News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by jameslk on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:19PM (#38043397)
There’s something really beautiful about creating a browser that can run in a browser. We can finally steamroll a lot of those cross browser incompatibilities by replacing the host browser engine entirely. It’s like the nuclear option to fight against the new IE (Safari)
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by IAmLiterallyAB on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:30PM (#38043506)
I dunno I'd say the new IE is Chrome. They basically control the ecosystem and everyone targets them when developing. "Best viewed with I̶n̶t̶e̶r̶n̶e̶t̶ ̶E̶x̶p̶l̶o̶r̶e̶r Chrome"
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by leblancfg on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:33PM (#38043544)
I think GP meant "the minority browser we bend our logic for, in order to accommodate"
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by jameslk on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:39PM (#38043615)
Yes, that is what I meant. I have to work on a lot of e-commerce websites and the WebKit browser engine is the one that seems to always be late to the party or outright won’t support new features. But of course most shoppers on a website are on mobile Safari, especially the ones making purchases. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it because Apple won’t allow other types of browser engines on iOS.
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by simondotau on Friday October 27, 2023 @06:27PM (#38044828)
If you need “new features” not available in Safari in order to run an ecommerce website, I’m fairly confident that you’re doing it wrong.

(Of course usually when one delves into exactly what features Safari is missing, specifically the ones which piss off web developers, it’s push notifications. And to that I salute Apple for bravely holding the line against that nonsense.)

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by jameslk on Friday October 27, 2023 @06:41PM (#38044936)
No, for me they have more to do with web performance. Look up how to track Largest Contentful Paint in Safari, for example. Many other types of ways to optimize websites are available in Chrome and Firefox but not Safari.

IIRC push notifications are supported in Safari.

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by simondotau on Friday October 27, 2023 @06:48PM (#38044996)
The absence of LCP reporting doesn’t affect your ability to build a website that works in Safari. My suggestion is to stop embedding eighteen third party performance metric platforms and your website will be faster than any of those platforms could ever make it.

I work in this field too and I’ve heard it all before — and 99% of it is bullshit. Web performance is a solved problem and has been for a decade, unless you build some ridiculous Rube Goldberg machine of libraries atop libraries.

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by jameslk on Saturday October 28, 2023 @02:31AM (#38047660)
> My suggestion is to stop embedding eighteen third party performance metric platforms and your website will be faster than any of those platforms could ever make it.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about but the snark and continuous incorrect assumptions aren’t constructive so this is where our polite debate will end.

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by simondotau on Friday October 27, 2023 @06:35PM (#38044886)
> "the minority browser we bend our logic for, in order to accommodate"

The web is dead. All hail the Chrome Platform, where the official definition of correct behaviour is “whatever Chrome does.”

How dare Apple force web developers to target more than one browser engine. Interoperability and agnosticism is for losers.

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by simondotau on Friday October 27, 2023 @08:18PM (#38045622)
Oh and before anyone says anything, I'm a staunch Firefox user and have been continuously since its first release. And in the last few years I'm starting to see a marked growth in sites which don't work in Firefox, usually because of something like a bug in their Content Security Policy which Firefox correctly rejects and Chrome doesn't.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of web developers are now exclusively using Chrome and resent the idea of testing elsewhere.

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by xp84 on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:44PM (#38043681)
This is interesting. Chrome is the new i.e. as i.e. was in 2002, namely, most people regarded it as “the only browser any normal person would ever use.”

Safari is the new i.e. in the sense that i.e. was in the late 2000s/early 2010s, meaning it’s the browser that we would like to ignore due to how weird it is compared to the browser we normally target. And how stubborn the vendor is in neither acting like the majority browser, nor giving up and adopting a different engine (or in the case of iOS, even allowing a different engine to run).

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by dirtyhippiefree on Friday October 27, 2023 @05:57PM (#38044537)
I see: in the case of iOS, even allowing a different engine to run

I’m hearing: iOS is •considerably more secure• like Blackberry was.

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by xp84 on Sunday October 29, 2023 @03:39PM (#38061899)
I’m not hearing that. Safari has its share of CVEs, including many of the jailbreak methods of the past, meaning one click to root the device. Apple isn’t any better at software than any other html engine vendor. And by having a monoculture on iOS, every time there’s a WebKit bug 100% of iOS users are guaranteed exploitable. There’s zero net security benefit to banning Gecko and Chromium (and any upstart innovators).
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by tedunangst on Friday October 27, 2023 @05:08PM (#38043959)
What features does shadow implement that are missing from safari?
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by canadahonk on Friday October 27, 2023 @10:12PM (#38046442)
CSS light-dark() function heh ;)
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by lionkor on Friday October 27, 2023 @05:09PM (#38043977)
Right after we made the browser to fight cross-OS incompatibility, which were made to fight cross-smaller-OS incompatibility, which were made to fight machine code and punching card and hardware incompatibility...

At some point maybe the web dev world will understand that, sometimes, you just have to live with the fact that there is no one true best solution, and instead build tools that are built with cross-platform in mind (like Qt, SDL, etc.).

Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by lodovic on Friday October 27, 2023 @05:20PM (#38044127)
It would be interesting to have Firefox available in WebAssembly
Re:Shadow: New browser engine made almost entirely in JavaSc... by callalex on Friday October 27, 2023 @07:27PM (#38045282)
Which “standards” have been forced on the industry by Safari?