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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

No, Safari is the new IE. There are better browsers but due to it's market share (forced by Apple) developers are forced to limit themselves to it's feature set.

And the reasons are the same as well: Microsoft saw the browser as competition to their OS and Apple sees it the same way. So they both limited development of their browser to keep their platform supremacy. The situation is not the same with Google -- the web is their platform. This has it's own issues but it's not history repeating itself.

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People used to build websites for IE.

Now people build websites for chrome.

Firefox is a better browser but people are stuck with chrome cos everything works in chrome. Google controls chromium.

Its absolutely history repeating when Google adds is own standards.

People whine about iOS Safari but the reality is it works really well and most of the complaints are “it works in chrome but not safari and I don’t want to spend any amount of time looking at it so I won’t support it”

Two different points in IE’s history.

Chrome is like IE in the IE5 era when it was totally dominant and the best browser around.

Safari is like IE in the IE7-8 era when it was the worst browser and actively holding back everything else.

That's a load of crap. I use safari for all my browsing with the one exception of using Firefox for read.amazon.com. It's perfectly fine. I'm never working on my computer an thinking, "damnit safari, why can't you just be like chrome/firefox." That never happens. I vastly prefer safari to chrome or Firefox.

At work I'll use chrome because some of our web apps only support chrome for whatever reason. But they're garbage IBM puts out, not something you'd use by choice.

Developers make sure their sites work in Safari. Just like developers made sure that their sites still worked in IE11 for almost a decade. Because it works for you is exactly why it's holding back development.

If developers made sure their sites worked in Safari we wouldn't have submissions to HN for sites that only work in Chrome with "oh yeah it doesn't work in Firefox or Safari because I didn't test it".

The number of developers who do their work on Chrome and call it a job done and never test in another browser, far outweight the number of developers who do test cross-browser.

The reason people tested in IE11 and less was because they were forced to. They liked Chrome but the users were using the shitty browsers, and older OS didn't yet support Edge.

Now the majority use Chrome and the devs no longer care.

We need more competition in the browser space, Safari and Firefox provide that. And neither are holding web development back.

Developers are.

Apple actively cripples Safari so that developers are forced to make apps for the App Store and give them a cut of all revenues. Safari is an extremely cynical product, much more than Chrome. Developers should not support Safari. Let the sites break.

What does Twitter do that requires an app that doesn’t work on safari? What did Reddit do that requires an app that safari can’t do? LinkedIn? Steam? EBay. Amazon. Google maps. Discord. Slack. What do these do that can’t be done on safari on iOS?

Web push notifications is the big one, though I suppose it's coming. I'll believe it when I see it.

> If developers made sure their sites worked in Safari we wouldn't have submissions to HN for sites that only work in Chrome

You're replying to me replying to the guy who says every site he goes to works fine in Safari.

I can't think of any websites that don't work with Firefox. It was hell back in the IE days because a lot of sites required ActiveX or whatever that nonsense was.

I encountered a lot of them. Especially ones that use recaptcha, a lot of times hidden recaptcha and you just get enigmatic error messages.

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