Thursday, May 18th, 2006
Give Safari some love
Category: Editorial
We have had two big pieces of news from the big guys, Google and Yahoo! that have placed Safari on the backburner once more.
Firstly, the new Yahoo! homepage preview had people calling out: “Safari is an “A level” browser at Yahoo! yet you can’t view the new homepage in it yet?”
Secondly, the Google Web Toolkit that people are talking a lot about doesn’t support Safari. Some are calling out to get support added there.
If you just look at the market share stats you see a small number for Safari, but a large percent of the Ajax developers seem to be walking around with an Apple in their backpack.
So, how important is it for people to support Safari?
It takes time to add support to a new browser, and you can see how you may want to get something out before full support is available.
Do you care?
Here here!
Maybe those developers are running XP on their Apples. :D
Safari lacks just too many essential features. Opera is a lot friendlier. Skip it until it’s based on Gecko. It’s their own fault for starting yet another rendering engine.
I believe this is the main reason for the lack of safari support. Still though, I have been developing ajax applications using xml with safari, and I have yet to really see the advantages of xslt.
absolutely, safari should be supported.
No question Safari should be supported. Just because Firefox runs on the Mac doesn’t mean its everyones first choice. Safari has a little over 3% market share last time I read, that’s a decent number, and a lot of “influencers” as Scoble says use Macs.
If you can’t make your JS compatible with Safari, don’t use it. We’ve been struggling so long to deliver the message of how important cross-browser support is, only to get companies go easier route with JS.
At the moment, Safari has the best XHTML/CSS rendering engine and JavaScriptCore is improving, I think that’s enough of a reason to support it. Besides, it’s not that hard, sure it can get problematic at times, but everything is fixable.
Using new technologies is not about making it accessible only to someone, but about improving overall usability. If the new technology doesn’t work for a certain amount of people (which is quite large in fact) then what’s the point of it?
I don’t personally care about Safari. But if the GWT doesn’t support, I can’t use GWT in my projects. Safari support is not something that you can do without these days.
Maybe instead of griping at tools developers for not supporting Safari you should be griping at Apple to make Safari work in some reasonable way.
I think Safari should be supported but I understand the difficulty in doing so.
As for “but a large percent of the Ajax developers seem to be walking around with an Apple in their backpack”, I run Firefox on my powerbook. Safari is pretty much there just to test with.
I for one am pissed off that Apple hasn’t given up on Safari and thrown it’s full support to Firefox. Having Yet Another Web Browser (YAWB) on the block isn’t helping. Apple isn’t innovating beyond the ability to write to the console with their web browser, and their userbase would ultimately prefer to have a browser that is more in synch with the rest of the world.
Safari support IS important. IE 5 is dead, so the browser out-of-the-box on Mac OS X is Safari. You would need to use Safari to go get Firefox. Nothing against Firefox, but not supporting Safari means not supporting Mac for the majority of Mac users. Most people don’t even pay attention to which browser they use and don’t understand why they should get the “flaming furry creature”.
And Safari is not an “unnecessary” addition to the world of renderers. Supporting Safari means supporting KHTML, the browser of choice in KDE. KHTML has also been chosen by Nokia for the new Series 60 browser.
I understand that the world primarily uses IE, followed by Firefox, but not supporting Safari/KHTML and Opera can be more dangerous than you think. Be sure you really know your audience before excluding certain browsers or rendering engines.
Curious, why are you claiming that GWT doesn’t support Safari?
Excerpt from: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html
“Browser compatible: Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.”
I believe that developers should support at least 4 browsers:
-IE; -Firefox; -Safari; -Opera
But I also understand that developers (I’m also a developer) have a hard time supporting too many browsers with different behaviours. Is almost like making software portable for Windows, Apple and Linux. It’s just crazy…
Honestly, Apple should be working to make its JavaScript library more compatible with Firefox. If Ajax is going to work developer are not going to want to support 4 or 5 different versions. Apple could save everyone a lot of work by just developing their JavaScript library in the right direction.
That’s funny, Morfik doesn’t support safari either.
I wonder why? ;P
@Steve - Check the latest browser stats. Safari has about 3% and IE5.x about 2%. If IE5 is “dead” then Safari is in a coma.
Web developers are too quick to write off browsers. The underlying problem here is plain old laziness. Saying you won’t support a particular platform makes your job a lot easier and a lot shorter.
No.
Get a horse.
rumour has it that Apple are toying with the idea of switching to FireFox (out of the box). A good idea, I think. Mac users are very much in the minority - why support a minority browser on a minority OS - could be solved if Apple switches to FireFox.
I use both Mac and PC, btw.
I’m a developer too and I’m sick of hacking my code for cross-browser compat. Personally, I don’t even test on Opera (it’s only used by a handful of “I wanna be seen to be different” nerds.
I say forget about it. Safari should support Gecko and work like Mozilla or go away. It’s a royal pain. Maybe Apple should should ship FireFox?? Afterall most of the open source fans I’ve met use Mac anyway.
30%. Thats the magic number I’ve always found any project’s time will expand if it attempts Safari support. Just ask yourself, do I want to add 30% more time to my project for Safari? On dojo.storage, for example, I spent about 8 months on that project, and Safari took about 3 months to support.
I tell my clients: yeah, we’ll add Safari, but it will add 30% to the cost and timeline due to Safari’s issues. Do you still want to keep it now?
…and please don’t come back on the “minority” comment with a handful of small, skweded sample stats. I code for IE and FF - the others, I don’t care about - and what’s even more important is that neither do my clients’ care.
Safari support is important but I think people need to be putting the pressure on Apple. I understand that Apples primary concern is standards compliance ( which is of course a line of BS, why invent canvas when SVG exists? ), however they seem to have forgotten that there are two kinds of standards ; the specifications, what everybody else except you supports.
To be honest I bet that the next version of Safari will be an amazing browser in terms of JS. AJAX is hip and if there is anything Steve likes more than turtlenecks and tofu, it’s being hip.
I use OS X extensively and love the OS but Safari is something I just don’t get. It’s current version is missing a lot of key functionality such as XSLT execution via JavaScript.
OS X is the best OS on the market (the fact that MSFT Vista is simple a bad attempt at copying OS X proves that), no question about it but I think it’s time Apple started shipping with Firefox, the first thing I did when I got my MacBook Pro was to start Safari to download Firefox.
No, I don’t care. Download Firefox!
GWT does support Safari. Cross browser compatability is one of its strengths. I guess we should be hailing GWT.
Excerpt from: code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html
“Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.”
You mean script-copy-pasting-kids who happen to be able to take a ready-made a javscript library and use it to build a one page “application”?
Most libraries are open-source, let whoever carries a mac around and cares port them to Safari. Just make sure you keep it a separate codebase, thanks!
At first I considered and kind of liked the idea of Apple dropping Safari and picking up Firefox. For what does Safari offer that Firefox doesn’t (or can’t?). But then you must remember that competition is a major driving force in making things better, so I hope they keep trying to make Safari better. Firefox is no where near perfect, so sadly we must continue testing in Safari, and IE, and Opera and Lynx :).
FFx may be the ticket for JS and Ajax junkies, but it is ugly as sin, the UI sucks, and it’s terribly slow in my experience. I understand compatibility as well, but I refuse to be a victim of allowing FFx to become the new IE in a homogonized world of no choice just to satisfy lazy programmers at lazy companies that did nothing more than replace the previous regime of lazy programmers. If you guys ran the world, we’d all drive a beige Toyota Camry, live in mass produced conformity obsessed condo associations, be taught from the exact same text books with the exact same undeviating curriculum, eat the exact same food, and probably just go to a clinic to order the exact same babies.
While Apple should likely get some pressure to deal with what Safari lacks to enable it to take advantage of the mainstream Ajax work, differences matter. Apple matters. Safari matters. Whether you use it or not, you need it to exist. Maybe Safari doesn’t suit your narrow-minded needs for yellow fady boxes, but is there one single browser out there that is perfect? Maybe the Firefox team should give it up? After all, it took how many years and restarts to even come close to getting it right? Maybe it has good JS support, but it’s miserable in other areas. FFx is not exactly an all-encompassing standout.
Puhlease, ship FFx as the default browser? No way! Can anyone actually come up with uglier form elements than the ones in Firefox? There should be a contest to see if it is actually possible. A browser development team / company that finds the way Firefox is organized and looks has absolutely no business being shipped in the box on a Mac.
So, by all means beat up Apple to move faster in getting the things Safari needs done sooner (I’d like to use your yellow fady boxes as much as the next guy), but don’t be so lazy to insist the world revolve around your narrow needs and should conform to your conformity obsessed vision of a beige world.
(I should probably have written this to be less hostile by not using “you” and “your,” but I’m a lazy writer — see how advantageous that is?).
Lest we forget, this is still fresh out of beta. It’s brand spanking new so don’t give the homepage too much flack. Indeed, Safari is a grade A browser and I’m sure the team is still working hard on getting things to work properly. Every developer knows how bad the DOM support is in Safari - so that’s definitely a contributor to this mess.
Also, lest we not forget, we are indeed still supporting Safari. I think some folks just forgot what “support” means: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/gbs.html
So by all means, we’re still technically supporting IE5. However regardless of the matter, I understand the point here.
Safari should support the web, not the other way around. I don’t have the time or the inclination to care about the miniscule number of users who have chosen this platform, when they could easily have chosen otherwise.
Sometimes MSIE breaks down on certain things. Is it a bug? Or is it a feature? Bugs get fixed in the next release — features either succeed or fail on their own merits. They are calculated risks.
So which is it with Safari — a bug or a feature?
Compatibility with Safari is hard? Come on. Compatibility with Netscape 4 was hard. Compatibility with Safari is a mild irritation. Your customers pay your living wage. Give them their due and respect their choice of browser, even if it’s not convenient for you.
Can you imagine driving up to a valet only to be told that the car you’re driving isn’t good enough? That’s just bad business, even if you don’t need the customer.
From the JavaScript page on the WebKit project site:
The good thing about Safari, at least, is that its rendering engine is open-source, so I’m confident that its JavaScript support will improve at a rate greater than IE’s.
I would encourage WebKit to focus more on JavaScript compatibility. Features like SVG are nice, but I think in terms of cost/benefit it’s far more important to make JavaScriptCore as robust as Gecko’s JS interpreter.
In my experiance the problem is not Safari, the problem is the KHTML engine that powers Safari. Look at Konquerer the same quirks and strange behavior is found there.
Firefox and IE is remarkingly similar compared to KHTML browsers. They are truly a whole different story. (when IE and FF are in standard compliance mode, that is).
I my obinion, we should not have just one browser be it FF or IE, but rather two rendering engines, Gecko and IE. Safari is welcome to stay, but please use the Gecko engine instead, and all developers will be happy, and users too, since they would still get their UI candy.
Microsoft should drop IE and support FF. IE is worse than Safari.
[...] Posted by Makkisan Thu, 18 May 2006 21:33:45 GMT Dion of Ajaxian.com has posted an Editorial about Apple’s Safari browser and major web services like Google, Yahoo etc failing to include support for the OSX Browser. We have had two big pieces of news from the big guys, Google and Yahoo! that have placed Safari on the backburner once more. Read full editorial here Ajaxian.com [...]
JS support should be pulled out of browsers, and provided via plugin architecture. no waiting for big, slow companies to update a product when all that’s needed is a new lib/plug.
So why? B/c they are probably using Firefox.
As a Mac user I find that Safair is faster but there is no developer community around it. No extensions. So I use Firefox, and take the hit on performance, b/c I make up that value loss with huge gains in value in other places. Look at Notebook by Google. if it wasn’t for the extension that you have to install, it wouldn’t nearly be as valuable. it would just be like Yahoo! Notepad. But the notebook extension rocks, and you can’t do that on Safari.
Apple succeeds in many places, but Safari IMHO is one of their biggest failures on MacOS X.
Lets give safari a nice burial. Location.href doesn’t update on back/forward. Breaking a big part of ajax site usability. Want back/forward? Getfirefox.com
@Dean: when I said IE 5 is dead on the Mac, I meant that development of IE 5 has stopped, never to return. Good friggin’ luck using any modern technologies with IE 5 (AJAX frameworks, etc.). It doesn’t even have decent CSS support!!!
@Everyone: Apple is working very hard, non-stop, since the birth of Safari to make it compatible with other browsers and specific sites as well. I don’t think that the Safari group (possibly the hardest working group in Apple) deserves all this negative feedback.
Mac users are a valuable group of customers who are generally worth the relatively small amount of extra effort to support a third browser.
P.S. Andrew references the WebKit site, but it should be noted again that there is a WebKit site where everyone can help make WebKit-based browsers better.
What is Safari’s reason to exist?
Why doesn’t Apple invest in Firefox development?
A browser that 3% of people use is not one that is likely to be fully supported by web sites. Using that browser is going to be a hassle. So why use it?
Wait … I’m getting a message from the approaching interstellar spaceship ….
Lucky I had my tinfoil hat on!
No. No I don’t need Safari to exist.
I need a little water each day and a small bit of food each week (and maybe a little love) but that’s it. No one needs a web browser, on any plain of existence. You can continue to use it, and I hope it will get better, but I’m not supporting it until it approaches a minimal level of non-crappiness. Speaking of NS4, anyone remember the LAYER tag? Look a lot like CANVAS to me …
One of the main reasons people use IE is because it comes installed on Windows by default. Likewise, many people choose Safari for that reason alone.* By choosing not to support Safari, you’re choosing not to let Mac users who don’t deliberately choose a third-party browser use your site. With the proportions of KHTML-based browsers being remarkably similar to Apple’s market share, I imagine that’s an extremely large section of Mac users.
* Personally, I find it more pleasant to use for most purposes than Firefox, especially on my slow Mac (G4/500), and its advantages (speed, OS integration) far outweigh its disadvantages for me.
Google and Yahoo! that have placed Safari on the backburner once more.
Excellent News!
Hey webmaster, what percentage of the commentors on this thread are actually using Safari?
What is it that Safari is not compatible with? What Javascript? I can’t find the info anywhere…
Yaay - XPATH support (finally).
http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6638
I was going to bitch about this as I use XML extensively in my apps. The XPATH basics work in IE, Moz is great, but Safari has not had anything for waaaay to long. But, looks like from this month its there! … in the nightlies at least …
If Mac simply supported Firefox, there would be no downside. Why divide efforts against IE?
Safari just has too many quirks and too small a user base to justify worrying about it overmuch. I generally make sure my apps are at the very least not horribly broken in safari, but getting them perfect is just way too much trouble. I know some people defend the idea to force aqua onto form elements, but the fact is, if you are seriously designing solutions to all sorts of user-interface problems (things that are ap specific and which you cannot rely on some safari developer to anticipate), something that basically chucks your ability to style is irritating to design for. I’m glad they are wising up, but I’m simply not impressed. The amount of stupid safari specific hacks I’ve been forced into has dwarfed those necessary for IE or Firefox.
What I don’t understand is why MS and Mac have sunk so much money into an application that earns them precisely no revenue at all, and in the case of IE, has COST BILLIONS of dollars in legal fees (hundreds of millions in an ActiveX settlement recently alone). What an absurd waste.
The day Apple will drop Safari and go with FF out of the box will be a sad day in history. Many seem to forget that the KHTML engine is the safest one currently available and is being developed by KDE as well as Apple. Furthermore, FF is a slow, ulgy rendering whale of a browser which consumes way too much resources.
Every developer choses his group of target users and should develope accordingly. Personally, I develop using Safari, Opera, FF and IE and usually have a harder time to get things running on IE then on Safari.
hahaha hehehe….after all these War…we are still fighting….
no peace man..no peace..
so sad, so sad…
I think anyone developing for the web should support Safari as standard. Yeah, it’s a royal-pain-in-the-butt but it’s a necessary evil in my eyes. The whole essence of the web is about choice and freedom, the freedom and choice to share and publish anything you want. And with that goes the choice and freedom to choose any method to view the web you wish. Saying Apple should drop Safari and package Firefox is just the same and Microsoft shipping IE with Windows. Firefox is there to give people a choice, some people choose to make the switch (Me for one!), and some don’t care … or don’t even know what Firefox is. A relative of mine has a MacBook, but isn’t very computer literate. She can just about manage to surf the internet, and is quite happy to use Safari. Bombarding with different browsers would just confuse her. I think people need to remember that not everyone who uses the web is a web-savvy uber geek, most are probably people who just want to check there gmail account, read the latest news etc and these are the people who web developers need to support. Basic Windows user’s use IE, and the same goes for Apple with Safari, KHTML on Linux period.
We must, as web developers strive to support all the browsers, not limit our applications to just a few and sack off the rest. As this will inherently lose you several potential customers … and at the end of the day, isn’t that what we’re all aiming for, to be successful !? There’s no point having the next uber-cool web app if no-one comes to use it !
If there are reasons for trubles with browsers, we have to ignore. Safari runs on KHTML an there are no big Problems (each browser has his little faults). Why support Safari? Because 30′685′899 People on the World use it!
I’d like to see support for safari. When I’m working on a PC I use firefox, but firefox on a mac just doesn’t seem as fast as safari. (plus FF doesn’t pass the acid 2 test)
If you want your ui candy with the gecko engine, camino does this.
-
Yet.. Safari is just that bit faster on a mac. You simply have to support it, otherwise you’re losing a lot of new users who are the creative type of people who will use your funky new sites, not someone who just bought a winpc to play games and surf msn.
-
That reminds me.. i really have to re-design my websites..
Mic Pringle says: “The whole essence of the web is about choice and freedom, the freedom and choice to share and publish anything you want.”
Actually, I would argue that the “essence” of the web is *standards* - what if everyone implimented TCP/IP or other protocols in their own “unique” way? - the web wouldn’t work, that’s what.
Add all the tabbed browsing, search bars and bells and whistles to your browser that you want, but for goodness sake - follow the clearly established standards and stop adding your own “interpretations” and proprietary BS.
Nothing “lazy” about choosing not to develop for a minority-browser; it’s simply a value proposition: “Do I want to spend X time (which = $$, BTW) developing for Y users?”.
Apple choose to start a new browser that now, after a couple of years already, isn’t capable of doing what their main competitor was able to 7 (or more) years ago.
And browsers should never follow standards. They should set them! Where would this site be if MS would have waited for the W3C to think of XMLHTTPRequest?
My lord! What a bunch of whiny developers this thread has brought out of the woodwork! Personally I don’t understand how developers hell bent on creating standards based sites quibble over support for Safari. Look, you either work to create a site or app that is compatible with all major browsers (considering Safari is the default on OS X its in the major category, unless you just don’t want to support macs) or you don’t and run the risk of pissing off potential customers for your clients. Its as simple as that.
However, many of you need to check your attitude at the door concerning your views on Safari, because its my experience once you start coming up with bogus numbers like “30% more” dev time for Safari (looking at you Brad Neuberg) you run the risk of having clients question why they should even spend the money on you to support Firefox when the overwhelming majority of users browse with IE. Bad mouth one perceived ‘minor’ browser and clients begin to ask why they need Firefox support at all… because, its a minor player as well compared to IE… right?
Go lynx, lets see you AJAX that one …
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You guys who complain about Safari don’t know what you’re talking about. Safari was the First Browser to pass the Acid2 Test for CSS compliance. Yep. I just went there again: Have you checked your favorite browser for standards compliance lately? Try it and see.
I never have any trouble supporting Safari. Or Firefox. And only a tiny bit with Opera. The big problem is IE. Talk about 30% extra time to support a browser… supporting IE is more like 50% of my time. I’ve never run into anything in the last 6 months, JavaScript or CSS-wise, that didn’t work almost the same in Safari as in Firefox. Opera 9 has caught them up, so it’s very reliable as well. Except for XML/XSLT (which isn’t quite ready for prime time and doesn’t provide any advantages that I can see over plan old XHTML/JavaScript/CSS), Safari supports everything an Ajax developer needs today.
There are a number of things Safari can do that Firefox–despite all its thousands of plugins–can’t do on a Mac. Integrate with Mac OS X keychain (Camino can do this, though), Utilize application services and other Cocoa frameworks (Camino can, though), Fill in forms sensibly and reliably from your browsing history, Adopt a Mac OS X theme if you’re using an alternative UI design, a la ShapeShifter, Use a back/forward browse cache that lets you, for example, browse backward a few pages to check something, or branch to another page, and then browse back to the form you were filling out without all of your work disappearing. This latter feature–the magic cache, I call it–works in Opera, but not in Camino or Firefox, as far as I can see after fiddling with all of the hidden preferences.
The fastest browser on the market today is Opera. Don’t believe me? Grab a copy of Opera 9 beta. You’ll be amazed. Even though I’m a Safari fan, I find myself using Opera more and more. Worst thing about it is that, like Firefox, it ain’t Cocoa. But one thing I love about Opera over Firefox is its theming ability… with Firefox, you have to restart to use a different theme. In Opera, you do it instantly during the same session. That’s a small thing, but it’s just to say that though I love Mozilla and Firefox and Camino and Seamonkey and Nvu and all the rest, the world DOES need different browsers and different development teams to keep feeding good ideas into the browser market. Opera has an even smaller market share than Safari does, but what … do you think we shouldn’t support Opera, too?
They do need to work together on standards, of course, but standards shouldn’t be static. The best thing about Firefox are its debugging tools and tools like Firebug. But WebKit, the open source nightly version of Safari, has an amazing tool in the works, called Web Inspector. It’s very powerful, but only half done at this point. And I find Opera’s JavaScript debugger much more useful and easy to use than anything available for Firefox. With Opera, you get concise, breakpoint descriptions down to the line of code that’s cauisng the problem. For example, another site I’ve complained about that doesn’t work in Safari is this one: http://asymptomatic.net/2006/04/13/2311/building-a-shelf-in-wordpress/
Fooling around in it just now in Opera, I encountered the following JavaScript error:
JavaScript - http://asymptomatic.net/2006/04/13/2311/building-a-shelf-in-wordpress/
Event thread: click
Error:
name: TypeError
message: Statement on line 128: Could not convert undefined or null to object
Backtrace:
Line 128 of linked script http://asymptomatic.net/wp/wp-content/themes/cycle/moo.fx.pack.js
if (toShow.offsetHeight == 0)
Line 122 of linked script http://asymptomatic.net/wp/wp-content/themes/cycle/moo.fx.pack.js
this.showThisHideOpen(elements[i]);
Line 48 of linked script http://asymptomatic.net/wp/wp-content/themes/cycle/prototype.js
return __method.apply(object, args.concat($A(arguments)));
Now, I don’t know about you, but this information would help me pinpoint the problem with an ease you just don’t get this easily in Firefox using Venkmann or anything else. And the Opera error console is slicker than but the same functionally as the Firefox Error console, but I use it mostly for CSS and JS errors.
You guys who don’t use Safari regularly should stay out of the conversation, since you don’t know what you’re talking about. The whining about Safari reminds me of developers who complain about having to support blind people. The point of the web is that it’s FOR ALL PEOPLE. Developers don’t have the luxury of supporting just their favorite browsers. Hell, if I did, I’d drop support for IE 6.0 already. It’s just painful having to hack away at my beautiful, standards-compliant code, just to get IE to render my page correctly.
I’m one of those who’ve been vocal about complaining about Yahoo and Google, by the way… this went up on my blog site a few days ago: Yahoo’s Ajax/DHTML User Interface Library Fails Its Own Test
Cheers,
Leland
I gotta say I’m pretty annoyed by this. Although I’m a professional web developer and I use FireFox on my Mac (mainly for the developer related extensions), Safari IS still the default browser on a Mac and I use it dailly. For the average Mac user, Safari is the default browser for a reason, so that is the browser they use. It is also the third most widely used browser right now.
Ok, it does have it’s annoyances and incompatiblities, but instead of dropping support for it (or in some cases just barring access based on the user agent), we (the collective of web developers) should be actively supporting the development of Web Kit and submitting bugs when encountered.
You can hope and wish Apple will ditch Safari and make Firefox the default browser, but that is not going to make it happen. Remember that Web Kit was (eventually) made [properly] Open Source after the KHTML team complained that Apple were taking what they wanted from the Open Source community without giving back. I doubt very much that Apple would ditch it especially since Safari isn’t the only Apple application running Web Kit, other such applications are Mail & Dashboard.
To sum up: Most of these “Web Toolkits” and “Frameworks” are already having to cater to multiple rendering engines, javascript interpreters and XMLHttpRequest methods. DEAL WITH IT, we’re lucky that there are three main browsers that are pretty closely matched for the most part, there is no NetScape 4 to worry about anymore!
Cheers;
Poncho
@Leland Scott
@Leland Scott
You’re telling all these JavaScript developers that they don’t know what they’re talking about? Give me a break. CSS != JavaScript by the way. I’m all for browsers passing the ACID test, but if there was a JSACID test, Safari would fail. IE probably would too, but Safari is a big mistake on Apple’s part, and they would get a lot of positive feedback if they put their efforts into FireFox instead.
[...] Totally simple, and if you have hit this snag its probably second nature. The first time, though, its pretty painful. And of course, this still doesn’t work in Safari. [...]
[...] Read full editorial here Ajaxian.com [...]
It’s not that web developers need to support Safari. Safari needs to support web developers.
Apple needs to ensure that its browser follows javascript standards more closely. Rather than forcing web developers to accomodate how their browser works. They should update their browser to work with how web developers already develop! (It’s in their best interest)
Still nobody has answered my question. What is wrong with Safari? What is broken or whatever.
I’ve been writing web sites for years for Safari and I have never ran into any problems. And yes, lots of Javascript and AJAX stuff.
The only browser that I ever have problems with is MSIE.
[...] Leland Scott from Musings From Mars has a couple posts highlighting the never ending browser debates, in particular the Safari issue we have covered before. [...]
Maybe I write bad code but I have never had any issues coding for safari, and I usually wait until the last minute to test in safari. What are the specific issues?
[...] Leland Scott from Musings From Mars has a couple posts highlighting the never ending browser debates, in particular the Safari issue we have covered before. [...]
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The solution is simple, and was forseen by the folks developing Firefox: Apple will integrate Firefox. Macs are becoming the boutique platform for technophiles world-round! The have the most elegant UI, the savant user base, and a unix interface to the core system… what more could a cpu-enthusiast want for their laptop? what? I’ll tell you… for every webapp produced in the coming onslaught to work, and work correctly! Watch carefully as Mozilla takes over the developer squadrons… then migrates to email-distributable packages, then becomes the auto-browser, then is everywhere via viral-like spreading techniques. You see, what makes the virus powerful is the fact is isn’t technically alive (aka. able to survive where none of the ‘intelligent’ can) so it can spread in environments not suited to typical organic lifeforms… isn’t this the niche Apple sought to thrive in from the beginning? Remember the hammer? I suppose we’ll see how things turn out :)
My lord! What a bunch of whiny developers this thread has brought out of the woodwork! Personally I don’t get how developers hell bent on creating standards based sites quibble over support for Safari
it’s a good idea and i like it very much
it’s a good idea and i like it very much
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more. So please keep up the great work. Greetings.
Thanks for very interesting article. btw. I really enjoyed reading all of your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view… makes you think more. It’s really good written and I fully agree with You on main issue, btw. I must say that I really enjoyed reading all of Your posts. It’s interesting to read ideas, and observations from someone else’s point of view…
We use OS X in our acency and I think it is a great OS but Safari is definitely not may favourite. We use Contenido to update our homepage and Safari is just causing problems so I use Firefox.
Thanks for this really useful article.Great cheat sheet, I appreciate it very much.
I really think that Safari could be a winner. The browser is the best performer in the market. I see one thing lacking -the many cool features one gets when opening up the process for add-ins from 3rd party developers. Without the developer support this product will not make it off the launch pad.
The main feature that is missing is full support for chinese (unicode) fonts. One of the best add-ins from Firefox that I leverage is the Chineseperakun add-in which supports on the fly translations of chinese characters which are moused over. A relatively straight forward implementation of divs and language conversion software that is totally inaccessible to one when using Safari …
Wonder if one can build an app that will work in Safari to link in google gears?
I fear opportunity to make an impact is slipping away…