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Comment by intellix | Hacker News Reader

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My impression is that the Safari team is just very small. They are often more quirky than other browsers, and they lag in features (but not nearly so badly as IE used to). On the other hand they've brought some very welcome improvements: the :has selector and container queries being the standout ones in recent times. And their engine is more power efficient and often faster than anyone elses.

EDIT: I would add: 90% seems waaay too high. If this isn't an exaggeration then you may want to consider that you might be doing something wrong (Not checking caniuse for support before using a feature? Trying to use features that are unsupported / poorly supported by your target browsers anyway?)

Really enjoying the power efficiency of Safari on a Mac, it keeps me away from the other browsers.

It’s disheartening that Google and Mozilla seem so disinterested in trying to match or exceed that power efficiency. I like having multiple options for web browsers but because of the difference is so stark it’s only actually a choice on desktops.

Mozilla has invested a lot of effort into power efficiency. It's a pretty painful treadmill considering how often platform-level things change (OS X compositor changes, OpenGL being killed, etc) which means you end up losing ground and having to rearchitect or rebuild stuff to get back to where you were previously.

Part of Firefox's power efficiency challenges on OS X are specifically due to how Apple designed the platform, and not something wrong with the browser. They've had to incrementally add in lots of machinery to feed the OS the information it suddenly wants.

If Safari has better power efficiency on OS X (I don't doubt it), that's partly just because they work next door to the video driver and OS compositor people. It's not because Mozilla doesn't care. (Does Google care? I can't say for sure, but I suspect they do.)

Part of the difference is compositor integration for sure, but there's also design decisions that factor in, like how Safari has throttled JS in non-active tabs for years, where Chrome only started doing this last year. One gets the impression that Google at least is more concerned with Chrome being an attractive app platform than they are with it being responsible with user resources.

You can turn on lockdown mode on MacOS Ventura and it basically disables active compiler JavaScript for all sites - you can turn it back on site-by-site but it’s interesting to see what keeps working.

Benchmark scores go to ass but much of JavaScript I’m actually used is just fine.

caniuse... It's like yeah it supports animations and then fails to mention everything with a transform flickers.

Or how the introduction of rubber band scrolling completely broke fixed positional elements but "safari supports position fixed".

I had a feature which shown an element if the browser UI was expanded and you weren't using the full potential height of the browser... So it tells you to swipe up to trigger a page scroll which minimises the UI. 15.6 gets released and the whole thing breaks and basically becomes impossible now.

Or how flex with 100% height is only not inherited in safari.

It's missing alot of footnotes for a myriad of issues.

Whenever it mentions support for anything new you have to take it with a fist full of salt.

I'm sorry, 90% was an exaggeration and it's probably closer to 70%

That's also my experience with Safari, not much is really "supported", most of the features are "supported, conditions may apply".

And i'm not talking about cutting edge features, there's still zIndex bugs and click event bugs on safari mobile for example.

> It's clear they hate the web

I feel that they're just organizationally incompetent. They're moving too fast and lack adequate quality assurance. macOS itself is getting much buggier overall. Craig Federighi should be fired.

I like Federighi's public persona quite a lot, but yes, I have too been concerned about macOS's quality since he took over.

Any books / inside reports I can read about his tenure that would provide more context on him & his management of macOS?

Some engineers post about their past experiences sometimes.

https://tidbits.com/2019/10/21/six-reasons-why-ios-13-and-ca...

https://twitter.com/taquitos/status/1599824249107406848

I'm not usually a backwards person, but I got the Macbook 2016, and with every release it got worse. Now I'm on NixOS on a Lenovo and while there are regressions, they're usually temporary. Regressions on MacOS seemed permanent.

What sites trigger this? Have been using Safari for years and haven’t encountered such a bug.

https://www.starzsoft.com/iphone-issues/safari-crashes-after...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/xjb06m/ios_16_safari_c...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254191515

Safari has its problems, to be sure, but it is a long, long, long way from being equivalent to old IE.

On one project I remember, around 30% of the code was there simply to make it work with IE. I've never seen anything close to that with Safari (much less 90%).

I remember having to support IE versions 6-11 with a couple of sites I worked on and wondering why Microsoft wouldn't just port the technically superior Tasman engine used for IE for Mac to Windows… it was so much better than Trident at handling CSS and could do things that Trident couldn't until a decade later like properly render transparent PNGs without hacks.

And yeah, Safari has posed far less of an issue for me than IE did.

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