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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."
"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."
Here's a lump of coal. You'll like it. We'll send you the bill later.
(Apple has always been like that - they Think Different)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As a 20yr IT guy,.. who started using Macs (in depth) about 5 to 7 years ago.. I pretty much use Safari for everything. Why?... It gives me the best Stability, Performance and Battery-life. Call it whatever names you want... but it works for me. (and I work in IT.. and push it pretty hard.. so No, I'm not "just surfing Facebook" with it).
Well I think the why is pretty clear with the feature set they have been releasing. On OSX Safari is a default choice whose major advantage is ties with iOS devices. They are fine with people using other browsers and might even welcome a more diverse OSX broswer ecosystem. On iOS they want to move away from the web and towards applications. They need the iOS Safari engine to be fast, but they don't need it to support the full range of web experiences since increasingly they want those experiences delivered via. applications.
The analogy with I.E. is really quite on point. Apple is acting like Microsoft did in the late 1990s / 2000s for the same reason Microsoft was disinterested in I.E. They were focusing on platform specific advantages that come from client / server rather than purely web server design.
You clearly are thinking with desktop-coloured glasses. Despite Android market penetration, Safari is clearly the dominant force in the world of mobile websites, to an even greater degree than Chrome is dominant in desktop websites (and yes, I recognize that's true).
Couple that with some really backwards things, like support for touch-events over pointer-events (http://mobiforge.com/news-comment/who-wants-pointer-events-api-everyone-nearly). Key advantage of pointer-events is that it is declarative/reactive instead of imperative/synchronous, and as such it is more responsive on low-end devices.
The thesis of this discussion is that not only are developers coding to Safari, but Safari development is closed (despite an open-source platform) and obstinately at odds with the overall standardization process. It pins part of the blame on bitterness over WebSQL vs. IndexedDB, which I have no real knowledge about so no comment.
I use Safari on an OSX box from time to time, when I need to deal with work e-mail and I don't want to log-out of personal e-mail on the main browser. Seems to work fine that way.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
For a while chrome was better than safari but not any more. Safari consumes much less resources than chrome and it handles multiple tab loads much better on my boxen. The final straw was when chrome deleted every single bookmark during a synch. Lost everything and no way to recover it. I tried restoring a backup but chrome just resynched and erased it again . With safari time machine works beautifully.
My faborite browser is Firefox but that's only because it has the zotero plug in.
This article is total rubbish
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What do you mean? Every single web view on iOS uses Safari's renderer. It's against the App Store rules to have your own renderer. The problem is that sure, if you design a website around Safari it'll work everywhere else, but it's a pain in the ass to design it to a 5 year old standard when all the other major browsers support other upgrades, extensions and capabilities that can make code easier/faster/better. It's most apparent when an open standard has replaced an Apple designed one that's inferior, and Apple refuses to change, such as WebSQL/IndexedDB.
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