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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> if a page renders poorly in webkit.

what's a URL of a page that renders poorly in webkit?

I couldn't link to any websites that render incorrectly under Safari on iOS (WebKit) off the top of my head, but I think that's rather a side effect of WebKit being the only engine available on iOS: I don't want my site to be unusable on iOS devices, so I end up spending a lot of time trying to work around bugs that only happen on Apple devices.

Sure, this ultimately means that everything Just Works on Apple devices... but it's not because their browser is up to standards. It's just that I'm forced to make it work.

To me, this is very reminiscent of the Internet Explorer situation, where I end up baking a bunch of hacks into my code just to ensure it works for the majority.

are you implying that all other web browsers implement and comply with all web standards? are you implying that no website is leveraging experimental features and hence not standard yet?

I am not, and that sounds like quite an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. All web browsers have bugs, and practically all web browsers support features that are not part of the standards track. That's not the problem.

The problem is two-fold: we have a specific browser engine that lags way behind the standards, and this same engine is literally the only choice for an operating system that runs on over 1 billion[0] devices.

When I say "lags way behind the standards", I'm not talking about unsupported features, but rather, well-established features that are supposedly functional but are simply buggy. And they're not niche features: I have personally seen bugs in features like the CSS filter property, Web Audio, and SVG rendering, that are unsolved to this date.

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253162/iphone-users-tot...

Web devs have to deal with Safari bugs all the time, that's why you don't tend to see them. Maybe now that there's going to be other browser engines on iOS, we can show nice "please open this page in Firefox" banners and force Apple to stop undermining their browser to push native apps.

Those of us that remember "This page works best in Internet Explorer 5" are shivering at your statement. I love Firefox and use it as my primary browser on my desktop. But suggesting to users that they should use that instead of fixing issues in your site feels bad.

There's a subtle but important distinction between "a browser misbehaves and incorrectly renders my compliant site, and I refuse to make my site wrong to satisfy it" and "a browser doesn't render my malformed site the way I want it to and I refuse to fix it because other browser (incorrectly) renders my site how I want".

Anything with a high amount of textures in WebGL.

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