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0 pointsWorldMaker2mo ago0 comments

> There wouldn't be Chrome-only sites and tools if Safari wasn't holding the web back (no "quotes" needed, as that's precisely what they're doing).

It's a matter of perspective. The safer perspective is: Safari isn't holding the web back, Chrome is moving too fast. Developers making Chrome-only sites and tools are moving too fast for the safety of web standards/web platform. Where one of the safety factors is "widely available in multiple implementations, not just a single browser".

> > Safari's problems are temporary.

> What are you talking about?

The point is that Safari may be moving slow, but it is still moving. It doesn't have enough users to hold the web back. It isn't "always a decade behind", it 's "a couple years to a couple months behind", depending on which caniuse or MDN Baseline approach you want to take.

There are some things Safari doesn't want to implement, but has registered safety or privacy or coupling reasons behind such things. Firefox is doing the same.

Safari isn't trapping website developers in "old standards forever", it is encouraging developers to use safe, private, stable choices. Chrome is "move fast and sometimes break things". Safari doesn't want to be that. That's useful for the web as a platform to have one or two browsers considering their implementations. It's a good reason to point out "Chrome-only" developers as being "too bleeding edge" (sometimes emphasis on the bleeding) and out of touch with standards and standards processes.

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nchmy2mo ago

As the links I shared showed in tremendous detail, everything you've said is complete nonsense.

WorldMakerOP2mo ago

The only well supported and consistent argument I see in those links is that Safari is bad at PWAs. I agree with that. But (timely rant incoming) I also think everyone is currently bad at PWAs. The current ServiceWorker-based approach is brittle and hard to use because it is too low level and too tightly coupled to what seem to be Chrome-specific concerns. The previous manifest.json approach should have never been disabled in Chrome, it should have at least lived side-by-side and let developers vote by their feet, at least until a reasonably equivalent high-level manifest replacement was built.

I was just thinking about this this week because I have a webpage I built with offline capabilities and an excuse coming up where many of the webpage's users will be offline for a week but might have use for the webpage, but I can't easily turn it into a PWA because it was built as an MPA and there's no great high level tools for writing an MPA's ServiceWorker because most of the high level libraries are so (overly) focused on SPAs. I wish I could just put a manifest.json or some sort of zip archive users could download and have it share Local Storage.

I do pin a lot of this on Google engineers. The side effect is Safari is having a hard time implementing these "standards", but the real cause is the "standards" are over-complicated trash that are also hard to develop for. Everyone including the links you sent can see how Apple's App Store moat gives them an incentive to drag their feet on implementing these "standards" and yet no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards that are hard for anyone to use and harder for anyone else to implement is just another way to drag your feet and keep the whole web platform behind, without looking like you are dragging your feet.

It would feel different, too, if the fully declarative manifest.json approach hadn't briefly worked (well) in Edge (Spartan) and Firefox before Google derailed that standards train with "Chrome-first" ServiceWorker complications. Always seemed like one of the reasons that Microsoft just gave up on the web platform because they couldn't keep up with Google's machinations (and conflicts of interest) in Chrome.

nchmy2mo ago

It is bizarre that you're "pinning" this on the Chromium engineers - who are essentially the only ones moving the web forward.

The safari feet dragging/obstruction goes far beyond PWAs. The chart on this page is one of many examples showing how consistently far behind Safari is - they've been enormously behind chrome and firefox in coverage of tests for 7+ years. https://wpt.fyi/. And here's an extremely comprehensive article on the topic https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...

As for standards, here's another detailed series to learn from https://infrequently.org/series/effective-standards-work/. Once again, you have it all backwards. Saying "no one is giving Google enough gruff for the conflict of interest with Google Play's moats and making over-complicated standards" is not only laughable, but just dumb - Google doesn't and, in fact, can't "make standards". Standards are something that comes about through the painful diplomatic process described in those links.

Moreover, it is quite clearly an institutional decision to hold back the web, or else they would allow for other browser engines to run on iOS rather than focing them all to be skins on webkit. Again, this is all documented in extreme detail in the articles on that site. If you find it to be still somehow lacking, the author is very open to discussion on bluesky or mastodon (I'd prepare far better though, because what you've said thus far would get eviscerated).

Also bizarre that you are saying that Google Play is somehow at the root of this supposed scheme to make web standards impossible for others to implement. Android is similarly against the web flourishing, but evidently not nearly as powerful in the greater Google enterprise as iphone/app store is in Apple.

As for MPA PWAs, there's nothing at all stopping you from serving pages from a service worker. There's plenty of valid and accessible ways to precache all the pages that a user might need while offline. Workbox (from Google!) makes it easy, but its also easy to hand-roll.

And, Microsoft most definitely has not given up on the web platform - they literally adopted and make contributions to chromium. The author of that site literally works at Microsoft now, coaching both internal and external teams on improving their use of the web, as well as contributing to standards.

I dont see any point in continuing this discussion, as you haven't shown even the slightest interest in considering how you're living in some bizarro world.

If you are actually attempting to communicate in good faith, i can't recommend strongly enough that you read that entire site. And, likewise, read and support the work of Open Web Advocacy. https://open-web-advocacy.org/

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nchmy2mo ago

As the links I shared showed in tremendous detail, everything you've said is complete nonsense.

WorldMakerOP2mo ago

nchmy2mo ago

It is bizarre that you're "pinning" this on the Chromium engineers - who are essentially the only ones moving the web forward.

I dont see any point in continuing this discussion, as you haven't shown even the slightest interest in considering how you're living in some bizarro world.

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