Safari does not have the monopoly status, Chrome has that, but safari does have the IE 11 like constant fighting when you have to support it.

Also Safari has monopoly status for everyone using an iPhone. The people on iPhone simply can't pick another browser, because Apple won't let them.

Yes, and is also very IE like in that it's not evergreen, various iOS devices stuck on specific revisions that Apple has left in various states of broken.

i have an iphone with safari, firefox, firefox focus and chrome, ...

iPhones aren't allowed to have web browsers that aren't running Safari on the back end. They can have different names, different UIs, but at the end of the day it's the same browser.

I don't know why non iOS browser play the stupid pseudo support game with Apple, it just makes it confusing for users like the parent comment... playing into Apple's hand, helping them pretend that it's actually a fair ecosystem with choices.

That's easy. Users want their bookmarks, history, passwords, etc synced across devices, and so if there's no Chrome, Firefox, Edge etc for iOS to accomplish that on iPhone/iPad, people who have multiple Apple devices would likely switch to Safari and those users would be lost. Additionally, in the case of Google and Microsoft, they'd be opting out of those sweet, sweet streams of user data if they had no iOS presence. And so, those browsers exist, just built around WebKit instead of Blink/Gecko.

Apple does this for a few reasons:

1) to prevent web apps from gaining a foothold. Modern web standards aim to provide native-like utility, performance, look, and feel. Apple purposefully holds their device back so companies are compelled to deploy native apps.

2) to prevent Google from taking over their platform. Chrome could give Safari a run for its money and "steal" user attention away from Apple's key platform pieces, providing a foothold for Google on iOS.

Firefox is the browser I want to see be the competition.

Extremely unlikely unfortunately unless the planets align and Google ceases all promotion of Chrome and Mozilla dramatically improves their own promotion game. Firefox would probably need more tangible reasons for people to switch too, because realistically the masses aren't going to care about the privacy or marketshare angles.

I don't see how Mozilla could "improve their promotion game" to stand up to that.

But that alone wouldn't suffice. From what I've seen of Mozilla's efforts to promote Firefox, they don't have any idea of how to appeal to the broader audience, or really any audience beyond the privacy-conscious. That Firefox allows better control of one's data is great but it's not nearly enough to carry most people past the friction point of switching browsers. For that you need things like major advantages in battery life and features that fix common web browsing annoyances.

It's that Safari is the only browser allowed on iOS. Which means that we are stuck with the subset of the standards that Safari has chosen to implement.

So Safari has outsized influence over which standards are actually feasible to build an application around.

One example: I've lost count of how long I've been waiting to build web apps that can send (user requested) push notifications.

Which, considering the alternative is Google having complete control over the web, I'm quite thankful for. It doesn't line up with how I'd like things to be in either case but it's much better for there to be some sort of check against Google. Google is far too aggressive about implementing new tech in the browser for very obvious reasons.

Just because it doesn't exactly match up to the same scenario of IE6 doesn't takeaway from the point that you can develop for everything else easily, then must deal with Safari's failures specifically.

Totally broken indexedDB implementation. Random rendering issues, especially if you happen to ever use z-index. Hacks needed to get the most basic events to trigger. Idiotic scrolling behaviour. Choppy animations that didn't adhere to basic CSS standards (even the ones that weren't added by Google).

Honestly, it was a mess, and sometimes felt like a deliberate ploy to stop web apps from becoming viable. Things are better now. Just waiting for them to finally add web push notifications.

Try to put something in absolute on top at width 100% and 100%, if you scroll down, the snapping goes further than the div...

I’m not one to defend google, but in the matter of a datepicker… it’s 2023 for crying out loud! A datepicker standard should have been solved and implemented about 20 years ago.

Admittedly it’s non-trivial dealing with dates across regions, time zones, DST, etc, but c’mon, it’s been clearly solvable for decades.

In my opinion this is not comparable at all, slightly differently or prefixed property/attribute names are really very acceptable to me compared to the hacks we used to implement. Having to hack for multiple IEs while also ensuring those hacks are not applied to other browsers was a special kind of evil to battle, and we are not just talking about "oh IE does not support this so we need to do this another way" but also things like "oh IE like to double the specified padding because why not" - and then at some point they removed conditional comments because they were like "IE is good now." which of course it wasn't.

I develop for Safari amongst other browsers daily and have for years, and do not share these frustration everyone else seems to have for it. Do I agree there should be more frequent updates of Safari (also for older MacOS)? Yes. Do I agree iOS should allow other browser engines? Yes. Is supporting older Chromium engines annoying too? Yeah of course, I've run into that as well (don't have any concrete examples right now unfortunately). People like to think that you can expect Chrome to always be the latest version because of the auto updating, but I have experienced multiple issues caused by users with a (very) outdated version. Whether or not you support these depends on your business / target audience, I had to, and it was frustrating.

Different browser engines will always be different and implement standards at different rates, and standards are often implemented before they are finalised and some do this with prefixes and others do not. Supporting multiple browsers is part of the job, if you don't like it you should not be doing front-end web development.

I for one would hate living in a world that is run by Google (Chromium).

I've experienced zIndex bugs, border radius bugs, form bugs, svg bugs and even dom event bugs.

I don't know how many of the people making this comparison actually had to deal with IE 5.5/6/7/8 support on a daily basis back in those days or what exotic things people are doing now.

Safari does feel like it has more rendering bugs yes, but I did also say in my comment that I believe Safari should have more frequent updates because bugs hang around longer. But then again, you are still not guaranteed that people always have the latest version anyway, even in Chrome.

I just don't get this comparison to IE and this is the first time I thought I'd comment on it, but in the future I will not do it again. The era of IE sucks, but IE was IE and Safari is Safari, Firefox is Firefox and almost all other browsers are Chrome. We are all allowed our own views on this and I should not have commented at all I guess.

Happy new year!

*: p.s. Apple should allow different browser engines on iOS

> https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/issues...

Can you elaborate on this? How does this happen, and is it a permanent de-buff?

Please don't do it again.

p.s. A comment beginning with "I hate these stupid parrots claiming Safari is the new IE" obviously broke the HN guidelines and therefore did not belong at the top of the thread. The moderation here was correct; your comment and laster destructive edit were out of line.

On the contrary, the things mods do—including downweighting top subthreads when they break the guidelines or aren't in the intended spirit of the site—are vital to why HN functions as well as it does (not that it functions particularly well; just that it could and would be worse). In fact, that process of downweighting top subthreads is probably the biggest thing we've ever figured out to improve thread quality, at least in recent years.

* Btw, if there were a way to have the community and software alone do what mods do, and thus eliminate the need for mods, that would be a day of great rejoicing on our part.

Don’t do that and tell me I’ve deprived people of context. You've already taken away from otherwise valid discussion about development with an industry and why this sentiment has proliferated by pushing my post to the bottom.

I could have also simply replaced the sentence with, "I don't like it when people repeat that Safari is the new IE," but HN doesn't have a recorded policy of restoring posts from downweighing.

If this is the only offending sentence, it seems like pretty shallow moderation to me.

“Edit out swipes” is a part of HN guidelines. I removed the post because clearly moderation found it fulminating, I agree it was, and now you seem to think you own my words.

If you have a problem with edits after silent moderation and believe this to be abuse, which contradicts current guidelines, just update the guidelines to include such a statement.

Perhaps it's unclear but the guideline there is about taking that stuff out before you post. The whole set of subsequent problems just goes away entirely if you do that which should be straightforward given there's agreement on the root cause - the posting of yelly comments.

The "edit out swipes" guideline is intended more along the lines of "please edit out any guideline-breaking swipey bits from your comment, while leaving the substantive point intact."