For anyone wondering why anybody uses Safari these days, the simple answer (for me, at least) is that it consumes much less CPU and energy on my MacBook Pro than Chrome and Firefox. It can mean an hour or more of battery life when unplugged, and greatly reduced testicle-cooking when plugged. I still use Chrome for development but Safari is my "daily driver" for email, surfing, reading, etc.
Yeah plus the integration (on Apple devices only, but hey) is superb.
I quite often use the automatic feature on my iPhone "open what you are reading in safari on the Mac Pro on your phone".
Then I leave work, commute home reading that, and then my Mac at home senses what's open in my phone's Safari and it's one click to open it on the big screen.
Safari is actually a pretty great browser, too. Faster than any other for me, more stable, less battery drain on laptops.
I still use Chrome and Firefox all day long too, but mainly for specific development chores, or to stay logged into services with my work account, while Safari is logged into my personal account.
I am agreeing with this. The difference of using safari vs chrome can make the difference of a few hours more battery.
Here's an example: I just started chrome to read some articles here on HN and it already bypassed my email client in battery usage that was running for for a good bit longer.
Even worse is that a lot of apps nowadays decide to ship their own chromium in form of electron. Slack, Nylas, Atom - it's a battery disaster and makes these tools virtually unusable when I'm not plugged in.
good point on Electron! I also noticed that Slack and Atom are real battery hogs. Worse is Slack when a giphy is also in the chat window (although the window is in background)... it burns CPU for new reason.
Not just the default browser - the only browser on iOS.
Which leads to frustrating issues like webpages you can't read because someone checked in a bit of cide that stuffs up viewport scaling in at webpage that has style="overflow:hidden" in the body tag.
In other words, don't try to browse source code in OpenGrok.
So you get critical issues that don't get fixed for 3-6 months.
Great, the Safari 9.1 GestureEvent for desktop PCs is completely different on how Chrome https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=289887http://jsbin.com/cuxopid/1/edit?html,css,js,output and IE are handling pinch to zoom gestures with trackpads on desktops. Gestures on desktop like pinch to zoom is now a total mess. Where is W3C or WHATWG on this? Pinch to zoom is now on Firefox: None (there was an attempt in the past) Chrome: it's mousewheel+ctrl IE: it's mousewheel+ctrl Safari: shiny new GestureEvent
Safari is the new Internet Explorer. That was my experience trying to grapple with its weird, non-standards-compliant implementation of HTML5 required fields.
I disagree – Chrome is the new IE. Why? It's simple: your analogy focuses on being non-standard, but actually misses the most important bit which is control of the market. Chrome is just as much non-standard as Safari, but you wouldn't know because it controls the market. Since ostensibly everyone uses Chrome, it gets to effectively dictate the standards while everyone else plays catch up – Chrome is the de facto standard to which others are held.
I'm not saying Chrome is a bad piece of software – it may or may not be but that's beside the point. What I'm saying is that when you and many others complain about browsers not being standards compliant, I'm willing to bet you mean de facto standards compliant – i.e. whatever Chrome dictates. Just like IE used to.
IE came up with all sorts of features that became de facto standards and in many cases these days an actual standard – @font-face anyone? Microsoft strong armed everyone else into submission until Google decided enough was enough. But it's not like Google did it out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because their business depended on people having the ability to consume the web. They need the web to be great, because otherwise they couldn't have sold so many ads on: the web. So their products need features, and it just so happens that a lot of us got to benefit as well. Compatibility however, isn't really important. At least not while they control the market. What they say, goes. It'd be very difficult to create a site these days that won't work on Chrome, but it's not uncommon that you find disclaimers around the web say "optimized for Chrome" or worse: sites just not working at all on anything but Chrome.
Now they have done, and continue to do a lot to advance the state of the art. But so did IE back in the day. At least until the competition died out.
I for one am glad Safari is weird – I only wish there were more weirdos.
CSS variables are a great way to do theming and cross-scoped styling for Custom Elements and shadow DOM. Polymer's had a shim for this for a while, but native support is much faster and more flexible.
A point release every n months is utterly useless for on-the-ground web developers. Safari needs to move to the Firefox/Chrome deployment model if it wants to remain at all relevant.
I really love Safari for being just a really good browser. No 'sneaky OS' like Chrome (I don't need Chromes User management, thank you, and I'd much rather have my OS's context menus and font aliasing), and speedier, if you will, 'snappier' than Firefox, with its custom animations for every button and overall not very 'native' look and feel.
No, I want a browser that does what a browser should do; let me easily and speedily browse the web. Safari is great at that.
>No, I want a browser that does what a browser should do; let me easily and speedily browse the web. Safari is great at that.
Except it isn't. Because it's non standard different way of handling things means it's a lot more work for Web developers to give the same experience they give in chrome to safari users. You get a dumbed down experience on safari as a result.
Are you saying that Longhanks isn't browsing the web "easily and speedily"? Even though it doesn't follow some standards, it appears to be fast for Longhanks anyway.
...at the expense of slowing down the adoption of agreed-upon standards to the point that they can't be reliably utilized because of compatibility issues? This is not exactly a new scenario. At least Microsoft has moved on.
Or as long as Apple keeps enforcing the "Safari Engine Only" rules on iOS. I think a lot of people would consider switching if Chrome for iOS was legitimate Chrome (rather than a Chrome UI with a Safari engine).
No. I remember IE6 very well. I remember when it was the most capable browser by far and I sat in an office full of developers cursing Netscape 4. I remember when IE 4.5 was the best browser for the Mac. I remember when Safari was a strange newcomer.
I also remember many years passing when IE6 stuck around like an unwelcome fart and we all hoped and prayed that it would die so we could move on. Rapid silent updates are the best thing that happened to the web for both the user and for developers. Chrome has many serious issues but it's update cycle isn't one of them.
You hate endless security updates? Endless compatibility updates? Endless feature improvements?
I'm not sure what part of the dark ages you would like to return to. Are we talking pre-Chrome, pre-Firefox or the days when Netscape 4 roamed majestically across the Triassic plains?
Personally, I'd like to return to Firefox 3-era update naming schemes. Point releases for minor features and bug fixes. Main version number changes whenever the browser has a major change, that changes how people use it (Like Firefox 3 to 4). Nowadays, it seems like every update changes the main version number.
When I first heard about Chrome's secret updates I freaked out. Now I have used the chrome stable channel for years and have yet to see anything serious magically appear. It is king of disconcerting though to see the UI change. For example the new gray bookmark folders are still confusing my eyes. They disappear into the background for me.
Relevant for "on the ground web devs", which is a very small market.
Safari will remain relevant for a long time as long as it is the default browser on OS X and iOS.
I prefer Safari and don't care much for 6-week release cycle for Chrome and Firefox. If anything, they've gotten worse in stability since they switched to 6 weeks cycle for me.
Modals alerts acting 'app-wide' rather than 'tab-wide' is a truly horrible thing. If there was a subtle indication of a tab showing a modal then it would be acceptable but this is better than the current state-of-affairs.
Let's hope they fixed the bug where WindowServer hangs up randomly after closing a Youtube tab. It's an incredibly annoying bug that's forcing me to reboot every 2-3 days. I don't browse Youtube on Safari, but as soon as there is a website with an embedded video, boom it goes :(
Is this a common bug? Were you seeing it in some kind of developer release, perhaps? I've never had that happen to me, and I browse Youtube in Safari every single day.
Is this the same bug where things randomly stop rendering properly if lots of tabs are open?
I find that I'm having to close a whole bunch of tabs in order to get pages to properly render. It'll work for a while then stop working again. Really quite annoying.
no it's a new standard. Chrome and IE already support it on Google Maps because a pinch to zoom is ctrl+mousekey for them. And now Safari has introduced a new standard. This is nuts. Why is there a W3C? Everybody is doing it differently.
I was forced to stop using Safari on my iPhone 5 because it became unusably slow after loading only a handful of simultaneous tabs. The changes came after one of the Apple updates and after that I had to switch to Chrome for iPhone.
