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0 pointssmoldesu4y ago0 comments

It's a shame that web developers have to spend $500 to buy a bespoke web-browsing machine just to make their sites work better with Apple hardware. If Apple wanted people to treat their browser seriously, they should have simulators and developer tooling to spare.

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asddubs4y ago

or just release safari cross-platform.

derefr4y ago

Safari (not WebKit specifically; the rest of the browser) relies on OS libraries. Those libraries would have to be reimplemented for other OSes.

I don't mean that that would be an impediment to porting; Apple have done this before—Safari 5 was available for Windows. (And interestingly, vice-versa, IE5 was available for macOS!)

What I mean is that the differences in implementation of these OS libraries would mean that this version of Safari wouldn't be bug-for-bug compatible with macOS Safari; and therefore, testing on this version of Safari wouldn't necessarily get you what you want, if your goal is finding and squashing 100% of the bugs that testing on macOS Safari would allow you to find and squash.

To use a pretty close analogy, it would be like a development workflow for Windows executable that involved running them under Wine in Linux, and never actually under Windows. You've QAed for the API surface, sure; but you haven't actually QAed the software for how Microsoft's own library implementations work (and the bugs that those implementations introduce.)

acoard4y ago

You're not wrong, but in practice I'd imagine >99% of bugs are in the rendering / webkit layer, not in the OS integration layer.

Sure, if you're making a plugin that plays with bookmarks or 'Read Later', you'd likely run afoul of the issues you mention. But most web devs are concerned just about browser compatibility of rendering their web-app. In this context, as long as web page rendering and JS engine is identical between OS' it's fine.

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savoytruffle4y ago

I don't know about the early versions, but I believe the final version of IE for Mac, though also numbered 5, used an entirely different browser engine from that on Windows. Tasman

http://jimmy.grew.al/macie5-twentieth-anniversary/

password43214y ago

Last I checked, there is a Windows WebKit/Safari build. I don't think it worked very well though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20700914#20701334

Edit: Looks like the new URL is https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67?numbuilds=400 but the build has been broken for almost 2 weeks. The last successful build is the 300MB https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/archives.webkit.org/win-x... (as explained in the link above, the Apple Application Support libraries are required).

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