Comment by mexicocitinluez

5 hours ago

> because things like Safari ...work really well

Are we living in the same universe? We manage a fleet of tablets (both Apple and Android) for a healthcare company whose EMR is web-based. And because of that Sarafi has made our lives miserable. So much so that we're migrating to Chromebooks.

I've been developing for the web for 15 years. The first half was spent battling Internet Explorer. Now it's Safari.

12 comments

mexicocitinluez

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acdha  5 hours ago

There are some proprietary Chrome APIs but if you’re not using those it’s been pretty rare to have major problems in recent years. I open a couple of bug reports a year against Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—mostly accessibility related—but most of the time it’s been a problem with code written specifically against Chrome rather than code which couldn’t work in the other browsers.

clickety_clack  5 hours ago

I’m a developer too, but the developer experience doesn’t matter to users. As a user of the app, it’s fast enough, cleanly designed, seems to be reasonably private and secure, and I haven’t hit any website with it where I’ve had to download chrome to view it or something.

  • mexicocitinluez  3 hours ago

    You're a developer but you can't connect the dots between features being hard to build and the inconsistencies between other browsers vs Safari to how that might effect the user?

    • clickety_clack  1 hour ago

      I can be a user separate from being a developer. The user experience of Safari is basically perfect for a browser. The development experience is completely irrelevant from that perspective.

      2 replies →

shuckles  4 hours ago

The people complaining about Safari often are running enterprise crapware that requires some esoteric Chrome API or bug to operate correctly and should actually be an app on iOS but cannot be funded as such because its creators don’t care about its users.

  • hombre_fatal  2 hours ago

    Then again, if a company can't polish a web browser app, then the native app they'd produce will be even worse.

    Now you have a crappy app that only works on some devices, and now with no tabs, no links, text you cannot select anymore because they used the wrong component, etc.

    Ugh.

  • jorvi  3 hours ago

    Well, formerly you would have been right, but WebUSB and whatnot are gaining a lot more traction.

    I didn't take WebUSB seriously until I steered someone to flashing a small firmware onto something and they could do it straight from the browser! And it was a nice workflow too, just a few button and a permission click.

    Two other examples I can think of are flashing Via (keyboard) firmware and Poweramp using WebADB via WebUSB to make gaining certain permissions very easy for the layman. I imagine it's gonna get more and more user in enterprise too.

    Firefox is seriously behind by refusing to implement it.

    • dns_snek  1 hour ago

      WebUSB is a giant gaping hole in the browser sandbox. Innocent use cases are really nice, I've used WebUSB to flash GrapheneOS on my device, but the possibilities for users to shoot themselves in the foot with nefarious website are almost endless.

      Consider the fact that Chromium has to specifically blacklist Yubikey and other known WebAuthn vendor IDs, otherwise any website could talk to your Yubikey pretending to be a browser and bypass your 2FA on third party domains.

      I'm conflicted on WebUSB because it's convenient but on the balance I think it's too dangerous to expose to the general public. I don't know how it could be made safer without sacrificing its utility and convenience.