Re:Hobson's Browser: How Apple, Facebook and Google broke th...
by feross on Saturday July 24, 2021 @10:33PM
(#27946199)
This is made all the worse by the embarrassing bugs in Safari. Apple broke IndexedDB in the current stable Safari and isn't in any rush to fix it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27509206). Safari updates are so infrequent that developers will have to include workarounds to this issue for years.
It's been fixed on master for over a month, but it hasn't been included in any of the Safari releases that have come out since then. When someone asked the Webkit engineers when we can expect a fix, their response was "Apple does not comment on future releases." https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226547
If I asked you to imagine what you could do to sabotage the web, it would not look very different than what Apple is currently doing. Add "support" for modern web features but then actually subtly (or not so subtly in this case) break them on a regular cadence. To be clear, I don't think the Webkit team is doing this on purpose, but the effects on the web are still the same.
It's been fixed on master for over a month, but it hasn't been included in any of the Safari releases that have come out since then. When someone asked the Webkit engineers when we can expect a fix, their response was "Apple does not comment on future releases." https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226547
If I asked you to imagine what you could do to sabotage the web, it would not look very different than what Apple is currently doing. Add "support" for modern web features but then actually subtly (or not so subtly in this case) break them on a regular cadence. To be clear, I don't think the Webkit team is doing this on purpose, but the effects on the web are still the same.