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Is Safari the New Internet Explorer?
An anonymous reader writes: Software developer Nolan Lawson says Apple's Safari has taken the place of Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the major browser that lags behind all the others. This comes shortly after the Edge Conference, where major players in web technologies got together to discuss the state of the industry and what's ahead. Lawson says Mozilla, Google, Opera, and Microsoft were all in attendance and willing to talk — but not Apple.
"It's hard to get insight into why Apple is behaving this way. They never send anyone to web conferences, their Surfin' Safari blog is a shadow of its former self, and nobody knows what the next version of Safari will contain until that year's WWDC. In a sense, Apple is like Santa Claus, descending yearly to give us some much-anticipated presents, with no forewarning about which of our wishes he'll grant this year. And frankly, the presents have been getting smaller and smaller lately."
He argues, "At this point, we in the web community need to come to terms with the fact that Safari has become the new IE. Microsoft is repentant these days, Google is pushing the web as far as it can go, and Mozilla is still being Mozilla. Apple is really the one singer in that barbershop quartet hitting all the sour notes, and it's time we start talking about it openly instead of tiptoeing around it like we're going to hurt somebody's feelings."
"It's hard to get insight into why Apple is behaving this way. They never send anyone to web conferences, their Surfin' Safari blog is a shadow of its former self, and nobody knows what the next version of Safari will contain until that year's WWDC. In a sense, Apple is like Santa Claus, descending yearly to give us some much-anticipated presents, with no forewarning about which of our wishes he'll grant this year. And frankly, the presents have been getting smaller and smaller lately."
He argues, "At this point, we in the web community need to come to terms with the fact that Safari has become the new IE. Microsoft is repentant these days, Google is pushing the web as far as it can go, and Mozilla is still being Mozilla. Apple is really the one singer in that barbershop quartet hitting all the sour notes, and it's time we start talking about it openly instead of tiptoeing around it like we're going to hurt somebody's feelings."
Yes.
Safari does not do either of these things.
Ah the RDF.
1. There is plenty of safari-specific CSS that renders improperly in competitors' browsers (the same is true of IE, Chrome and Firefox as well). Back in the late 90s/early 00s the problem was you do things the IE way or the Netscape way, many of which were non-standard. Nowadays browsers still introduce their own extensions and ways of doing things with different quirks hence the safari/webkit/chrome/ie/etc CSS prefixes.
2. Here you will find pages and pages disproving you.
Note: All the browsers have such problems, not just Safari. Just calling you out on your false idea that Safari doesn't suffer the problems of other browsers. The point of this article is that Safari is becoming the new IE in the sense that with respect to industry collaboration they are behaving like Microsoft did with early IE. Try not to extrapolate beyond that.
Just because you no longer use Apple's iOS doesn't mean millions of other people don't still use iOS. There are two kinds of browsers on iOS: browsers that run remotely and behave akin to Remote Desktop, such as Opera Mini, and browsers that wrap the system's UIWebView or WKWebView control, such as Safari. The App Store Review Guidelines forbid third-party web engines that run on an iOS device. This means the vast majority of browsers for iOS are essentially window dressing around Safari.
If only enough people that mattered used Safari.
You mean other than CxOs and VPs that carry an iPhone and/or iPad?
As a 42 year old system engineer (*nix) I can say your inexperience is showing. There hasn't been a company I've worked for who didn't have a plethora of Macs in the hands of the developers, SysAdmins *and* managers.
Most of our linux admins? Macs.
Half our Windows admins? Macs.
1/4 of our developers? Macs.
Went to a couple Puppet conferences. Most of the laptops? Macs.
etc, etc, etc.
The rest of your comment is pure applesauce.
When you're describing vendor lock-in, I fail to see how the comparison is not relevant.
They do? Are you high? I just took one of the tracks from that U2 album Apple pushed. Track 6, Volcano. I took that track, an m4a, copied over to a Windows box, and played it in VLC. VLC runs on OS X along with a host of other MP3/media players. So, wtf were you saying??
So no...fine, user lock in without Chrome. Give me a break.
You better keep trying, because your first two sucked ass.
Beware of the Leopard.
When you expect to get most of your revenue from selling apps in the iStore - it's essential that people are unable to get apps for free via fancy web pages.
Hence, iPhone doesn't support WebGL for doing fancy 3D graphics on a web page - if it did, people would write cool games in HTML/JavaScript/WebGL and monetize them directly without having Apple take 30% of the revenue and "approve" their product.
Is this because Apple can't support WebGL? Hell no! The browser actually DOES contain code for WebGL, but it's disabled...UNLESS your web site signs up to display Apple-provided advertising banners...in which case, WebGL works great!
Safari uses the exact same core rending software ("WebKit") as Chrome - so it can trivially support everything that Chrome supports - it's really just a matter of Apple deciding to deliberately cripple the browser to prevent people from providing apps for free.
www.sjbaker.org
Your reasoning is way off. Apple does exactly what you claim they didn't want to do all the time. Siri is not supported on some models that run iOS 7. The new multi-tasking in iOS 9 (multiple on-screen apps) is only supported on newer iPads, and not the iPhone at all, not even the 6+. So basically, you're so completely wrong it's not even funny.