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Discussion on: Firefox (and other browsers), Forgotten?

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danwalsh profile image
Dan Walsh • Edited

Few exceptions on that are styles in which Safari is the new Internet Explorer. The aberrant lack of support and maintenance Apple provide to it's own browser is just the reason for which the major part of Apple devices users use Safari for what it deserves: to download Chrome.

That might be so, however all web browsers running on iOS and iPadOS use the WebKit rendering engine. That’s worth repeating: Chrome on iOS and iPadOS uses WebKit to render websites, not Chromium. This ensures that a website rendered on one iPhone in one browser renders reliably the same on another iPhone in all other browsers. The only benefits to downloading an alternative browser like Chrome (on your iPhone or iPad) are syncing your user data (bookmarks, passwords, etc.) and choice of an alternative UI. It’s for this reason that it’s crucial to implement and test for Safari.

These days, Safari has pretty great support for many of the latest browser features. Will it ever be “bleeding edge”? No. Should we be implementing or relying on such features in production websites/applications? Conventional wisdom says probably not.

At the end of the day, as long as you are implementing and testing based on the browser and device usage of your project’s user base, you can’t go too wrong.

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joelbonetr profile image
JoelBonetR 🥇

Agree on everything.
What affects me from the first paragraph is that I need to subcontract iOS webviews just cause Apple don't support PWAs nor let other browsers support webApps in iOS... That greedy bastards.

Either way yes, we're limited by this and we'll be till they want and we need to align with that "ruleset"

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mikolajbuchwald profile image
Mikołaj Buchwald • Edited

These days, Safari has pretty great support for many of the latest browser features.

Yes, but the support comes at late. The other thing is the support for the not-latest features. As Joel mentioned, there are some functionalities that has unfortunately been left over by the Safari development team, and it seems they will never get fixed.