Safari no longer supported by Spotify

Here&#x27;s my guess as to what happened.<p>A couple months ago, Spotify switched their web player from using Flash to using HTML5 + DRM (the &quot;standardized&quot; web DRM).<p>At least, that was the case for Chrome and Firefox, which I noticed because I exclusively use the Spotify web player.<p>But I guess Safari doesn&#x27;t support web DRM via the Widevine CDM. So they must have kept the Flash based web player around for Safari.<p>And, indeed, Flash would only be needed for Safari. Chrome and Firefox support web DRM on Windows, Linux, and AFAIK MacOS too.<p>Now, supporting both a Flash based web player and an HTML5 based web player is a lot of engineering. I&#x27;ll bet at some point they decided they didn&#x27;t want to do that. The only reason they still had the Flash player was to support Safari and Safari only has 2% market share. On top of that, I&#x27;ll bet most of their customers use the desktop app. So of the 2% of Safari users, how many are using the Spotify web player?<p>So they dropped their Flash based player, and thus had to also drop support for Safari.<p>I think it&#x27;s a fairly reasonable move. Flash is dying; they couldn&#x27;t keep their player on it, so they _had_ to move to HTML5. Since they have to use DRM at the behest of the RIAA, web DRM thus becomes their only choice.<p>I doubt the story is much better for alternatives. Even if any of the other music subscription platforms are still using Flash, that&#x27;s unlikely to continue for long.<p>I don&#x27;t blame Safari for not implementing web DRM. That leaves only one party left to point the finger at; the RIAA. If you need someone to blame, blame them.

Is this an engineering error or an intentional move from Spotify as a company?<p>I use Safari as my day-to-day browser (I switched from Chrome 2 years back) and I&#x27;m a satisfied user. I&#x27;d be less happy if companies started dropping Safari support.

Spotify reported most recently $300mil in annual advertising revenue.<p>In 2011 they were caught using &#x27;supercookies&#x27; that can be persisted even when the user clears their cookies in the browser.<p>It is entirely possible they&#x27;re refusing to support Safari because of the privacy changes Apple made, changes that specifically defeat the kind of tracking Spotify has previously been known to use.

Personally it would take a lot to get me to stop using Spotify. I really like their desktop app and they&#x27;re pretty open to modifications like Statusfy [1], Shpotify [2], and RES embedded playing. Their UI is so much easier on the eyes and mind than Google Play Music or Apple Music, and I&#x27;m very thankful that they do Linux builds when others like Google Drive can&#x27;t be bothered.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paulyoung&#x2F;Statusfy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paulyoung&#x2F;Statusfy</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hnarayanan&#x2F;shpotify" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;hnarayanan&#x2F;shpotify</a>

Not just Spotify--Facebook (Business) too.<p>My primary browser is Chrome, but I decided I wanted to no longer be logged in on Facebook in Chrome and having my usage tracked. So I used Facebook only in Safari.<p>Unfortunately if you visit business.facebook.com in Safari, it tells you it&#x27;s an unsupported browser. You can&#x27;t set up Facebook ad campaigns or even check your business messages in Safari at all. :(<p>If anyone from Facebook is reading this, the iOS Facebook Pages app is also broken. Notifications of new messages to your page don&#x27;t work after you put a page in Business Manager in Facebook. It&#x27;s hugely frustrating.

I don&#x27;t understand how people are discounting Safari as unused when probably about half of all web traffic comes from iphone&#x2F;iPad these days, which only allows the WebKit rendering engine.

What is a good Spotify alternative if I don&#x27;t want to deal with DRM at all?<p>I don&#x27;t care if it has a gazillion bands and trillions of songs. Or if the big stars with million dollar marketing budget are on it.

Later on in the comments a user says &quot;Also Firefox ESR v.45.8 (extended support release) is no longer supported.&quot;

I switched to Google Play a long time ago and never looked back.<p>* 50,000 of your own tracks can be uploaded to their cloud and listened to on all your devices.<p>* Casting<p>* Essentially all the same artists as on Spotify.<p>* Use with your all powerful google account.

I&#x27;m honestly still bitter about the fact that Spotify is not supported in Jamaica. Thank God for Deezer.

From web dev perspective Safari is becoming new IE6. CSS3 written to spec, working fine on anything else including IE11 tends to fail on Safari. I&#x27;m sure I will get a lot of hate from Apple fun boys and girls, but that has been my and my colleagues&#x27; experience recently.

<i>In other words, Safari users have no choice but to switch browsers or use the desktop app.</i><p>I understand that&#x2F;why OP is unhappy but that is a pretty decent choice they offer here.

Safari is the new ie

Safari is a horrible browser, no reason to use it. I hope all sites break on it.

Good riddance. I got so tired of my Spotify account being hacked that this last time recently I just said enough and moved to Apple Music. I liked spotify&#x27;s interface better but their security sucks and they can&#x27;t seem to stop user accounts getting hacked. I think their decision to break support with Safari is a bad move for them, but better for the user. Move to another service.

Browsers are becoming too complex; this causes problems not only with compatibility but also with security. We should strip down the functionality of the browser to the bare essentials, e.g. something like WASM. Everything else can be implemented in the browser&#x27;s user-space.

I hear the &quot;Safari is the new IE&quot; catchphrase a lot these days. But serious answers only please, does anyone know WHY Apple has let its browser go stagnant?<p>Is this a deliberate strategic decision (i.e. to drive Apple users toward native apps?). Or pure Hanlon&#x27;s razor?