Safari is not as bad as IE was compared to other browsers. However, calling it the 'new IE' is accurate if the definition is 'the browser with the worst support of new features and most bugs'. Here is a comparison <a href="http://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-10.2/ios-10.3/edge-15/firefox-53/chrome-58.html" rel="nofollow">http://html5test.com/compare/browser/safari-10.2/ios-10.3/ed...</a><p>What is especially frustrating for web devs is that all browsers on iOS are Safari underneath. We have to deal with those weird bugs and missing features the same painful way we dealt with IE, hence the title of the article. Saying that it's not as bad is not the point, IE 11 was also not as bad as IE6, we still had to deal with its quirks.
Drastic title for an incredibly weak article that barely even bothers to make a case. So Safari has a bug. Why does that warrant immediately labelling it abandonware?
meh, desktop Safari is actually a very good browser. It is the fastest of all browsers in macos for a bunch of operations and their support for ES6 features beats all the other browsers (99% in <a href="https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/" rel="nofollow">https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/</a> ).<p>Also one could argue that if Apple did not invest so much in WebKit then chrome would have had a harder time achieving its current usage and would probably be a very different browser than what it is today.<p>My 2cents
Anecdotal, but this doesn't match my own experience. When developing for the web I usually develop on Safari. More specifically for a first-gen iPad running Safari Mobile. And then, for whatever reasons, it almost always works on other browsers pretty much as is - the main exceptions being very old devices running ancient versions of IE.<p>(Admittedly I aim to make sites that degrade well and work <i>without</i> JS, so that might be an important caveat in an age of Angular and what have you. Perhaps I'm stuck in y2k and still think a site should render in 0.2s on all but 10+ year old browsers. [Shrugs])
A few bugs don't really make Safari the new IE. There will always be bugs and differences with rendering engines, that is the price of competition. However IE was a completely different class of shit sandwich that inflicted horror onto all devs who had to work with it.
I suspect all the people disagreeing with this either<p>A) Are not web developers<p>B) Use macs as their primary development platform<p>C) Have never had a user using iOS 7 complain that your website is entirely broken and not be able to replicate or debug it because every mac in your office is using OSX 10.10 and Apple have jigged it so you can't run an emulator for iOS <9 and everything on the computer (Except iTunes) refuses to believe the iOS 7 device exists when you finally persuade the customer to bring it in to you.
Here’s an irritating bug that popped on Safari 10.1 (iOS 10.3) that strains the use of CSS variables: You can’t just use a variable to declare a box-shadow’s color opacity, you need an intermediate variable.<p>Demo: <a href="https://codepen.io/anon/pen/YxmQdj" rel="nofollow">https://codepen.io/anon/pen/YxmQdj</a><p>Apple versus Google keeping devices up-to-date is a reversed problem on the web: iOS’s web browser updates only with new OS releases, and they don’t come to all devices. iPhones 5 (and iPads 4) will be stuck with that bug forever. On Android you can use Chrome’s latest version if you’re on ≥ 4.1 and Firefox’s if you’re on 4.0. 99% of Android users are.<p>Even if you’re very aggressive on focusing only on recent browsers for your website, you need to handle Safari bugs for <i>years</i>.<p>Safari is far from being as bad as IE ≤ 8, but it sure is the most annoying browser when you’re targeting only recent ones.
This is only going to get worse as newer iOS versions drop support for older hardware, especially iPads. It is doubly concerning since Apple bans browsers from the app store unless they just use the iOS-provided webkit engine for, so these devices are stuck with legacy Mobile Safari versions for the end of time.<p>As more and more modern iDevices become legacy while still being perhaps "powerful enough", I think we will start to see a persistent population of web users similar to the clan of IE6 users that took forever to shake off.
Luckily, it doesn't have near the numbers IE 6 ever had and it's not something a company would require their employees to use for work applications long after EOL, that was the real pain of IE.
It works the other way arround too. 2 years ago part of a site in production stoped working just because how chrome loaded some js libs at loading time. Ff,safary heck even ie worked ok but chrome.
I fixed his bug by changing the height on panel from 100% to 100vh. No need for extra markup like his fix plus as someone else mention iOS 11 doesn't have this problem and that most likely means the next desktop version will that fix also.
IE still holds the crown here. Lots of "enterprise" still use IE (not Edge), and IE have not got that much updates lately. That said I've had more issues with Safari then IE.
I don't know about the challenges for a web dev. But as a MacOS user I love Safari. It is very fast, it does not drain my battery and it gives me an increadibly streamlimed experience (bookmarks sync across all my Apple devices, I can continue a session that I started on my iOS device on my Mac).<p>Chrome kills my battery. Firefox is way to slow (startup time).
Durn whippersnappers, when I started developing for the web Apple didn't even have a web browser. Personally, I dev on a Mac and use and test with Safari, Firefox, and Chrome and to be fair they're all great.<p>I can deal with little CSS issues but what Safari really needs is Service Worker support.
Safari isn't the new IE for one big reason: it's the only rendering engine on iOS, which means if you want to support mobile web, you <i>have</i> to support it, and that won't change anytime soon.