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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How does a post that gets almost all of its facts wrong get modded up as Insightful? You started on a provably faulty premise, backed it up with inaccurate statements regarding WebGL, and then closed it out by saying something that I'd have hoped most of us here would trivially recognize as incorrect.
When you expect to get most of your revenue from selling apps in the iStore
Apple announced at the start of the year that they've paid out $25B to developers over the life of the App Store. Do some quick math, and that means that Apple is averaging $0.45B in revenue each quarter from the App Store, which would put it at <1% of their quarterly revenue (e.g. Apple posted $60B in revenue in their latest, post-Christmas quarter).
Which is to say, your basic premise here is that Apple is intentionally crippling the product that makes up 60% of their revenue (iOS hardware) in order to bolster the revenue in a segment that accounts for less than 1% of their revenue (App Store downloads). Seriously? Apple's main business isn't selling apps; it's selling selling devices that run apps, and you may even recall that back when the iPhone launched in 2007, the "apps" it supported were web apps, not native apps.
iPhone doesn't support WebGL for doing fancy 3D graphics on a web page
Could've fooled me. iOS 8 has been out for nearly a year at this point, and has had WebGL support from the beginning without any of the weird requirements you're talking about.
The browser actually DOES contain code for WebGL, but it's disabled...UNLESS your web site signs up to display Apple-provided advertising banners
A) You're confused. You're talking about iAds (and I'll discuss why I know you are in a sec), but the iAd advertising network only operates in iOS apps, not on websites. Sites can't sign up to it.
B) It's not disabled. See above. WebGL support was available as an experimental feature in iOS 7, and as a standard feature in iOS8. No ads or other funny business required.
The reason you're confused is because, technically speaking, iOS did have support for WebGL as far back as iOS 4.2, but it was only available to iAd developers. By that, I don't mean people who agreed to put iAds in their app. I mean people who were actually making the iAds themselves, since iAds are basically just mini webpages that display an ad.
If that seems a bit weird at first glance, recall that WebGL was a resource-intensive feature on the devices of that day, and Apple has a history of restricting the scope or operation of resource-intensive features until the implementations or device capabilities improve (see: background processing, native apps on Apple Watch, etc.), so it made sense at the time why WebGL was restricted to iAds, since they were designed to only be on the screen for short periods of time yet could stand to gain the most from such a feature.
The only sense in which what you said is correct is that for a few years the only people who were able to make use of WebGL on iOS were the ones making the ads, but it was never a feature that web developers had to make a Faustian pact with Apple to use. It simply wasn't available to them.
Safari uses the exact same core rending software ("WebKit") as Chrome - so it can trivially support everything that Chrome supports
They haven't both used "WebKit" since Google forked WebKit to create Blink over two years ago, but even before that, they weren't even running "the exact same core rendering software" for the last several years back when they were both running "WebKit".
Google and Apple have had divergent multi-process architectures for quite some time. Google built