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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

I think people underestimate Safari. IIRC "back in the day" they were the first to get 100% in supporting all of ES6. Conviently, they were first in supporting the things I care about - like backdrop-filter and css scroll snap. Safari/Webkit/JSC is faster at executing javascript as well.

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ARM Safari is an absurdly energy efficient browser as well.

They’ve definitely made some significant missteps over the last few years, mostly around breaking storage APIs and being slow to fix it due to being part of the macOS release cadence.

Battery life is the key in why Apple doesn't want third-party browser engines. On Mac, they have to babysit the user by saying "your battery is dying because <x> app is using too much energy" because otherwise the user will bring it into the apple store complaining about their battery life. Forcing all apps to use WebKit has likely saved many MWh across the iPhone's lifetime. The only downside for Apple when they'll be forced to allow other browser engines is that they might need to make a more active alert for "using the most energy: Chrome".

There are plenty of apps on iPhone that suck battery. Those that make use of the camera and depth sensors, for instance. Or games.

Apple doesn't want other browsers because they don't want runtimes. They don't want a way for someone else to build a marketplace on top of iPhone or to escape Apple's stringent review process and deploy on their own timelines.

A browser with features not broken by design? Scary.

If there are 1 billion iPhones running Safari for 2h/day, and the power efficiency saves 200mwh (just a random number), then Safari saves 400MWh/day, or ~150GWh/yr. This saves ~.1% of all the power used by the world.

First and foremost in my browser evaluation criteria is "can I run ublock origin or similar on it?"

Last time I tried, Safari was a no-go. The web without an ad blocker is incredibly bad.

You can run 1Blocker[0] on both Mac and iOS. You can also pair it with NextDNS[1] if you want even more blocking.

[0] https://1blocker.com/ [1] https://nextdns.io/

You see, that's the problem here. Why should I be paying for simple thing like adblocker?

There are lots of free ones too.

Do you find the piece of software useful?

If this thing is so simple to build perhaps you can build your own. That's free.

There’s a couple of things I don’t understand about your comment.

1) I don’t understand why it’s relevant. Parent commented about the lack of ad blocking and I simply shared a possible solution.

2) I don’t understand why complexity has to be factored in when it comes to pricing.

Should something be free just because it’s simple? Someone has to work and maintain that software.

NextDNS has free tiers.

on Android, Chrome doesn't allow adblockers and Firefox does, so I had to switch on my pc as well to Firefox to have sync

I did the same. Frankly Firefox is still a serviceable browser. It's not nearly as bad as HN hand-wringing would leave one to believe.

my only issue which can be big is that some websites have some actions which just don't work on ff like dropdowns or playing video

Yes, as a user I prefer Safari to all be alternatives on macOS.

The issue with Safari is that too many features just don’t work 100% correctly. Like WebRTC mic support has a number of bugs. Calling captureStream on a canvas produces a media stream that cannot be played back in Safari. Playing a lot of audio tags produces an audible popping sound on play. And there any many other issues I can’t think of off the top of my head.

First to pass the Acid 3 CSS test suite too, IIRC.

> IIRC "back in the day" they were the first to get 100% in supporting all of ES6.

You can also add quotes to "100%", as anything else in Safari, it was quite buggy and you had to use workarounds sometimes.

You could swap “Safari” for IE6 and tell the same story. I don’t know what it is about OS dominance that drives such disinterest in upgrading browsers outside of wanting to push native apps for that App Store revenue.

You could also say that Chrome had a huge _interest_ in pushing for browser-alternatives to native Apps because of Chromebooks. Some of that died down once Android support was added. The position on many of these by other browser vendors were that they were harmful for the web. You will likely never see implementations of these non-standard API outside chromium-based browsers.

The other thing which they are very slow to support is new codecs on the video tag. Presumably this is because they want to keep their "video playback" power metrics. the WebKit team is incredibly metrics-driven, which is one reason for their performance and power-efficiency.

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