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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."
The unisonous response is "no". The author is trying to balance the needle on its tip.
and most won't notice. hit two and they do. hit three, that's jazz.
If Safari is the new internet explorer then that's not bad. If Safari is the old internet explorer then that's really bad.
Better known as 318230.
Yes.
No corporations support it so there is no reason for most of the world to bother supporting it unlike IE.
"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
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.
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?
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).
Does it really matter that much they aren't at conferences? That shouldn't be where evolution of HTML and browsing happens anyway...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
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.
Apple is the new IBM, content only to perform preventive maintenance on their annual upgrade cash machine. Anything that isn't awe-inspiring or scandalous enough to make headlines isn't worth their effort. Fixes to Safari might only add a couple bullet points to their "over 300 improvements" to OS X next year, and that's if they delay all fixes until then just to make them noticeable. The cost-to-benefit ratio is too high for those penny pinchers, so they won't bother.
Because exposing a user's files to any in-page behavior is a security risk and needs to be handled in clean managed ways with limited APIs? The hooks they established to do this went far beyond just browsers and also affect how content is provided to apps and 3rd party API calls.
Because 3D in browser has gone through a lot of iterations over the years? Read up on VRML for example. WebGL is a relatively recent fad extended from OpenGL and so relies on device drivers for hardware acceleration. Rather than have pages that would perform poorly or be inconsistently incompatible, Apple didn't guarantee provide the feature until OS-supported devices could support it. It's bad enough to run into situations where "it works on latest release, but not previous ones". Imagine how bad it would be if "it works on the latest release, but only on these specific models". That's a non-starter when it comes to the world of HTML/JS/CSS development.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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...
The "Android browser" browser is not Chrome.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
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
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.
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.
This is getting tiring, and along with "walled garden", it is really stale and worn out as an argument.
If you could install your own browser on iOS, then browsers wouldn't be a problem. Because of the walled garden, you can't.
"Walled garden" isn't a tired argument against iOS, it is a very serious problem, but fanboys would rather ignore it or call it 'worn out.' In reality it sucks and there's no need for it, and plenty of reasons to not have it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Please point out the "good" Android phones available in August 2007.
Apple doesn't care. That's not the same as "not knowing". Get real. Apple is a huge company, both in financial terms and in number of employees. Do you really think they don't know what an "Enterprise" needs in terms of IT support?
He didn't say the Android Browser, he said the default Android browser.
In newer versions of Android, you don't get the old Android stock browser. It was the default in the past, but hasn't been so for a long time now, and isn't even available unless you run hacks to install it and its dependencies.
As opposed to posting an opinion on /.
hint: Chrome (or any browser* on iOS) is little more than a skin over Mobile Safari (=webkit). sure, sometimes the skin is useful, but iOS Chrome is actually more like "Safari with some Chrome-ish Extensions".
*: at least any browser on the App Store; Apple literally won't allow any other renderers. maybe there are homebrew browsers for jailbroken iOS. i don't know.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky