When I left android, I was jailbreaking on iOS, so generally had all of those features, but funny enough probably about right when you left extensions, VPN ad blockers, etc. came out. Officially and polished.
Debugging (without a MacBook). Webgl 2. WebXR. Local storage not being completely gimped. I'm glad I don't work in that industry anymore, Safari was the bane of my existence...
Good web standards are a threat to the app store (particularly anything to do with ARKit) - not like 3rd party browsers are likely to change that much with the majority of users sticking to defaults, but it might apply some pressure
Which ones are you needing? For Adblock I block using VPN, similar to setting up a pihole. I’ve found replacements for most of what I do use elsewhere. Some working even better then the desktop counterparts.
I have a pihole at home so it’s really when I am out and about but I’ll check out VPN offerings. The last time I used a vpn it really hit my battery hard but maybe it’s better now. Other than that it’s just the plugins to get rid of the cookie screens and additional YouTube ads.
Mostly in everything that has to do with PWAs. It’s gotten better since they introduced Web Push last year, but there’s still a lot of things it doesn’t support, like Web Bluetooth, AV1 (except for devices with hardware decoders like the 15th gen Pro iPhones), and things like mobile sensor inputs.
But also in how bad its rendering engine is. Things that work on every other platform render super weird in WebKit.
Thanks. Do you have an example of the super weird rendering? Also are none of what you’re saying here togglable in the WebKit Feature Flags to mess around with bleeding edge features?
Besides rendering bugs that may or may not be Safari's fault, I wanted to get uBlock Origin on an iPhone but it's not available, IIRC because the content blocking API is more restrictive than what uBlock is designed for.
I’m telling you my experience as a web developer for the last 20+ years. If you want specific examples, you could look online. I’ll tell you my SVG icons sometimes don’t work in mobile Safari and I have no idea why. They work 100% of the time in every other platform. I also have to do weird things to get the safe viewport measurements to work in my PWA, again, only in mobile Safari.
I’ll tell you what, you try asking customers to go toggle a feature flag and tell me how that works out.
Safari is almost always the last browser to adopt a standard, often times years after it’s been standardized. And don’t tell me it’s because they take their time to get it right, because their rollout of Web Push was atrocious.
OK you’re speaking from a completely different point of view then. I was more curious about what I would be missing out on using Safari right now. Definitely not thinking about how a project I paid somebody to create is going to render.
You’re missing out on the things people can’t create because Safari is holding the industry back. Just because it’s not a user facing problem doesn’t mean you’re not affected as a user.