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Comment by mattdw | Hacker News Reader

"Sorry, this game works only in Firefox and Chrome."

Welcome back to 1998. For the record, it works fine in Safari too. Why do people even do this?

It should be obvious. They are likely developing on a Mac, primarily in Chrome. They check it in Firefox, maybe resolve 5-minutes worth of bugs, then call it a day.

It's a demo, and firing up VMs or slow BrowserStack instances isn't worth their time; they already accomplished what they wanted for their target audience: themselves.

Yeah, this sucks, but why is this the top comment? This is just some uninteresting nitpick about the implementation and adds nothing to the topic that is covered here. This is a brilliant proof of concept and who gives two shits which browsers this works with as long as we can use it somehow and learn from it?

So now we're complaining that our security vulnerabilities aren't cross-platform enough?

No, he was complaining that it is more cross-platform than they say it is.

Modern Safari is impossible to test against without buying a Mac ever since Apple stopped releasing current nightlies. (Running Safari6 in a VM isn't adequate since it disables webgl and changes some other behaviors)

If it hasn't been tested in Safari, they should not state that it does not work in Safari. A better message would be "We have only tested this in Chrome and Friefox on Windows, so this application might not work for you."

It is a bit like the difference between "File X does not exist", and "Could not find a file named X". Computer programs should be polite to the limit of serfdom, or they will come over as arrogant.

I believe that http://nightly.webkit.org is what you want. You'll have to build it yourself, but that can be automated.

That is false. There are plenty of inexpensive services that let you use an in-browser remote desktop client to test against many different web browsers, including Safari.

I just told you why those don't work. They don't have a real GPU so WebGL and other features don't work or don't behave like a real mac. Try it yourself against a website that uses modern HTML5 features. Same goes for audio.

But this doesn't use WebGL or audio, and in fact runs perfectly well in a VM, so what exactly is your point?

Also, "modern HTML5 features" covers plenty of things that work well without a GPU. It is only a tiny set of features that do not work. For the vast majority of modern sites, testing via a VM works just fine.

I was more annoyed about the screen resolution limitations that are greater than the majority of laptop resolutions still in common use (though I will concede that the quality of laptop screens have been abysmal until lately)

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