this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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As a web developer, Safari needs to either die in a fire or be transferred to a company that actually cares. It’s more than half a decade behind everybody else.
Tell me about it. Every time I implement some new thing in my app:
Firefox/Chrome: You cast HTML5 video. Critical hit!
Safari: Your spell fizzles....
... Safari added support for HTML5 video in 2009. Chrome did not even exist yet in 2009.
In fact, Safari was the first to support it. At the time you had to use Flash to deliver video in every other browser.
Firefox added a half assed implementation of the video tag shortly after Safari but it wasn't fully supported until 2013 according to caniuse.com. In fact FireFox was the last browser to fully support HTML5 video.
Not looking to start a flame war here, but if that's the case, then Apple's had even longer to get it right. lol. I implemented my video containers using the MDN specs which worked for both FF and Chrom(e/ium) as-is. Had to read through Apple-specific specs to figure out why Safari wouldn't render them (not autoplay but render at all).
While it's not quite "IE all over again", it's in the ballpark where I have to make special concessions to support a specific browser that is only offered on one company's platform. History may not be repeating, but it's certainly rhyming.
Ah - that's got nothing to do with supported features. Apple has always been a major backer of web based video distribution - a lot of the tech (from video formats to delivery platforms like HTTP Live Streaming to the tag were partially or even fully invented by Apple.
Your video wasn't working because the by default Safari assumes (correctly) that most video on the web is an ad. Safari generally only tolerates text/image ads* and to get video to work, you need to make it clear to Safari that the video is a real video the user wants to see.
Safari also silently blocks something like 99% of cookies... only cookies that behave like login/session/etc cookies are allowed. That's a lot more problematic than blocking video... since there's often just no way around it.
(* even text/image ads are barely tolerated... as far as I know, Safari is the only major browser that includes explicit support for ad blockers - Chrome/FireFox/etc allow extensions to arbitrarily manipulate the page, but safari actually has an ad blocking API - though they call it "content blocking").
Chrome released in 2008,but did not support HTML5 video until 2010. But yes, Safari did it first (in 2008). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video
It also took 6 years longer than everybody else to support WebGL2, and it's the only browser without a working WebGPU implementation. It also has no timeline for wasm-gc, while Chrome already ships with it default enabled and Firefox will ship with it on the next release.
Apple has been removing support for garbage collection from other technologies that used to support it. Wouldn't be surprised if they never add support for that, they'll tell you not to waste CPU cycles (and therefore, battery power) collecting garbage.
They want you to figure out when memory should be deallocated at compile time, not run time.
I personally prefer to use such languages, but I often don't have a choice for certain tech stacks.
Yeah, when testing my sites, on the desktop at least, I don't even bother testing in Safari. It ends up with nothing but headaches and a bunch of kludges to make things work there. Reminds me of working with IE years ago. But at least with desktop Safari, it has such a small market share that ignoring it isn't problematic.