Safari is holding the web back
In the process of building out Kelp, my UI library for people who love HTML, it’s become painfully obvious that Safari is holding the web back.
I’ve heard Safari referred to as the new IE, but I don’t think that’s accurate.
IE was pushing a lot of innovative features in a completely standards non-compliant way. In that regard, Chrome is more like the new IE, pushing through Google’s own whims and forcing the hand of everyone else.
Safari, by contrast, follows the standards process.
On paper, it’s keep up with feature parity, and in some cases, implements features before Firefox or Chromium.
No, it’s the bugs.
Safari has a tendency to implement features in an almost complete but not-quite-there kind of way. CSS that works in Chromium and Firefox breaks in Safari, because they implemented some weird ass shadow DOM shit or vendor-specific nonsense.
Sometimes, fixing something in Safari means breaking it in Chromium and Firefox.
Now, some of these issues are with webkit, the open source engine behind Safari. And I personally know folks on the Safari team. They’re smart, caring, awesome people.
But Apple is a literal trillion dollar company. They’re far better funded than Mozilla is. Surely they can afford to throw a bit more money and muscle behind this stuff.
And Safari is still the only browser option on iOS in the US. If you use mobile Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi, or Duck Duck Go on iOS, you’re really using a reskinned version of Safari.
They have the same monopoly and the same anti-competitive behaviors on mobile that Microsoft had during the peak of IE desktop dominance.
The whole point of web standards is that I as a developer should be able to write CSS once and have it work everywhere. The instant I have to start writing “just for Safari” CSS for a baseline feature, the standards process has failed.