Apple Is Not Defending Browser Engine Choice

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • caniuse

    Raw browser/feature support data from caniuse.com

  • Look at the front page of https://caniuse.com/

    At the bottom right there is a chart and Safari is in 3rd.

    I built a company based on browser testing and Safari in general was/is always behind.

    They have hired some good people so maybe that situation will change but in general Safari is the currently the boat anchor of browsers. Hopefully the situation will change over time.

  • interop

    web-platform-tests Interop project

  • Container Queries and Subgrid are only available in Safari Technology Preview, not stable, and Firefox has actually been supporting Subgrid for more than 2 years. Because CQ is not supported by either Chrome of Firefox, it will be at least 2 years before we can start actually using it.

    It would have been much wiser for Safari to catch up on the dozens of features they don't support that both Chrome and Firefox do, or to focus on bug fixes for the most basic features that's been broken for years. Instead, they chose to ship shiny new ones to try and convince both regulators (from the EU, UK, US, etc) and web developers that they are leading the way in feature adoption. Unfortunately this seems to be working to some extent in the web devs community. Regulators are unlikely to fall for it though.

    Here is the 7 years old scrolling bug I'm referring to, which prevents any decent implementation of modals in Safari on iOS: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/interop-2022/issues/84

    Here you can see that Safari has 5 times more API failures (representative of both missing features and bugs) than Chrome, and 3 times more than Firefox: https://wpt.fyi/

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    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • uBlock-Safari

    uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium, Firefox, and Safari. Fast and lean.

  • > as of IOS15 the Safari Extension API has everything uBlock would use

    Does it? My understanding is that the Safari Extension API isn't suitable for uBlock Origin: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158

  • uBlock-issues

    This is the community-maintained issue tracker for uBlock Origin

  • By January 2023, uBlock Origin stops working with Manifest V3.

    This is the future people are advocating for with Chrome dominance.

    Firefox has temporarily saved itself from this but don't worry, Google will eventually tie their hands as well.

    No one is safe from an unstoppable spyware company.

    https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

  • standards-positions

  • > If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one.

    Easy.

    The most obvious/glaring one is WebHID. Enjoy the timeline: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459

    It's not just HID, of course. All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Chrome is shipping them enabled by default, and there's no end to clueless developers maoning about this and calling Safari (mostly) and Firefox (from time to time) too slow in "moving the web forward". Needless to say that all those non-standards are pushed forward by Chrome.

    The less obvious one is Constructable Stylesheets.

    The spec had an obvious flaw that could lead to easily reproducible deadlocks. And that is on top with other issues with design, API naming etc. A team within Google (lit-html) wanted this feature, so Chrome shipped it against clear objections from both Safari and Firefox. And then refused to move the feature back under a flag because "0.8% of page views in Chrome" were suddenly using this feature. And proceded to gaslight other browsers' developers https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45. See e.g. a response to that https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu... Of course there's now a "looking ahead" that wants to do exactly what Safari and Mozilla wanted to do in the first place: https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead

    In general, Chrome pushes 40 to over 100 new Web APIs with each release (that is, every two months). How many of them are actual standards that had actual input from other browser developers? In how many Chrome actually listened and implemented suggestions? https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

  • construct-stylesheets

    API for constructing CSS stylesheet objects

  • > If there are examples of 'Apple ignoring standards' actually meaning Chrome-only features please tell me one.

    Easy.

    The most obvious/glaring one is WebHID. Enjoy the timeline: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459

    It's not just HID, of course. All/most of the hardware APIs are considered harmful by both Safari and Mozilla. Chrome is shipping them enabled by default, and there's no end to clueless developers maoning about this and calling Safari (mostly) and Firefox (from time to time) too slow in "moving the web forward". Needless to say that all those non-standards are pushed forward by Chrome.

    The less obvious one is Constructable Stylesheets.

    The spec had an obvious flaw that could lead to easily reproducible deadlocks. And that is on top with other issues with design, API naming etc. A team within Google (lit-html) wanted this feature, so Chrome shipped it against clear objections from both Safari and Firefox. And then refused to move the feature back under a flag because "0.8% of page views in Chrome" were suddenly using this feature. And proceded to gaslight other browsers' developers https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45. See e.g. a response to that https://github.com/WICG/construct-stylesheets/issues/45#issu... Of course there's now a "looking ahead" that wants to do exactly what Safari and Mozilla wanted to do in the first place: https://web.dev/constructable-stylesheets/#looking-ahead

    In general, Chrome pushes 40 to over 100 new Web APIs with each release (that is, every two months). How many of them are actual standards that had actual input from other browser developers? In how many Chrome actually listened and implemented suggestions? https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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