Safari makes most of their web engine open source. Android originally used Webkit for everything related to browsers, that’s why the Android WebView API is full of WebKit references. Webkit is now just Safari without the nice Apple shell. It runs on basically any OS, with varying levels of hardware acceleration support.
Safari on iOS may be neutered by Apple’s fear of web apps eating their extreme App Store profits, but on desktop the engine isn’t that bad. It had notifications long before they became a problematic missing feature on iOS, for instance. It got WebP support and other stuff Safari on mobile lacked for a long time because desktop browsers could just use the open source libraries already out there.
I occasionally use Gnome Web if I want to quickly look something up without restoring all my tabs, and I find WebKit to be a fine browser engine most of the time. It even has PWA support on desktop, which Firefox has decided isn’t worth investing in.
I find WebKit to be a fine browser engine most of the time.
It is worth mentioning that the WebKit port for GTK does not support WebRTC and that it is not supported at all by Apple. It’s an effort by Igalia, one person from Red Hat and volunteers.
There’s also essentially no WebKit browser for windows. WebKit is often slow at adopting new web technologies as well.
All that to say - WebKit is not the example of a success outside of helping big corporations to make their own big proprietary browsers.
All I know is that as a frontend Dev, features in safari are about 5-10 years late to the party. the world’s first trillion dollar company is years behind a non profit…
It strongly depends on what features you mean. Safari has excellent Javascript support and mostly lacks the Google web APIs. CSS support is also pretty good from what I can tell. I’ve never bothered to test on Safari (don’t have a device that runs it and I won’t buy one for it either) but I don’t think I saw anything go wrong last time I took a look using someone else’s phone.
Safari does suffer from the “major updates come with the OS so features come out once or twice a year” problem which is a pain, but the worst parts are all iOS specific.
This is something I deal with daily. Safari has awful support for new-ish features. Combine that with a requirement to support a couple versions back like my company does and you’re basically limited to what the web was 10 years ago. Safari is the new IE.
From a feature perspective, yes. But with the dominance of Google’s Chrome and them pushing awful web API’s I’d say the title of “the new IE” goes to Chrome.
Google’s business practices are God awful, yes. Apple’s are too, in a different way. In the end, Google’s probably are worse but from a technology standpoint at least they are not seeking to ignore web standards. They’re trying to create them. In the case of the authentication API it’s a shit ass standard, but that’s not what they have done historically. Google has mostly embraced and helped push standards through which made the web better. Apple has actively despised and resisted standards.
But I’m not sure why we are comparing these two evil tech companies. Firefox and other browser makers have also supported modern web standards while apple hates the idea of them. The result is a shitty ass browser that behaves like 7 years old Firefox or something. That was my only point.
I’ve never bothered to test on Safari (don’t have a device that runs it and I won’t buy one for it either)
This explains why you don’t think safari is that bad. Lol, you don’t test in it. It’s fucking bad. Every time I think I’m doing some safe that safari can’t botch and don’t test for a few days in safari, I’m shown what a foolish thought that is. The types of sites I work on have some less common features admittedly, but every other browser, even silk browser on ancient Kindle devices, works flawlessly most times while safari has a problem with SO much. Even back when we supported IE 11 (trident) the weird issues were worse on safari.
Hardware and the fact that their products became bourgie status symbols. Their aesthetic game is on point and UI is fairly polished, but their software can be super limited in annoying ways.
Agreed, but I think the general population thinks that their products are great in general. They’re not too concerned about hardware vs software. “It just works”
Safari makes most of their web engine open source. Android originally used Webkit for everything related to browsers, that’s why the Android WebView API is full of WebKit references. Webkit is now just Safari without the nice Apple shell. It runs on basically any OS, with varying levels of hardware acceleration support.
Safari on iOS may be neutered by Apple’s fear of web apps eating their extreme App Store profits, but on desktop the engine isn’t that bad. It had notifications long before they became a problematic missing feature on iOS, for instance. It got WebP support and other stuff Safari on mobile lacked for a long time because desktop browsers could just use the open source libraries already out there.
I occasionally use Gnome Web if I want to quickly look something up without restoring all my tabs, and I find WebKit to be a fine browser engine most of the time. It even has PWA support on desktop, which Firefox has decided isn’t worth investing in.
It is worth mentioning that the WebKit port for GTK does not support WebRTC and that it is not supported at all by Apple. It’s an effort by Igalia, one person from Red Hat and volunteers.
There’s also essentially no WebKit browser for windows. WebKit is often slow at adopting new web technologies as well.
All that to say - WebKit is not the example of a success outside of helping big corporations to make their own big proprietary browsers.
All I know is that as a frontend Dev, features in safari are about 5-10 years late to the party. the world’s first trillion dollar company is years behind a non profit…
It strongly depends on what features you mean. Safari has excellent Javascript support and mostly lacks the Google web APIs. CSS support is also pretty good from what I can tell. I’ve never bothered to test on Safari (don’t have a device that runs it and I won’t buy one for it either) but I don’t think I saw anything go wrong last time I took a look using someone else’s phone.
Safari does suffer from the “major updates come with the OS so features come out once or twice a year” problem which is a pain, but the worst parts are all iOS specific.
This is something I deal with daily. Safari has awful support for new-ish features. Combine that with a requirement to support a couple versions back like my company does and you’re basically limited to what the web was 10 years ago. Safari is the new IE.
From a feature perspective, yes. But with the dominance of Google’s Chrome and them pushing awful web API’s I’d say the title of “the new IE” goes to Chrome.
Google’s business practices are God awful, yes. Apple’s are too, in a different way. In the end, Google’s probably are worse but from a technology standpoint at least they are not seeking to ignore web standards. They’re trying to create them. In the case of the authentication API it’s a shit ass standard, but that’s not what they have done historically. Google has mostly embraced and helped push standards through which made the web better. Apple has actively despised and resisted standards.
But I’m not sure why we are comparing these two evil tech companies. Firefox and other browser makers have also supported modern web standards while apple hates the idea of them. The result is a shitty ass browser that behaves like 7 years old Firefox or something. That was my only point.
This explains why you don’t think safari is that bad. Lol, you don’t test in it. It’s fucking bad. Every time I think I’m doing some safe that safari can’t botch and don’t test for a few days in safari, I’m shown what a foolish thought that is. The types of sites I work on have some less common features admittedly, but every other browser, even silk browser on ancient Kindle devices, works flawlessly most times while safari has a problem with SO much. Even back when we supported IE 11 (trident) the weird issues were worse on safari.
Apple’s big selling point has never been their software.
What has it been then? I think hundreds of millions of people would say their software “just works” and that’s why they love it.
Hardware and the fact that their products became bourgie status symbols. Their aesthetic game is on point and UI is fairly polished, but their software can be super limited in annoying ways.
Agreed, but I think the general population thinks that their products are great in general. They’re not too concerned about hardware vs software. “It just works”