Safari Doesn't Get Enough Credit | Hacker News Reader

Safari Doesn't Get Enough Credit

jordanreger.com

2 pointsjordanreger3 comments

Honestly, I think Safari doesn't get enough _hate_. It's the last browser that's not evergreen and tied to operating system updates. That's the biggest pain point as a developer when trying to support Safari.

Instead of having to support the last 5 versions of the browser you have to go back and support versions that are YEARS out of date regarding web standards and implementations, so even when Safari does add an upcoming feature you have to wait a few years before all users actually update their macOS to get these new features.

A quick example I just grabbed is AVIF support [0]. Safari has technically already added full support for this image encoding, the problem however is that you NEED to be on macOS 13 for even partial support, and full support only appeared later. If you look at the usage statistics at [0] you'll see that most Safari users are still not on the newer versions. It's even worse on iOS regarding some things, where even mundane features for Flexbox might not be available bug-free to all your users.

Rant over.

[0]: https://caniuse.com/avif

I totally agree. I think that this is an element of the larger problem, which is trying to be solved by Interop and just general compatibility issues with Safari throughout the years. One of the biggest pain points in my web dev journey has been supporting Safari and for that I support Chromium and the accompanying devtools completely. This article is purely based on my usage experience, though, nothing other than that.

As a user, I generally agree with this article. There are a couple of things that I don't like about Safari (extension icons are on the top left, not the top right, and the security certificate icon is too close to the site name in the search window, just to name my top two peeves). But it works well. Firefox is fine, Edge is acceptable, and Chrome is crap.

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