Comment by bryanrasmussen
4 hours ago
>It's been a few years since I've had battle Safari quirks, one example that stuck with me from a couple of years ago is that LocalStorage is not available in private browsing mode. Other browsers just treat it as ephemeral/SessionStorage basically.
so what's the spec say people should do? Does it not specify?
Well I have known a few things on accessibility and color spaces where Safari was way ahead for a good length of time so my theory has always been that they were ahead on the things they cared about and behind on the things that they didn't care about and depending on what you cared about they might seem like jerks or heroes.
Yeah, more than anything, up until recently the WebKit team primarily worked on things that Apple cares about, which is why for example it’s generally been more battery friendly than Gecko or Blink — Apple sells an absurd number of battery powered mobile devices, so they’ve got a powerful motivator to pay more mind to efficiency than most. Similarly, poor color space handling reflects badly on their devices’ displays and makes it more difficult to seamlessly blend WebViews in alongside native components.
Google and Mozilla by contrast don’t need to care as much about these things since they’re not going to take as much heat for poor battery life or color handling; on the platforms that most of their users are on, these are both the rule and not the exception so users don’t really protest.
Instead what Google cares the most about is asserting control over the web as a platform, which is directly reflected by the features they’ve prioritized.