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Comment by gilfoy | Hacker News Reader

I’m not convinced opening up the platform to Chrome skins is good for the web, we’ll just end up with one browser that much faster

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Are Safari skins any better? If they opened it, you could run Firefox.

But you wouldn't. Look at desktop browser share.

In practice I think he is right unfortunately. Most people would just run Chrome and more websites would require Chrome since they could just tell Apple users to deal with it, making the mono-culture even worse.

Yep. We're going right back to "This site works best on Internet Explorer."

Sad to see supposedly technically-knowledgeable people cheerleading for regression.

Less sites would do this is Safari wasn't the last non evergreen browser lagging behind everybody else.

Maybe the answer from Apple should be to improve Safari instead of restricting competition.

Whatever that means. Do you have specific complaints about Safari?

FYI:

...fewer sites...

...if Safari were...

Yes I have, I worked with it for years, there's the officially supported standards and then there's the buggy reality you have to deal with. I've encountered bugs with backgrounds, zIndex, videos, forms, localStorage, SVGs, all basic browser features.

Then Safari also is the last non-evergreen browser so it's the slowest to update compared to all the other browsers. If you have a bug, there's a good chance you'll have it for years

OK, that's much more informative.

But "non-evergreen" doesn't mean anything.

Evergreen refers to the speed of update, your average iPhone user takes one year and half to update. Your average Chrome user is updated within 3 weeks, your average Firefox user within 4 weeks.

Call it with another word if you want but Safari is on a league of its own.

Totally valid gripe. I agree.

I support Safari on a web app and have very rarely run into issues. It’s nothing like supporting even IE11 was.

I've also worked during the IE11 days and while Safari is indeed better, I'd only put it marginally better.

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