Safari team asking for feedback

Are you talking about Safari – or Chrome?

Allow me to re-quote the whole paragraph:

Chrome / Google doesn’t force anybody to use a particular browser and/or rendering engine. iOS / iPadOS users are forced to use Safari. Even Chrome and Firefox on iOS use Safari’s framework.

For the comparative platform, Android, there are browsers available using all of the rendering engines. And Apple would be welcome to release Safari for Android if they desired to do so. Same with ChromeOS.

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I am comfortable stating that Google Chrome does not implement all W3C standards. Nor do they restrict themselves only to the W3C standards. I am comfortable stating that every browser and any other piece of software has bugs in it. Even Safari. Even Chrome. (Even the code that I wrote had bugs in it sometimes. :slightly_smiling_face:)

But if you take the position that the way Google does things is the way it should be done, then everyone else will be seen as falling behind and not doing it right.

Chrome is an option for Mac users. The iPhone and iPad are special cases – you know, the walled garden? Some of us like that and are happy to be able to avoid Android’s Wild West.

There are better ways to “anchor” against Google than what Apple’s doing. Browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, Edge, etc stood up against FLoC, for example. I love that a lot of browsers aren’t taking Google’s nonsense. But not implementing W3C standards isn’t the way to go.

Nobody implements all of the W3C’s standards. Never have and never will. That’s a straw man.

P.S. Who is the 800-pound gorilla on the W3C? It’s Google.

Correct. Google Chrome, however, implements many more of the standards. It generally implements them faster. And it fixes bugs on a much more regular basis.

When I’m talking about unaddressed bugs, it’s not to fault Apple for having bugs in Safari - it’s to point out that the far more likely explanation for Safari lagging behind is that it’s not nearly as high of a priority to Apple as Chrome is for Google.

Ah, but that’s not my position. I expect Apple, as a vendor utilizing a platform monopoly to force the use of a particular browser, to prioritize implementing the stuff that the standards bodies adopt. Nothing more.

For example, I never faulted Safari for not implementing AMP, because AMP wasn’t a standard agreed upon by the community. It was a Google experiment that, after being abandoned, yielded some interesting ideas for future community standards. And Apple is welcome to have their own experimental features if they want to innovate. In 2009, they were leading the field. Now they’re very clearly not.

I typically love the walled garden too, but the primary stated point of the walled garden is security. And when it comes to browsers, we’re not talking about a situation where “Chrome was rejected because it’s insecure”. We’re talking about “any competitor to Safari’s rendering engine is rejected sight-unseen by policy”.

It’s not that anybody has everything 100% implemented - it’s that Safari is in last place, when they used to be at the front of the pack. In 2009, for example, Safari was hailed as the ONLY fully-standards-compliant browser. They were innovating, and driving the standards. Now they’re not, and that sucks.

I don’t think anybody in this discussion wants Google to dominate the browser market. But “dragging an anchor” is a far less useful strategy than dedicating energy to innovation. The first drags everybody down to your level. The second demonstrates leadership by encouraging people to pursue the next level. And the second of those two options is how the Apple of 10 years ago was acting.

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Well done. You made me laugh out loud!

Seems to me, in this thread, the way Google does things on the web is met with approval but fault is found with Apple. The fact that the browser is crucially important to Google but not to Apple is acknowledged and then ignored. I resent the implication that if Apple is not doing it Google’s way, they’re doing it wrong.

While I prefer Apple’s devices, apps, and its old-fashioned approach to the web over Google’s attempt to make the web into its own operating system, there are wonderful alternatives for those who don’t agree with me.

I don’t see that at all. In fact, that seems to be a viewpoint held by only one poster on this thread.

On the contrary, I see a number of posters, some very eloquently, pointing out that Safari has gone from the being a leader in the browser space to be being a laggard. And further pointing out that since ‘Safari’ is the only real option for iOS and iPadOS, how that is a real issue for developers and users.

Constructive criticism of Safari is about Safari.

One can dislike Google’s aims and motives and still want Safari to be a better browser. These are not mutually exclusive.

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It is true that Chrome does better supporting standards than Safari does. But they are both not complying to the standards for 100% and then it comes to the choices they make which standards to support and which not. I’m not aware of any website not working in Safari (Microsoft Teams excluded, but that’s because the cross-site tracking setting in Safari).

I’m no expert in which standard are (not) supported on a given browser, but looking at https://html5test.com it seems that companies are making choices on which content they find most important, and many don’t even matter that much.

One thing where Safari could improve is regular updates, especially for security related stuff, Chrome is much better with this because it is updated more regularly.