work with a smooth scrolling multitouch trackpad.

Clicky vertical only mousewheel scroll? Sorry, spent $6000 on the maxed out laptop but can't get a $10 mouse to go with it.

Enjoy scrolling two pixels per wheel revolution because our scroll hijack only works right on trackpads.

On this specific issue: scrolljacking is always bad because the web simply doesn’t expose the necessary primitives to make it not bad for at least some people. Search my comment history for a little more detail and discussion.

At my company most are on Windows the rest are on Linux, so nobody actually tests in Safari or Safari Beta.

This is how it is where I work, too. We offer first-class support for Firefox and Chrome, but we really only have one person ever testing anything on Safari, because we only have one person with a Mac.

They need Safari on Windows, Developer Edition.

But instead they force you to buy an M1 Mac mini for testing, or rent one on AWS or other Cloud. They will spend PR resources attacking those site that doesn't support Safari, which may harm their user on iOS. And force them to support Safari by spending money on Apple. Brilliant strategy by Tim Cook.

Edit: I know you could use other webkit browser on Windows for testing.

I avoided this portion of the argument earlier, but…

Given the yearly cost of your average software development team and their budget for development laptops/desktops, a $700 mac mini for Safari testing is pocket lint for your average corporation.

Even for independent contractors, that cost is pretty trivial in the scheme of other tools and software that designers and developers pay for.

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