Slashdot Mirror
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."
No corporations support it so there is no reason for most of the world to bother supporting it unlike IE.
The problems with IE were twofold:
1) It contained tons of rendering bugs that websites relied upon, and so Microsoft's refusal to fix them assured the browser's market dominance by making pages render improperly in competitors' browsers.
2) It was completely insecure.
Safari does not do either of these things.
I think Chrome is closer to the new IE. It has lots of problems, developers code specifically for it and it causes all sorts of development headaches. Not enough people use Safari for it to be an issue.
I'm gonna pay a whole lot of attention to that, for sure.
#DeleteChrome
It's simple. As long as a significant portion of Apple's revenue comes from having a closed, "walled-garden" ecosystem, Apple will be disinclined to participate anything that might result in the demise of that ecosystem. After all, it's hard to be in the same boat as everyone else supporting WebAssembly etc., when that same technology will ultimately result in the death of on-platform app stores.
You are not aware iOS is a major OS?
That's more or less what I was thinking as well. From a user perspective, Safari is pretty much like Chrome except more stable and much less resource-hungry.
Maybe this relentless catering to every sloppy demand of every hack web programmer is what makes web browsers the bloated pieces of shit that they are nowadays.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
When you can figure out the reason that no other technical standard is decided at paid conferences, you'll have your answer.
Or you could have it way sooner, but then you didn't choose that option.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I currently have a web radio transceiver front panel application that works on Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, Amazon Kindle Fire, under Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. No porting, no software installation. See blog.algoram.com for details of what I'm writing.
The one unsupported popular platform? iOS, because Safari doesn't have the function used to acquire the microphone in the web audio API (and perhaps doesn't have other parts of that API), and Apple insists on handicapping other browsers by forcing them to use Apple's rendering engine.
I don't have any answer other than "don't buy iOS until they fix it".
Bruce Perens.
Well actually it seems to me Chrome itself is the new IE, in that I see more and more websites working on Chrome and maybe IE, but with compatibility issues in Firefox, like menus not working properly. Old IE was too far behind and deviated willfully in non-standard ways. Chrome is so bleeding edge, and web devs are lacking more and more insight into the issue of browser compatibility, that it seems to me we are heading into a whole new era of compatibility hell...
This is getting tiring, and along with "walled garden", it is really stale and worn out as an argument. What company (that turns a profit) isn't interested in customer retention? What other products and services are portable in the manner you imply compared to Apple? Jesus, this has been going on for ages with tech. Did your Atari 2600 carts work in that fucking ColecoVision your weirdo friend had? No... they didn't. And that same song continues today.
Beware of the Leopard.
If only enough people that mattered used Safari.
You mean other than CxOs and VPs that carry an iPhone and/or iPad?
No I mean accountants and ERP users that actually use applications in the enterprise. C-levels and VPs are a very small group of users, important, but only if you are managing stakeholder expectations.
Oh and I can see the fanbois are out modding again and taking everything personally.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.