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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.
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.
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...
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.
I also use Safari, though I'm still pissed off with them for combining the URL bar and search box (which means that I keep typing one-word search terms and having it try to resolve them as domains, which then go in my history and so become the subject of autocomplete. The only way to avoid it is to get into the habit of hitting space at the end of a search, which is no saving on hitting tab at the start to jump to the search box). Chrome doesn't properly integrate with the keychain. I use Firefox on Android (self destructing cookies makes it the first browser I've used with a sane cookie management policy), but overall the UI for Safari does exactly what I want from a browser: stay out of the way.
TFS is nonsense though. Developers don't know what's going to be in the next version of Safari? Why don't they download the nightly build and see?
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