I think GP meant "the minority browser we bend our logic for, in order to accommodate"

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.

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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

> "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.

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.

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).

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.

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).