That's the thing, though.. To a lot of us, Safari HAS been very viable for many years but now with recent changes it is not.
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Safari Team Asks for Feedback Amid Accusations That 'Safari Is the Worst, It's the New IE'
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Can we please have Safari (on both the iPad and the iPhone) actually give you desktop mode when you request it? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve requested desktop mode, only to be rewarded with…mobile mode.
Also, I regularly get the Safari URL bar appearing almost invisibly on my iPhone. The fix I found on another site is to hit the Aa icon and switch the bar from top to bottom...then back, and it then appears normally.
Also, I regularly get the Safari URL bar appearing almost invisibly on my iPhone. The fix I found on another site is to hit the Aa icon and switch the bar from top to bottom...then back, and it then appears normally.
Mind bending the whole "angry men" stuff, surreal. No wonder Safari's current state. Seems like she's not the best choice to put up with critics and channel them into a better product.
Yeah, I agree (depending on your definition of recent, I guess). I was using it as recently as 2018/19 I believe. Once they nuked regular extensions is when it all started going downhill (at least for my uses).
I still have my 2010 MBP and my 2015 MBP, and ran betas a lot on my 2015 machine.. I think Safari's Reading List was introduced somewhere around 2013? Was maybe in testing about 10 years ago or so? When Big Sur was released, and they initially introduced Safari's new Start Page and all the syncing and stuff, THAT was the last time I can remember it was good.. Then at some point mid-OS cycle, they changed the SideBar to run up to the top instead of stopping at the Favorites Bar, and thru various tweets I found that they basically had to become in line with Apple's own HIG. So, basically there's arbitrary rules put in place and they're forcing themselves to follow their own made up rules, and thus depreciating one of their products in the process...
I do miss all of the old style extensions, although there's been some great work recently with a large variety of new Safari extensions that make up for most of what I miss from long ago...
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First of all, you're wrong. You can revert to an older iOS version until Apple stops signing it, which is usually 1-2 weeks after a new version is released.
But I was talking about switching the Safari UI back to how it was before iOS 15. Settings > Safari > Tabs > Single Tab.
I think the fact that Apple & the Safari Team are giving folks the option to either have tabs on the top or the bottom shows how focused they are on accessibility. There were SO many changes to those settings and how it looked thru the beta process. They really nailed it overall IMO. It's hard to make everyone happy, but they're trying...
I actually didn't even realize I've been using the "new" version (bottom tab) until just now. It was really horrible during the beta period, but I think they totally fixed it for the general release. Essentially they moved the bar to the bottom but kept everything else the same, which is clearly what they should have done from the beginning.
I would ask… are there ANY webpages that ONLY work in Safari? I’m guessing no because that’s what you would expect with a standards compliant browser. Then, follow that with, are there any sites, like IE long ago, that ONLY work with chrome browsers?
Okay, dear. By your logic you have to add on every Chrome/Firefox beta version to their major release numbers.
Yeah, sad to say it but in past 6-12 months safari has become a bit of a nightmare. I’ve noticed some sites flat out don’t work with it now and have had to resort to using chrome for these sites. I’ve been a safari user 15 years on every Mac I’ve had. Sadly, it might be time to switch to the dreaded Google browser.
I often have trouble on FB with it and get a out of memory error message. I do not have the problem on other browsers.
Apple's Safari and WebKit team has asked for feedback on Twitter amid criticisms of the browser's bugs and missing support.
Jen Simmons, an Apple Evangelist and developer advocate on the Web Developer Experience team for Safari and WebKit, Tweeted that "Everyone in my mentions [is] saying Safari is the worst, it's the new IE." This led her to ask users for feedback, preferably highlighting specific bugs and instances of missing support that inhibits websites and apps.
Simmons also urged users who notice bugs that are "several years old and not fixed" to contact her with a link from bugs.webkit.org or a Feedback number from Apple's Feedback Assistant so it can be looked into more closely. The call for feedback has largely been received positively.
Safari has been met with complaints from some users in recent years over the browser's bugs, user experience, and website compatibility. The problems reached fever pitch last year when Apple unveiled a substantial redesign for Safari at WWDC, which was met with widespread criticism that accused the changes of being "counterintuitive." After months of tweaking the ambitious redesign in response to feedback, Apple eventually gave up on the changes just before the public release of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey, reverting to the previous Safari design by default.
Apple has also been criticized for demanding apps that browse the web to use the WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript on iOS and iPadOS, a policy that effectively bans non-WebKit based browsers. This has caught the attention of regulatory agencies, including the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which said that "due to the WebKit restriction, Apple makes decisions on whether to support features not only for its own browser, but for all browsers on iOS." A previous tweet from Simmons appears to suggest the importance of maintaining the WebKit restriction.
Following consultation with developers, the CMA is considering forcing Apple to reverse the ban on non-WebKit based browsers to allow for more competition. It is unclear if Apple's latest push for feedback is related to the growing regulatory pressures around Safari.
Article Link: Safari Team Asks for Feedback Amid Accusations That 'Safari Is the Worst, It's the New IE'
I do a bit of web development - I do notice issues with Safari sometimes that I won't experience when using Edge (won't touch Chrome).
It's been that long running joke about Safari being snappy - its anecdotal but I have found it be a little slower in the last few iterations, I think since Big Sur.
I still use it as my main browser though, just for the iCloud integration.
It's been that long running joke about Safari being snappy - its anecdotal but I have found it be a little slower in the last few iterations, I think since Big Sur.
I still use it as my main browser though, just for the iCloud integration.
I do have to commend her for her comments - I work in IT, and vague complaints and massive frustrations are hard to manage without specific details.
Apple's Safari and WebKit team has asked for feedback on Twitter amid criticisms of the browser's bugs and missing support.
Jen Simmons, an Apple Evangelist and developer advocate on the Web Developer Experience team for Safari and WebKit, Tweeted that "Everyone in my mentions [is] saying Safari is the worst, it's the new IE." This led her to ask users for feedback, preferably highlighting specific bugs and instances of missing support that inhibits websites and apps.
Simmons also urged users who notice bugs that are "several years old and not fixed" to contact her with a link from bugs.webkit.org or a Feedback number from Apple's Feedback Assistant so it can be looked into more closely. The call for feedback has largely been received positively.
Safari has been met with complaints from some users in recent years over the browser's bugs, user experience, and website compatibility. The problems reached fever pitch last year when Apple unveiled a substantial redesign for Safari at WWDC, which was met with widespread criticism that accused the changes of being "counterintuitive." After months of tweaking the ambitious redesign in response to feedback, Apple eventually gave up on the changes just before the public release of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey, reverting to the previous Safari design by default.
Apple has also been criticized for demanding apps that browse the web to use the WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript on iOS and iPadOS, a policy that effectively bans non-WebKit based browsers. This has caught the attention of regulatory agencies, including the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which said that "due to the WebKit restriction, Apple makes decisions on whether to support features not only for its own browser, but for all browsers on iOS." A previous tweet from Simmons appears to suggest the importance of maintaining the WebKit restriction.
Following consultation with developers, the CMA is considering forcing Apple to reverse the ban on non-WebKit based browsers to allow for more competition. It is unclear if Apple's latest push for feedback is related to the growing regulatory pressures around Safari.
Article Link: Safari Team Asks for Feedback Amid Accusations That 'Safari Is the Worst, It's the New IE'
They're trying on ios/ipados, on macos address bar is still crippled since return of the old tabs
A couple of things I've raised previously, and surfaced again thanks to these tweets:
- I can add something to my Reading List on my iPhone or iPad without issue, but sometimes when I do this on my Mac, I'm told I "can't change the bookmarks right now". How does iOS deal with a syncing clash? It looks like it just queues the changes and applies them once the sync is done. This needs to happen on the Mac version.
- There are some web standards that Safari simply doesn't support. One of them means I have to have Chrome installed on my work Mac in order to access a logging system. It's some sort of file streaming upload feature, I can't remember it exactly. One website means I have to use a completely different browser and all the nonsense that comes with Chrome.
- I can add something to my Reading List on my iPhone or iPad without issue, but sometimes when I do this on my Mac, I'm told I "can't change the bookmarks right now". How does iOS deal with a syncing clash? It looks like it just queues the changes and applies them once the sync is done. This needs to happen on the Mac version.
- There are some web standards that Safari simply doesn't support. One of them means I have to have Chrome installed on my work Mac in order to access a logging system. It's some sort of file streaming upload feature, I can't remember it exactly. One website means I have to use a completely different browser and all the nonsense that comes with Chrome.
The only important thing Safari needs is more frequent updates. It's crazy that you need to wait for minor or even major OS updates for Safari bug fixes or feature additions, that's why people call it the new IE in the first place.
Ya that fix everything, like the slow scroll, broke websites, terrible performance on monterey, and new bugs trying to fix another bugs.
Safari can be great, but it really struggles when loaded up with lots of tabs. I often have 2 windows with 8-12 tabs for my work. I tried hard to use Safari as my primary development browser, but after 2 months of issues I had to go back to Chrome which is able to handle the load without issues.
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They removed NPAPI support from Safari 12 onwards, so having to manually launch those things is kind of annoying because even Microsoft Edge can learn that you want/trust, and auto-launch. Even Mozilla still allows a command to let it work. it's not a big deal but little things they just make decisions on should be in developer mode or something.
Sure Edge is based on Chromium, but the fact remains you can't be doing things your own way or the highway. It's what led IE to a graveyard.
Sure Edge is based on Chromium, but the fact remains you can't be doing things your own way or the highway. It's what led IE to a graveyard.
Agree a lot here, and there would be a certain satisfaction to it all.
Chrome's rendering engine was originally WebKit. In 2013 they forked WebKit's WebCore engine and Blink was born, and that is what is used today. If Apple then went to the Blink core at the heart of Chrome/Chromium, that could make life a lot better on web devs. I mean, at that point, you really only have one major browser renderer.
In fact, I'll be willing to wager that someone in Apple has just such a project running... wrapping Safari around Blink - just in case.