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Comment by jacobp100 | Hacker News Reader

Safari has been improving at rapid pace for a while now. They were the first to get ES6 support (and the only to implement tail calls), they’re usually the first with CSS features

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So why do a lot of sites I visit still fail in Safari?

It’s rare to see that but almost every time I have looked it’s been because the developer did something which used a Chrome API instead of a web standard. I’ve found it best to develop in Firefox and Safari, because Chrome almost always works the first time you test it and you don’t accidentally introduce a dependency on something which is still being standardized.

Honestly, this hasn’t always been my experience: multiple times I’ve targeted Firefox for doing something mildly out of the normal but absolutely within spec and supported across the board for years, and then tried it in Chromium and found debilitating bugs, to the point where once in a case of CSS blending I just had to give up on the entire concept, or else the page would just stop rendering after 8192px.

I’ve never actually developed against Chromium, and my position as a staunch Firefox user (and a Nightly user at that, for at least eleven of the last thirteen years) may be negatively affecting my judgement in this, but although what you say may be true from a features perspective, I don’t find that at all difficult to manage, and from a bugs perspective my impression is that Chromium has historically tended to be much buggier: that Firefox shipped better quality, later, while Chromium shipped lower quality, earlier. Though I do get the sense that this is less true than it used to be, and that Chromium is generally of higher quality for features of a certain age now than five years ago. And I reiterate, this is about the vibes I’ve got, as a Firefox user. I’ve tended to have to file more interesting or problematic bugs against Chromium than against Firefox.

I’m not definitely not saying any browser is perfect - I’ve filed many bugs against all of the major browsers - but I think Chrome took over from IE in the category of browsers which a certain type of developer uses as the only browser and decides that if it works for them it’s ready to ship. I’m not sure I’ve ever had someone rant in the inverse case saying that if code works in, say, Safari but not Chrome it must mean that Chrome is a terrible browser and shouldn’t be used. That default mentality is toxic for the web but not uncommon.

I haven't found this to be a problem, but if you do I might suggest looking at the options under the view menu.

https://i.imgur.com/lMHkiH8.jpg

"Reload Without Content Blockers" and "Reload Reducing Other Privacy Protections" might be what you need. It might be Safari's anti-tracking/cookie features that might be at fault or it might be that you have a content blocker that's causing an issue. If you're using iCloud Private Relay, it's possible that sites are filtering those IP addresses or there's a DNS issue and you can use "Reload and Show IP Address" to check that. For example, iCloud Private Relay often uses Cloudflare's DNS. archive.is doesn't work with Cloudflare's DNS (because Cloudflare won't leak your location to their DNS servers and so archive.is returns bad results to them).

I've had various different issues with Safari as a developer for the last few years (also frequently paired with SVGs for some reason). In the absence of IE, Safari has the perfect combination of decent market share and bugs that for my company we get a lot more Safari specific reported issues than any other browser.

It's usually smaller things like SVGs not working with CSS animations, or SVG filters causing weird edge case issues, but I'd really expect any major browser to fully support something like SVG and it's a little disappointing to find that the browser is the issue.

Not to defend Safari in this case, just to give perspective: SVGs are the forgotten unloved child that very few people building browsers care about. And that's unfortunate.

See this post for historical context: https://codepen.io/AmeliaBR/post/me-and-svg

Because web developers aren’t adequately testing other browsers? Each browser has its own additional APIs and implementation specifics. Chrome in specific has tons of non standard additions.

Because to test with Safari, you need to buy a Apple device.

Because they rely on features or behaviors that are only in Chrome?

I only know of 1 where it is a current problem. What do you have?

I have reports that this sandbox is failing intermittently only in Safari. I don't have a Safari machine to test with. Reports say that the content pane on the right is empty. By default, there should be a clickable button in it, which is the sandbox output.

https://mutraction.dev/sandbox/?view=normal

Reports say there is some iframe load failure showing in the network monitor. Every file being loaded is a normal static file served from a CDN. Also, sometimes, when it fails there's a rare chance that a reload will make it work?

Hmm, seems to work fine here on MacOS Sonoma and Safari 17.2.1. Happy to help you test if I can be of help.

This is like saying "is X is better than IE, why do the sites that work in IE but not X".

Do you have examples? I use Safari as a daily driver, don't even have Google Chrome installed, and everything works great for me.

That’s a web developer problem, not a Safari problem.

I wouldn't say they're the first to get most CSS features. Usually just things that are more visual, like color spaces and theming. They still drag their feet on a lot of features, but they are getting better.

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