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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

    However, [Safari] still has the best perceived performance. 
    Just open a page with a heavy layout and scroll up and 
    down, or type an address or search term in the location 
    bar and "feel" how fast it loads.

The performance gap is particularly noticeable on older Macs. Safari feels about the same as other browsers on my recent Mac... but there's a big gap in responsiveness between Safari and the other browsers on my wife's 2009-ish Core 2 Duo. [Edit: I mean that Safari is much more responsive than Chrome or FF]

This doesn't excuse Apple dragging their feet on web standards, of course.

It's just puzzling. Clearly Apple puts a lot of work into Safari. It's not the bastard child that IE was at Microsoft... recall how the IE team was disbanded after IE6 at one point.

And yet, frustratingly, Apple doesn't support modern web standards despite allocating a healthy slice of developer resources to Safari.

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Its in Apple's interest to not have Safari work well on older machines (since they want people to buy new machines), or improve it in ways that would make the browser better compete against the app store (especially on mobile).

It is in their interest to have it be a very nice looking document viewing platform, which is where I imagine most of their developer resources are going towards.

   Its in Apple's interest to not have Safari work well 
   on older machines (since they want people to buy new
   machines)

Then they're failing miserably, because as I (and others in this conversation) have attested to... Safari is noticeably faster than Firefox or Chrome on older Mac hardware.

So I don't think your theory holds any water. Sorry.

(Edit: My post was unclear. I and others feel that Safari, despite its other shortcomings, is the most responsive browser on OSX - not the least.)

I think he interpreted your post as being the opposite of what you meant it to say. You said the performance gap is more noticeable but you probably mean in favor of safari, although it could be interpreted either way.

I think you're right. I edited my post for clarity.

I did, and I should have read it more carefully. That being said, I think there is a balance that Apple tries to maintain here. If there experience on older systems is terrible, they run the risk of people switching to a different operating system and platform. If the experience isn't significantly better on newer hardware, however, customers won't be motivated to upgrade.

I would definitely not attribute it to any purposeful attempt at by a company to make things worse for older systems... human beings developing software on new hardware is already enough to make performance issues happen.

In reality, if the lead developers of some software find the experience to be good enough on their machines, that's going to lead to it becoming worse on old hardware, no matter what the company (as people have said in this thread, it's even worse with chrome and firefox.)

It takes huge amounts of effort to ensure that the development work you're doing is performant on a range of hardware. If you neglect doing that, I'd definitely chalk it up to laziness and not malice.

(In other words, I agree that performance gets worse from version to version, but you don't need to attribute to malice that which can equally be attributed to laziness.)

I don't necessarily attribute it to malice either. Their interest in making money and being successful will motivate where they spend their development dollars in maintaining older software and keeping current customers happy on their older systems versus developing new features and software that will increase sales.

    I should have read it more carefully

No, I was unclear. :)

    If there experience on older systems is terrible, they 
    run the risk of people switching to a different operating 
    system and platform. If the experience isn't significantly 
    better on newer hardware, however, customers won't be 
    motivated to upgrade.

I'm certain the main engineering goal they have for Safari is energy efficiency.

Battery life is one of the two or three major selling points of all their devices, and improved (or at least equivalent) battery life is something they deliver with every iteration of OSX.

I believe Safari's performance/responsiveness is largely a happy accidental byproduct of this focus on energy efficiency.

Again, I'm not defending anything they do. I'm a OSX user and Firefox is my browser of choice, if that tells you anything!

I don't find this puzzling at all. I think Apple wants Safari to be a great browser for the limited role they think the web should play.

They are putting a lot of work into making the browsing experience better on Safari, very successfully I think, but adding tons of features that could expand the role of the web as an applications platform is just not in their interest.

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