Comment by nwienert
8 months ago
The data doesn’t show they drag their feet though. If anything FF is behind.
I genuinely enjoy Safari as a user more than Chrome. As a developer the dev tools suck. But as a user - the UI is far more minimal and nice. Every single action feels 2-3x faster, from opening and closing, tab opening or movement, etc. Battery lasts significantly longer. And I never really run into anything that doesn’t work, ever. Plus never worry about the latest hidden checkbox I have to find to not have my data soaked up. Hide my email is also dope.
The more responsive and thoughtful UI and battery/performance alone would have sold me. But the privacy and modern features it’s gotten over the last years make it better imo.
Just want to give a perspective as I feel people should update priors from 2021 “Safari is the new IE”
You said data doesn't show they drag their feet and then proceeded to present anecdote of your personal preferences and use cases while adding that thoughtful UI and battery life are the features and not web standards or the implementation quality of it nor the lack of 3rd party browsers on iOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31902707
Sure they have recently implemented some features like IndexedDB but the data does indeed show that they dragged their feet!
They did years ago, as of late they are in fact moving faster than others. I think my point stands, they are no longer clearly behind in features, and in fact probably are near tied if you subtract the Chrome-only stuff, and take into account there's a variety of things Safari has that others don't now.
> The data doesn’t show they drag their feet though. If anything FF is behind.
Literally no? We must not be on the same page, both of the technologies I namedropped were Chrome and Firefox exclusive for a half-decade. And they're certainly not the only features Mozilla and Google agree upon; Apple deliberately gimps features that benefit PWAs so that browsers artificially cannot compete with their native apps.
> Just want to give a perspective as I feel people should update priors from 2021 “Safari is the new IE”
I'm sorry; people will keep calling Safari "the new IE" for as long as Apple carbon-copies Microsoft's Explorer strategy from the 90s. You can run from it, insist it's not true, but Apple will clutch to their ecosystem control whether it's rational or not. This is why we have to antitrust them, to stop the market from more of their irrational self-serving harms.
I mean if you do the analysis on features supported on CanIUse, Safari is not really behind in any meaningful way. There are some missing features relative to Chrome, but they actually support a number of things other browsers don't. It's not clear-cut like it was years ago. Sorry if that's inconvenient.