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Website best viewed in…not Safari

Sheepish-Lord said:
The internet is built on Chrome and has been for some time and Safari isn’t OS agnostic so no reason to list it. Honestly though, any website that displays that is usually outdated and will probably still work.
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The internet isn't built on Chrome. The worldwide web (www) might be geared towards the Chrome browser because some Product Managers decide that's the default browser their company's website(s) should support, but the www != the internet.

Anyways, back to the point. If I see such a message on a website, and that site isn't 100% necessary for my life, I never visit it again.
 
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mwhite said:
I often see this on websites: “This website is best viewed in the following browsers: Chrome Firefox Edge”. Chrome is always listed first, Firefox second. Once in a while Edge. But NEVER Safari. Why? And why does every website cream their pants over Chrome? I don’t trust Chrome. It’s Google, the company that sells all your data. Why is Safari never listed? Why the prejudice against Safari?
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Usually it’s not economically viable for web desktop apps.

Safari usually is a very small share of users, has some quirks (interprets some JS/CSS/HTML differently) and is unusual to use for developers (chrome is usually seen as superior for debugging plus end users use it, so you’re testing the right stuff).

Myself, I’m a developer, have been since the IE6 days and have used a bunch of platforms. I use Safari these days and always get comments for it from other developers and clients.

There’s almost always a few Safari-bugs that I can’t bother to solve though and just put in some specific warning message for that feature. But 99% works fine.

When I look at our usage statistics, safari use is usually neglible.

So unless there’s unique business rationale to target Safari, you tend to skip it. Because in software you’re constantly short on time and can only implement like 2% of all feature requests/ideas.
 
apostolosdt said:
Chrome is only for Google Drive easiness.
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I'm actually quite surprised at how well Google Docs, Sheets and Drive work with Safari. The issue I run into most often is that the custom right-click menu in Sheets and Docs will sometimes break in Safari. It's a bit annoying, but not enough to make me leave Safari.
 
mwhite said:
I often see this on websites: “This website is best viewed in the following browsers: Chrome Firefox Edge”. Chrome is always listed first, Firefox second. Once in a while Edge. But NEVER Safari. Why? And why does every website cream their pants over Chrome? I don’t trust Chrome. It’s Google, the company that sells all your data. Why is Safari never listed? Why the prejudice against Safari?
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1. A web developer only testing only on the browsers they use themselves.
2. Possibly paid incentives to push a browser, a bit like those annoying "Sign in with Google" popups.

Safari is well known on macOS, and no longer supported on Windows. There is no need to push it.
 
It means they only checked their site in x browser before publish and don’t know if they used entirely web standard coding or not

It was certainly more a thing 30 or even 20 years ago

Now it’s just a sign of laziness
 
ignatius345 said:
I'm actually quite surprised at how well Google Docs, Sheets and Drive work with Safari. The issue I run into most often is that the custom right-click menu in Sheets and Docs will sometimes break in Safari. It's a bit annoying, but not enough to make me leave Safari.
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On a related note, Microsoft’s Web applications (e.g. Word, Excel, etc.) also work fine in Safari.

The reason I use Edge on my Mac for work is because Safari’s profiles implementation couldn’t be more half-arsed, and I keep my personal bookmarks etc. available on my work account through this mechanism.
 
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jennyp said:
It's annoying. CapCut online won't work with Safari.
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From the Develop menu change the User agent to Google Chrome - ChromeOS and it will work in Safari 18.4
CapCutGoogleOS.jpg

Show the Develop menu https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/advanced-ibrw1075/18.0/mac/15.0
 
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zinacef said:
Saying “Apple is selling you to Google” implies complicity in surveillance capitalism, which is inaccurate given Apple’s privacy-preserving measures. A more balanced view is that Apple leverages business partnerships while still placing user privacy at the forefront—albeit within a complex ecosystem that includes compromises.
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I think if you had to condense the situation to six words "Apple is selling you to Google" would probably be the best description!
 
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My solution has been to set Duck Duck Go as my home page in Safari. It always comes up when I load Safari. It is also set so that tabs are not saved to be opened up, and only Duck Duck Go appears. If I need to go back to a tab, I can always use the History button.
 
redcarian said:
On a related note, Microsoft’s Web applications (e.g. Word, Excel, etc.) also work fine in Safari.

The reason I use Edge on my Mac for work is because Safari’s profiles implementation couldn’t be more half-arsed, and I keep my personal bookmarks etc. available on my work account through this mechanism.
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I actually keep my work and personal stuff on entirely separate user accounts -- separate Apple IDs, separate everything. I can switch very quickly between the two with fast user switching.

Side note, I find Safari's Tab Groups feature to be incredibly useful at work. I have maybe a dozen separate projects to manage, and each one has its own set of maybe 5-12 tabs open at any given time. I can literally just keep a single Safari window open, and pick which project I'm working on.
 
bogdanw said:
"Google Pays Apple $18B to $20B a Year to Be Default iOS Search Engine" https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/11/google-pays-apple-billions-default-search/
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bogdanw said:
Apple is selling you to Google.
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What a silly argument.
Was Apple/Steve Jobs selling you to Microsoft when they accepted $150 million in 1997 for Internet explorer to be the default Mac browser for five years?
In fact, when the iPhone first launched, almost all of its built-in services were Google.
Google was the default Safari search engine, maps was Google powered, even Google‘s YouTube was a built-in default application.
 
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BrianBaughn said:
I think if you had to condense the situation to six words "Apple is selling you to Google" would probably be the best description!
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Catchy, sure. Accurate? Not so much. “Apple is selling you to Google” sounds like a spicy take, but it crumbles under even the lightest scrutiny. If Apple were truly “selling you,” it’d be doing a terrible job of it—what with all the on-device processing, Mail Privacy Protection, App Tracking Transparency, and the whole anti-fingerprinting crusade. Apple practically wrapped itself in a “Privacy. That’s iPhone.” banner and ran a victory lap.

Yes, Apple takes a fat check from Google to make it the default search engine. That’s not some secret conspiracy—it’s a business deal, not a data free-for-all. You can change your default, and Apple doesn’t hand over your personal life in exchange for that search bar.

So if you’re going to reduce a complex relationship into six words, maybe try: “Apple gets paid, not played.”
 
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jennyp said:
Surprising, since sites must be rendered on mobile and Safari has about 23% share of the mobile browser market.
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Yeah if you’re doing a marketing page it needs to work on Safari for sure. Everyone surfs on iPhone here at least.

But for web apps they’re usually built for desktop. Phones tend to get native apps. Varies by market of course, but at least in my encounters.
 
And a counter-example of Safari being excluded...

My utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric, recently updated their website and required certain browsers to use it. Safari was supported and Firefox wasn't. For quite a while, they would disable everything if you came in with an unsupported browser. They've relented since and just warn me when I use Firefox.

Supported Browsers

PG&E supported browsers, plus PG&E supported operating systems.
www.pge.com
 
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zinacef said:
Catchy, sure. Accurate? Not so much. “Apple is selling you to Google” sounds like a spicy take, but it crumbles under even the lightest scrutiny. If Apple were truly “selling you,” it’d be doing a terrible job of it—what with all the on-device processing, Mail Privacy Protection, App Tracking Transparency, and the whole anti-fingerprinting crusade. Apple practically wrapped itself in a “Privacy. That’s iPhone.” banner and ran a victory lap.

Yes, Apple takes a fat check from Google to make it the default search engine. That’s not some secret conspiracy—it’s a business deal, not a data free-for-all. You can change your default, and Apple doesn’t hand over your personal life in exchange for that search bar.

So if you’re going to reduce a complex relationship into six words, maybe try: “Apple gets paid, not played.”
Click to expand...

And, it’s another business decisions that prevents our iOS & Mac devices from costing even more than they already do.
 
I know the actual reason Safari is never listed on these things.

All the front end development these days is outsourced to the lowest bidder who tend not to use Macs because they cost a proportionately significant chunk of an engineer's salary. I regularly have to deal with this issue to the point we end up using AWS EC2 Mac instances so they can fix stuff on them which doesn't work and the customers have complained about it.
 
smirking said:
Yeah, anyone who says Safari is the new IE has never known the joys of having to add 30% of extra time to website projects just to ensure that everything would work in Internet Explorer 6. Even later versions of Internet Explorer weren't really the infamous IE horror show that IE6 embodied.

I vaguely recall IE4 actually being pretty good and I remember being fond of IE7, but that might simply be because it gave me false hope that my IE6 days were behind me. My time fighting the IE6 battle lasted a lot longer than most developers' because some of the sites I worked on were popular in countries with lots of pirated copies of Windows that were frozen to their install dates.

Good times.
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Luckily for me, in those times, I wrote entirely in Flash!
Publish once, render everywhere identically, pure bliss.

Then 2007 came along with iOS refusing to play.

As you say….. Good Times
 
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