I desperately want to love Safari. I desperately want Safari to succeed. It probably won’t.
I’m triggered.
I love Apple. I love everything they do. I love their hardware. I love their software… usually.
I’m tired of the browser wars. I want to be using Safari. It’s clean, simple, and it comes integrated with my devices. It offers a good experience overall for most of my needs. But sometimes I need it to do more. I need it to be the One Ring That Rules Them All.
I fully believe the web browsing market is a disaster. The web browser wars are everything that’s wrong with technology today: there’s standards, but no one agrees on how to implement them (what’s the damn point of a standard, then?) Web developers are left to make awful choices about compatibility. Those choices affect the end user experience in horrible ways.
I have been using Microsoft Edge on my Mac for a while because overall, this was the best browser for a one-size-fits-most situation. But I don’t want to. It makes me feel dirty. I want to be using Safari. Recently, I noticed that some developers of Safari have solicited feedback about how to improve WebKit and Safari, and it’s got me to thinking.
Apple needs to fundamentally change some things about Safari or they’re never going to succeed. My highly opinionated takes:
Safari needs to go back on Windows and Linux too
A long time ago, Apple made Safari available for Windows. This was pretty exciting because it allowed me to keep my iCloud/Safari data in sync across Mac and Windows. At the time that was pretty important to me because, like it or not, Windows was still a heavy part of my life (spoiler alert: I didn’t like it at all). I didn’t realize the fundamentally good thing about this until recently: it forced Apple to do more testing and development on WebKit.
A few years ago, Apple stopped making Safari available for Windows. This was a mistake. This meant that Windows developers no longer had a good way to test their sites’ compatibility with Safari unless they purchased a Mac. Sure, this was great for Mac sales, but if your browser is going to sit in the corner and whine about people not following your rules when you only have 9% of the market that good will is eventually going to dissipate. Maintaining compatibility across devices and web engines is expensive from a labor perspective, and removing Safari from other operating systems makes it even more expensive.
Application developers are, in the end, going to target the top 75% of their customer base. Unfortunately, that’s not WebKit, and as long as Safari chooses to ostracize itself from the world by being Mac-only, that’s only going to get worse.
(P.S. I know Apple did not have Safari on Linux at any time. I’m suggesting they should).
Safari needs to do more testing of “real world sites”.
I actually had to file a bug in Feedback Assistant to call their attention to how awful Safari handles office.com and the Microsoft Office web apps. It’s bad. Horrifically bad. There are also full-on compatibility problems with things like messenger.com, where you still can’t use the video camera and mic with Safari (it’s 2022 and this still doesn’t work). Do people at Apple actually use web browsing, or do they just put out a web browser with things they think are cool and hope it catches on? Come on folks, please do some testing with real users day to day.
Please stop ignoring these sites and engage to make them better for all of us.
Safari updates should not be tied to the OS itself
Safari needs to make faster, more reliable updates. They need to disassociate from the operating system to do that. Yes, I know WebKit is an integral part of the OS. Microsoft made that mistake with Internet Explorer… and they have since backed off from that. Why would you emulate that?
Consider allowing other engines in Safari
I’m not a god at development, but it seems to me that the selling point of these browsers is the engines that parse the DOM, not so much the browser. If that’s so, why can’t I use Safari and choose the engine that I want it to use? I should be able to use Safari with the Chrome or Firefox engine. That would prevent me from having to load an entire new web browser just because something broke in WebKit. It would also address some of the compatibility/testing issues that I highlighted above.
Extensions
Lord have mercy everyone loves their extensions. That’s a crazy market. Apple’s been trying to make that better, but the limitations imposed on extension developers have all but halted everything. That needs to be better. Open up a bit, please.
In conclusion…
WWDC is just around the corner and perhaps some of these things will change and get better. I sure hope so. I want Safari to succeed. It’s clear that it’s the best browser for my M1 Mac, and there’s no reason I should have to use other browsers. It could be so much better with some of the right decisions.