Either Support Safari, Or Lose Customers
Monday, December 12th, 2005 by MR
I’m completely sick of “web 2.0″ applications/companies/websites not working in Safari. I’m even *more* sick of people who say that users critiquing a web application’s inability to work in Safari are lame or don’t know what they’re talking about. This rant was brought on by comments on TechCrunch about the new version of Writely tools. I left a comment that basically said, “it’s lame that Writely is introducing new features when the basics of their application still don’t work on Safari” and then I got flamed.
Safari Matters
If you care about the Macintosh user base, then you should care about Safari. If you don’t care about Safari, then you’re saying you do not care about the Mac user base. It’s quite simple.
The default browser on Mac OS X is Safari, take it or leave it. How many non-tech-guru Mac users out there actually took the time to download Firefox or Mozilla when they had a spyware-free and completely capable browser like Safari already installed on their machine? People download Firefox because they’re sick of IE6 and all its shortcomings. A tiny percentage of the real world downloaded Firefox because they like the theming or the standards-compliance (I fit into this category, as do most of the people who read this site, but we’re not exactly the majority), but that’s not the allure of Firefox. People don’t switch to Firefox because they’re eager to get rid of the float margin bugs in IE6 or want 24-bit PNG support with alpha transparency, they switch because they hate spyware and the Fox is billed as a better alternative to IE6.
But on Mac OS X, there is no IE6. The default browser for my operating system is elegant, spyware-free, standards-compliant, quick, and easy to use. Why would a normal Mac OS X user download Firefox when Safari does what they want? Firefox on Mac OS X looks bad, doesn’t load as quickly as Safari, and has some goofy bugs. I’m not saying that Firefox is a bad browser because it’s not, it’s terrific, but on Mac OS X it just doesn’t wallop Safari the same way it wallops IE6.
Best Practices
A web team not supporting a crappy, old browser that doesn’t work well is one thing, but not supporting a modern browser like Safari is just ridiculous. If a web team can make an application work on IE6, then there is absolutely no reason they can’t make it work in Safari. No reason at all. Yes, Safari has some Javascript quirks, but so does IE6 and every other browser, and web developers have found ways around different Javascript implementations in the past so why is this any different? I’m not just some graphic artist spouting off like this, I’m someone who’s been writing Javascript for web UIs since 1996.
Writely doesn’t support Safari so I won’t be using it — not a big loss since Writeboard does a better job at what I need anyway.
Reader Comments
91 Responses to “Either Support Safari, Or Lose Customers”
I agree. The equivalent of saying “We don’t develop for Safari” is like saying - “Forget all those silly Windows users out there, IE is old.” Normally, I would point out Firefox as an alternative, except because of the glaring memory leak bug, Mac users don’t have this luxury. So, that leaves them with what - Camino, Omniweb?
I think that in 2006 we will see the rise of more and more Mac usage, not to mention less Microsoft-centric methodologies in general, as a result of open source efforts. So, as a designer, do yourself a favor - Go the extra mile, if only to show off that you can, and develop for cross-browser situations.
On my site, the browser breakdown is: Firefox 56%, IE 29%, Safari 10%. For me to ignore those numbers would be foolish.
December 12th, 2005 at 4:48 pm
I’ve never used Writely but I imagine it uses some form of WYSIWYG editing inline. If so, the problem is actually Safari’s fault as none of the good WYSIWYG editors can play nice with it. Dojo works the best but even with Dojo, the support is incomplete.
I love Safari and it’s of course my browser of choice, but standard WYSIWYG capabilities are still lacking and that’s nobody’s fault but Apple’s. It’s the only glaring hole in Safari at this point… as far as I can tell.
December 12th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
With the Writely/Writeboard thing: Safari basically doesn’t have a WYSIWYG component that functions in a reasonable capacity, last I checked. Since Writely is seems critically dependent on that component, it’s no wonder they can’t support Safari :) Of course, I’m not saying that being critically dependent on the browser WYSIWYG component is defensible — and perhaps the real interesting questions here have to do with the state of such editing in the browser.
Either way, until Safari fixes the component, it’d be literally impossible for them to support Safari.
Other than that little thing, Safari has been extremely simple to support from my Squarespace experiences. If you’re coding/testing in Firefox by default, Safari almost comes totally free. It’s flat out a great browser.
December 12th, 2005 at 6:03 pm
I guess it depends on who Writely’s intended audience is - obviously it’s not Mac users. I use Firefox on my powerbook - mostly because my content management system doesn’t work in Safari.
December 12th, 2005 at 6:45 pm
Yeah — the Gap (and its other stores, Old Navy and Banana Republic) don’t support Safari at all, and actually prevent Safari users from shopping on their websites. Seems idiotic.
December 12th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
Mostly off-topic:
Actually I’ve seen many non-techie people walk up to a Mac and fire up IE 5. That icon is just too recognisable and the name just makes too much sense. Why would I go on safari when all I want to do is explore the Internet?
I’m thankful that Apple removed it from the clean install of Tiger and thereby making Safari all the more ‘default’.
December 12th, 2005 at 11:45 pm
I guess I just have to laugh when I read stories like these. It doesn’t make ANY sense why a company would alienate a specific user group for any reason. There are exceptions to the rule (when you are talking larger corporation sites, carmakers, etc {some, not all}), but why would you bottleneck like that?
Firefox is significantly slower on the mac. I will continue to use safari because it works, and it works with all my other programs and RSS feeds. My setup at work uses both mac/pc and connects the two with synergy. I will use firefox on the pc, but continue with safari on the mac side (I like firefox web developer extension - so I keep it open to use that).
I, too, am glad that Safari is the ‘clean’ default and the E is gone.
In the long run, it’s their loss. I guess thats a price they are willing to pay to be ‘web 2.0′.
December 13th, 2005 at 9:05 am
Thanks for mentioning this. As someone who uses Safari and doesn’t use Firefox for many of the reasons you mentioned, it constantly frustrates me that people give Safari the cold shoulder. Granted, there are sometimes technical reasons for this - Safari could be improved in a number of areas - but a lot of times, it just seems like simple laziness/ignorance more than anything else.
December 13th, 2005 at 10:47 am
The goal in life is to help all people use a Mac simply because they are the epitome of greatness and all that is right in the world. If everyone used a Mac there would be no war or famine. There would just be a world like the one in Aeon Flux. An utopia. Where people where panties and get kidnapped.
December 13th, 2005 at 11:13 am
Bob, I don’t get your point. And I think you didn’t get the article’s point.
December 13th, 2005 at 11:32 am
It’s nice to know my sites work in Standards-compliant rendering browsers like Safari.
Typical bigoted hatred with no credible experience tend to extrapolate beyond the argument and paint themselves fools, ‘Bob’.
December 13th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
Re: Your initial entry - agreed.
December 13th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
It’s weird the way you all seem to thing off ‘Web 2.0′ as a PC only thing, As iv always though of it as more of a Macintosh approach to the net. Am i alone in thing that?
December 13th, 2005 at 1:32 pm
It seems to me, from reading the article (and comments) linked to, that the Writely team does intend to support Safari, it is just going to take a bit more work.
When given a choice of getting something out quickly and only on the top 2 browsers, or waiting longer to gain the final few percentage points of the users out there, most development teams won’t even think twice about it. You can argue the merits of that decision, but 80%-90% of the browsing population is still more than 0%.
As for the people flaming the mac users and claiming they should just “use another browser”, they really are just trolls. Of course jumping in on any web application that doesn’t support Safari and calling them lame isn’t all that productive either. ;)
December 13th, 2005 at 2:48 pm
Yes! Tell it like it is brother. Pretty much every site I use supports Safari (good for them), and the ones that don’t I avoid as much as possible.
December 13th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
When I design sites, I think:
- Firefox
- Safari
- god, I hope I can get this shit to look and work right in IE…
Do companies who don’t support Safari have idiots building their sites or what?
December 13th, 2005 at 6:39 pm
WRT WYSIWYG editors working in Safari.
I develop using OpenCms which now (as of version 6.x) uses HTMLarea and this works absolutely fine in Safari. If there are problems, I haven’t encountered them!
I’m pretty sure the same comments apply to FCKedit which I have used with the Magnolia CMS - I don’t remember any problems whatsoever in Safari. But I could be wrong here - it was a while ago…
Does anyone here know differently?
I’m genuinely interested because I want to be able to push OpenCms solutions to Mac-using clients and be able to say it works fine!
BTW I recently came across a client who didn’t want her second tier banking website to support Mac users because her graphic designer boyfriend had a Mac and she hated looking at it. So sometimes there is no rationality behind the marginalisation…
:)
December 13th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
I run a non techie website in the UK, and to be perfectly honest Safari/Mac users are less than 0.01% of my users. In fact from my log files are saying I should be more worried about the 2.3% of people who are still using IE5.
As far as I can see the importance of safari support has a lot to do with where you are and also who your target audience is.
December 14th, 2005 at 3:09 am
Do people just not understand that running a company is about trade offs? I run two web sites and quite frankly over 90% of my traffic is from IE. That is just reality. I also work for a company with over 20,000 macs. I am sorry, but Safari is just lacking in some features that businesses want to target. If they can get a product out that hits 90% and costs say a million to develop and then costs another 1/2 million for the other 10%, is it worth it? I don’t know, it just depends on your goal as a business. Companies do this everywhere, not just on the web. It is the same reason the majority of clothing sizes fall within a size range around the population norm. If you weighed 500lbs would you be here pissing and moaning because 90% of the clothing out there does not fit you? Well maybe, but I am sure you would not see the support you are seeing here. You made a choice to use a mac. You love it, great. But you knew that going into it things would be a bit different than the PC experience which is why you did it in the first place.
December 14th, 2005 at 3:25 am
Hear Hear!
December 14th, 2005 at 3:28 am
If Apple wants developers to make Web 2.0 apps compatible with Safari they need to make a Safari for Windows. I develop Web 2.0 apps and I have no desire to pay for an over priced computer just to test for a relatively obscure (in terms of overall market share) browser. Give me a Safari I can download for free and run on my Windows box and I’d test with it.
December 14th, 2005 at 3:31 am
who cares about safari. if its not to standards, much like IE then leave it behind. is firefox that much better then them all?
December 14th, 2005 at 3:37 am
who cares bout safari! if its be hind schedule like ie then forget it. is firefox and opera the only browsers left?
December 14th, 2005 at 3:39 am
Why doesn’t Apple make Safari work as well, or identically, to Firefox? And save everyone the trouble of futzing around for this small browser marketshare app? Why not fix Safari instead of making it a standout for failing? I stopped using Safari because, like IE5, it just had wayyyy too many idiosyncracies. I blame Apple, not the developer community.
December 14th, 2005 at 3:50 am
A cleverly whiny post… which is sure to get lots of linkage now that it’s been picked up by digg.com.
I think you’re being totally naive about the realities of web development. I work at a successful software company who develop online financial apps. While we’re happy to support Firefox and linux desktops, the only way we can support Safari is by going out and buying a Mac.. because that’s the only way to run Safari.
Considering that Macs are still a tiny proportion of desktops out there… and when it boils down to it we could always just recommend that Mac users use Firefox.
I hope that things will change when OSX goes Intel, but in the meantime you should accept the fact that you’re a tiny minority, and it’s hard to push the business case of supporting Safari when it’s tied to a particular hardware platform. Things might be different if Apple released Safari for linux (which shouldn’t be too difficult considering its origins).. then we’d have more reason to support it. The future of the web is hardware-agnostic, and Safari isn’t that way at all.
December 14th, 2005 at 3:54 am
Why would anyone (any company) want to spend disproportionately more money per user just to satisfy a few Mac anti-establishment zealots?
If it costs $50,000 per project to get it out and working on IE and FireFox, it would be supid to spend another 10 percent making sure 1-2% of total visitors (if that) can see it in some off-the-wall (statistically speaking) browser?
Mac zealots remind me of the different cults out there. All they need is black sneakers and cool-aid.
And then GOD [ehrm. Intelligent Designer] said:
“Let the flaming begin.”
December 14th, 2005 at 4:16 am
I have more users who log on with a PSP than safari. I find it funny also that the PSP browser works better than Safari. Safari users for me are about as bad as people who still use dial up. I could care less. People who use dialup are too cheap to buy something from my site and people who use Safari are probably too poor from all the money the spend on applications and computers from a company that is just too overpriced already!
Go Firefox! Even go IE!
December 14th, 2005 at 4:34 am
The other issue is, of course, not everybody has access to an apple. Also, JS support on safari isn’t ‘quirky’, it’s bizarre - to support safari using any JS app requires a total rewrite and browser detection code. Which is just horrible.
December 14th, 2005 at 4:39 am
PC users who said “Windows comes with a browser already, why should I change?” were branded as idiots. Now Mac users say the same thing, and there’s righteous indignation that the rest of the world isn’t toeing the line to meet their needs.
All browsers have quirks. You’ve just defined Safari’s quirks as the default “this is the right way to be”, the ideal 100% against which every other browser is found lacking. Now you say you’ll take your ball and go home if people don’t cater to your needs. This is just as absurd when the subject is Safari as it was when the subject was IE.
December 14th, 2005 at 4:50 am
Give them a mac and I’m sure they’ll support it.
December 14th, 2005 at 4:52 am
“If you don’t care about Safari, then you’re saying you do not care about the Mac user base.”
I think you hit the nail on the head there. I’m not trying to be trite, but there’s really not much incentive to develop for such a small segment of the internet population. That’s the price you pay for being in the minority on anything - you have little ability to sway market forces.
Good idea to create standards based designs? Absolutely. But until Macs/safari make up a significant enough percentage of the population (don’t ask me what that percentage is), I don’t see it changing. That said, I think Apple is in a unique position to challenge MS supremecy in many of these areas if they continue to do what they’re doing and make some good strategic choices along the way, but that’s a different topic ;)
For what it’s worth, I agree with your premise in theory, I just don’t think it’s very realistic for the most part. But all the innovative people aren’t realistic, so you’re probably far smarter than I :)
December 14th, 2005 at 4:53 am
As others have pointed out, the number of people visiting my client’s web sites are very low, about the same number of people using Lynx to surf the web.
Does that mean I shouldn’t make pages that support Safari? No it doesn’t, but it does mean that Safari goes to the very bottom of my browser priority list. Just like the creators of Writely, I do intent for the sites to be Safari friendly, but I’m not going to wait to go “live” with the site just because I can’t get some Safari quirks ironed out.
And when I say quirks, I’m referring to the JavaScript issues with Safari, which are very irritating.
December 14th, 2005 at 4:53 am
How would you test for Safari if you don’t have a Mac (and getting one is not an option)? I am sure that is a problem for many web developers. There should be a Safari for Windows.
December 14th, 2005 at 5:10 am
This is fascinating, let criticize developers for trying to create rich cross platform apps which run in a web browser.
I don’t support Safari or Konqueror (webcore is based on the khtml rendering engine) for a lot of apps for 3 reasons:
1 This is the big one - no js support client side XSLT (same reason why Opera isn’t supported)
2 It is less than 3% of the browser market - http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=0
3 No client is willing to pay me enough to buy an Mac for testing purposes
December 14th, 2005 at 5:20 am
I agree with you on this.
reading the Writely site, they say they want to, but cant since it doesn’t have a “design mode”
i dont know if they didn’t notice, but Safari got a “design mode” with version 2 (Tiger version)
It uses the exact same commands as IE does, so the pages should work without many changes.
December 14th, 2005 at 6:00 am
On my mac I prefer firefox, purely because I use both windows and mac and like to use the same extensions etc…
Just setting the scene.
However in development Safari is usually the last thing we test (unless I have convinced someone to support opera). When it comes to CSS and HTML there is usually very little needed to make safari look beautiful. But since the first version and continuing now javascript support has sucked.
There are things that you just can’t do with safari, and writely has run up against several of these. I guess they could have cut back on their features to support safari, but I think they made the right choice. They state on their blog that they have identified the issues which deny the safari support and have communicated them to the safari team, so I think they are being responsible.
Seriously though, 99% (ish?) of websites should have no problem supporting just about any browser. When it comes to complex web applications though, I think the browser makers have to meet us halfway. If there are issues with how their browsers work, either fix them or publish work arounds for the developers to use.
I don’t know if this is realistic, but after working through the late nineties and then the first few years of this decade I don’t want to get back into a situation where we cannot make innovative web applications because we have to cater to browsers which refuse to keep up with the evolving web.
Safari does keep up (and indeed leads in some ways) in most ways but I still don’t like some of its js issues.
December 14th, 2005 at 6:17 am
Would you like some whine with your cheese?
December 14th, 2005 at 6:34 am
I find it absolutely amazing that so many “trendy” shops (Gap, Banana Republic etc.) shun the default browser of the “trendy” persons choice of computer.
Mac users are, on average, more stylish, have higher incomes etc. etc. (this isn’t trolling - zdnet did a report on this some time ago) Surely therefore shops should be embracing Safari.
Crazy, just crazy. Someone at Gap needs a rocket up their backside for this. Seriously, it must be losing them a lot of business.
December 14th, 2005 at 7:04 am
“If a web team can make an application work on IE6, then there is absolutely no reason they can’t make it work in Safari. No reason at all.”
Uhm…not having a mac? I’d be glad to support that 0.5% of my visitors using Safari if it was only a matter of popping open another browser and fixing the quirks, but shelling out a hefty price for a mac just to test web pages? That’s hardly “no reason at all”…
My view is this (and I guess it’s immature, but I doubt I’m the only one with it): Safari is the new guy, and if my applications use only standard features and work find in Firefox, then any bugs are shortcomings in Safari that are Apple’s job to fix (And perhaps a problem is that I have too much confidence that they will)
December 14th, 2005 at 7:13 am
Safari is an essential application. Macintoshes may not be a massive percentage of the market, but they still account for MILLIONS of computers people use every day.
To not support Safari is to ignore MILLIONS of potential users/customers.
’nuff said. Great job on the write-up!
December 14th, 2005 at 8:13 am
For all of your computing life you have been stalked by a sociopathic monopolist who actually worked for apple for a while.
He foisted CPM and a public domain basic on the public as DOS and ms basic. Then borrowed apples GUI to sell Windows 95.
The endless theft of others IP culminated in Windows dominating every thing in computing. The web caught M$ by suprise, they needed to catch up they stole a browser coupled it to DOS (XP uses a stolen DEC kernel NOW),borrowed A bsd tcp ip stack. Unfortunatly for every internet user this crap was priced low enough to catch on. Welcome to the world of Microsoft. It is common Microsoft practice to break other Operating systems so that only M$ stuff works right
December 14th, 2005 at 8:34 am
I agree. I have both a PC and Mac and have Firefox on my Mac for testing purposes, but Safari is my default browser. I’m not thrilled about switching browsers on my Mac just to use a web app. So I don’t. It would be too much a hassle if it’s a website that I use/view often.
Luckily, all 37s apps so far support my use of both PC and Mac systems.
December 14th, 2005 at 8:42 am
I totally agree :)
December 14th, 2005 at 8:54 am
I agree that web developers should have legacy methods of providing their services to various browsers.
The truth of the matter is, if the technologies on the web are advancing, how long should developers support browsers that are not up-to-date?
For new web site start-ups and small companies, writing one application is daunting enough. You have to go for the largest possible audience. If Safari doesn’t support what the mainstream audience does, it’s just as much Apple’s fault as the developers.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:13 am
“Oh, I use Mac, so everyone must support it.”
“Oh, and I use Lynx, why doesn’t your web app display appropriately in my browser?”
I’m with Mike B; Safari is waaay down the food chain in terms of visitors to my site.
You guys are so self-centered. If I have limited time and a limited budget, I’m going to target IE. Not because I love Microsoft or hate the Mac user base, but because I enjoy having the lights on each night when my children are trying to study.
Optimizing for the last 2% just isn’t good business sense.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:14 am
so your new browser isnt backwards compatible you say. really now whos fault is that.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:17 am
I agree! I am a Mac user. I love Safari. However, I have used every other available web browser for OS X out there (Firefox, IE 5.2, Opera, Flock, Shiira), and I must say I always come back to Safari. Why? Seemless bookmark syncing, the most standards compliant browser on the web, and easy, elegant use. What can I say….it just works. WSIWYG is lacking, but I can wait for it.
Develop for Safari! The Mac userbase is growing everyday. Since switching to Mac, 5 years ago, I do not let any of my departments dev work go out without debugging in IE, firefox, opera, and safari. Even though we are still a MSFT shop with an IIS intranet, I want it done right. No shortcuts.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:19 am
It’s a matter of market share, you know that. It only makes sense to develop for Safari if I can earn enough revenue to cover the extra development cost. What is at issue here is not people not caring about Safari, it is about business decisions. Instead of imploring web developers to research and fix every little bug for Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari, Kommander and Lynx, we need to be getting together to beat down the doors of the people writing the browsers and get them to start following standards. That sounds easier than it really is, but it is possible, and it needs to happen.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:33 am
apple made a big mistake when choosing KHTML as the base for its CoreHTML components.
Gecko is light years ahead.
Btw, Firefox 1.5 runs much better on my archaic G3 than safari.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:35 am
whoever flamed you are fooolish.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:37 am
What about Opera?
:)
December 14th, 2005 at 9:47 am
The problem with developing for Safari is 2 fold. First off, Safari is a poor browser at best, yes its the default browser for MacOS X, and you cant expect people to use other browsers, but that doesnt make it any better. My company, who develops a web application internationally cannot spare developers to “fix” issues with a browser that makes up less then 1% of our traffic. And its quite odd how IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera dont need “fixing” but Safari does. Safari needs to improve as a browser, then perhaps most of these issues will go away by them selves. Until then, use firefox, its a much better browser.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:49 am
I think you’re missing another important aspect of not developing for Safari, the fact that not everyone has access to a Mac. I know an application I designed worked fine in Firefox, IE, Opera, and even Konqueror. But when I tried it in Safari on a Mac at CompUSA it died, I have no idea why, and I had no way to fix it since no one I know owns a Mac.
I like the article and agree that you shouldn’t leave anyone out in the cold, but the percentage of Safari users overall is small and sometimes it is unpracticle, or even impossible at that moment, to fix whatever problem there is.
December 14th, 2005 at 9:51 am
The problem with Safari is that it is something that most of us cannot test for. Most self-employed/volunteer and small biz devs do not have Macs sitting around to test on.
The closest browser we can use is Konqueror, and even that is not available under Windows. There was a stalled/failled KHTML/WIN32 project and some have had success using KDE on Cygwin, but most of us do not want to bjork our system configurations.
The other option is Kubuntu or Knoppix Live CD’s. Problem is that you need beefy machines (at least 256mb of memory) to use them. Sure most of our primary machines have that much memory, but don’t have spare PC’s laying around. So we have to reboot between Windows and Kubuntu/Knoppix.
Basically, Safari is a pain to test for. All the other major players (MSIE, Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox, Opera) are accessible. We do not have easy access to WebKit/KHTML.
I’d love to support Safari since that seems to be the de facto browser of Mac people now, but as it stands I usually treat Safari like I do Netscape 4.x … and that is, “as long as it works good enough in that browser”
December 14th, 2005 at 10:09 am
Mike, excellent point about adding new features before fixing basic functionality, I still get locked out of sites on FF, even though it’s now been around for a _long_ time.
ChrisP, I am pretty much the same about designing sites, with the small difference that I don’t bother too much about IE6, it’s a dying browser.
Mike, B, you can’t go by server logs, many non technical users have now hacked and edited user-agent strings (even when they don’t know what one is) to get into sites that lock their browser out.
December 14th, 2005 at 10:23 am
The GAP doesn’t support Safari? Funny, some GAP people sit on Apple’s Board of Directors.
December 14th, 2005 at 10:24 am
My “favorite” none compliant sites are the ones where a simple mail to the support, pointing out how bad it looks on Mac OS, prompt replies like, “Try using IE6″, or better yet, “It works on Windows”.
Perhaps there should be some sort of name and shame site where none compliant sites, like PC world and the whole of the Dixons group (Comet, Currys et cetera) can be shamed into realising it’s not just Mac users who can’t use their services properly - but in fact everyone who takes their own advice about avoiding spyware.
December 14th, 2005 at 10:33 am
I like the FCKeditor but it doesn’t work in Safari :( I know they are trying to make it work, but if I recall correctly, it has to do with the lack of editor support in the browser.
I don’t like the way Safari supports forms, either. In Firefox, I can use the Tab key to access dropdown boxes, and I can click the labels on form elements to access their inputs (radio, checkboxes, text boxes, etc.) For some reason, these critical accessibility capabilities are absent in Safari.
So what browser do I use on my Mac here at work? SAFARI! Why? It’s clean, elegant, FAST, and just feels right. I love Firefox on the PC, but it doesn’t quite look or feel right on the Mac. Bummer!
Anyway, I agree that any web site that claims to be worth its salt needs to be able to support Safari. I’ll give a pass to application sites like Writley or tools like FCKedit that want to support Safari but Safari won’t let them. But gap.com? Sorry, no excuses there!
December 14th, 2005 at 10:38 am
There is IE for MACs. Lots of people use it.
December 14th, 2005 at 10:42 am
Safari is a niche inside of the Apple niche. The volume of Safari users doesn’t justify much work ensuring safari compatability. If it works… great. If not, it’s probably not worth fixing according to the cost-benefit analysis.
December 14th, 2005 at 10:57 am
Those sites that don’t work with Safari - eff em. Who needs them? Somebody will come along and offer the same service with Safari support and the world will continue to be a happy place.
December 14th, 2005 at 10:57 am
The problem with safari isn’t the lack of an htmlarea but (IIRC) the lack of a javascript range object. The inability to get the user’s selection tends to make developing a wysiwyg editor a bit more difficult.
I tend not to support safari on my dhtml pages. I do not have a mac and do not have regular access to one for debugging. Simple as that.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:04 am
Why do Web 2.0 sites not support Safari? Because it has buggy JavaScript!
At my work I use a (soon to be no more) web learning tool called WebCT. There’s one task (deleting items in a content menu) that never works with Safari and myself, and a few others I’ve asked to, have flied a bug with every new version of Safari. Still no fix.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:14 am
HTMLarea and this works absolutely fine in Safari
Huh? HTMLarea has never worked in Safari for me.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:15 am
One of the websites I run, which is sports oriented, is about 45% FF, 32% Win/IE, and 20% Safari. I know this is probably a special case, but it does happen.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:15 am
Well instead of bashing web 2.0 - bash the guys who don’t understand the true meaning of “web 2.0″.
In my mind it’s not all about ajax and the new funky color schemes - it’s about making a site work for every browser on every platform and for EVERYBODY.
We have both Mac’s and PC’s in the office and Firefox use over IE is enforced on the PC’s. So we can test all sorts of browsers in-house which helps and usually we’re only hacking for IE anyways; Safari and FF are somewhat similar in the way they render things.
The one thing I do hate about Safari and Mac in general - is the way it automatically restyles forms regardless of any apparent css. If I got a guy doing a site on the mac, we have to move it over to a PC to do the forms styling - annoying.
Other than that, Safari is cool with me even though I’m not a mac guy.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:25 am
Amen.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:27 am
One thing that you may not be taking into consideration is that some web developers may not have access to a Safari browser in which they can test their pages.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:28 am
Get a real OS…
December 14th, 2005 at 11:31 am
Anyone who develops on Windows will not have Safari as a target browser for obvious reasons. Safari for Windows would open up more testing against this browser.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:37 am
“I run a non techie website in the UK, and to be perfectly honest Safari/Mac users are less than 0.01% of my users.”
One thing to remember is that there’s a good number of Safari users, tired of sites ‘best viewed in Internet Explorer’ who use freely available utilities to teach Safari to lie to webservers that Safari is actually IE. You’d be amazed at how often this solves incompatibility problems on poorly designed sites/services.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:38 am
Either Support Safari, Or Lose Customers…All Three of Them.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Like Mike B said, it’s all business. What’s the point in writing your website with support for a browser that is used by only a few people that visit your site? It has to be cost-effective for a business to do something otherwise they go out of business. If Safari comprises enough of a business’s user-base then they should make sure they support the browser, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. If you don’t like it, tough. Capitalism works. If the business doesn’t know and alienates its users, it’ll leave and someone that understands will fill the void. What’re you whining about anyways? You already said you use Firefox. If you don’t want to use another browser, don’t go to sites that don’t support your browser. Write them an email or something, but your simple solution is to download Firefox. I _know_ that doesn’t solve the problem of poor support, but if it’s a big enough problem then a good business will see it if there are enough complaints. A bad one won’t and will go out of business. So if this is as big a problem as you think, only the businesses that need to support Safari will stay. Non-business sites and/or free software will just lose users/traffic, but I wouldn’t complain much because the guys are working for free. If they won’t fix it, just find something else. If you can’t find anything else, tough, you could download Firefox. I know that sucks as a solution, but it could be a decent stop-gap while the real problem is fixed.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:56 am
Mike, I completely agree with you. What’s even more ridiculous is that often these fancy sites actually work with safari! What holds us safari users are pity browser detection mechanisms. They basically look at your User-Agent and check if it’s IE or Firefox. Otherwise you are doomed.
More on the topic: there is a huge number of flash-based sites that check is your flash version == 7 and keep banging you out if it is not, even if your version is actually eighth. This is just laughable.
December 14th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
At one of my customer sites, we’ve made every effort to support Safari, but it’s not on our officially supported browser list just because it keeps crashing while running our JavaScript (perfectly legal JavaScript that does not have any trouble on Firefox or MSIE or Opera). Once Apple gets their bug(s) fixed — it should be impossible to crash a browser with JavaScript code, so yes, this is Apple’s bug — we’ll start officially supporting Safari. Even though Mac users only constitute about 5% of the user base at this particular site, we do want everyone to be able to use it.
I imagine many site owners run up against the same instability and say, “It’s not worth spending unknown amounts of time coming up with a workaround for such a small number of people.” MSIE (85%) and Firefox (10%) are big enough to warrant the effort. Safari at less than 5% (a substantial number of Mac users use Firefox) is just not worth the extra engineering effort to support. Simple cost-benefit analysis.
Once Safari gets more stable I’m guessing that’ll increase the number of sites that support it.
December 14th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
It’s pretty bizzare how they flame you at techcrunch. Anyway, I use Macintosh but I prefer using Camino instead of Safari. Why? Because there’s quite alot of application that didn’t quite pan out with safari.
For example, my installation of WordPress doesn’t work well with safari with some of the button missing. Gmail doesn’t fully compatible with Safari because the edit button (you know… stuffs with WYSIWYG) is not viewable.
I don’t know how to design a website for Safari since I never develop a site for a specific browser other than Firefox, but it’s pretty much everyone should embrace the new standard web browser of the web (which in this case is, very sorry, Firefox — or Camino for Mac)
December 14th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
“I can’t support Safari because I don’t have a Mac to test on.”
WTF kind of business are you running if you can’t come up with $500 for a Mac Mini? That’s gotta be the lamest excuse for laziness I’ve ever heard.
December 14th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
Using the excuse that you won’t support Safari because you don’t want to go out and buy a Mac is like saying I won’t support IE6 because I don’t want to buy a PC. Completely inane.
December 16th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Totally laughing myself to death on these comments. Man this is serious to some folk.
I wonder, how many griping people know that the Safari rendering engine is KHTML?
I mean, let’s separate the men from the boys, here. Does “testing” something mean that you open it up in the associated browser and make sure it looks right? Has the content-type “text/html” dumbed us all down to that point?
I agree that the dogmatic approach is often flawed, but should we just be mediocre instead?
Also, why are people comparing Writely to big business?
Everyone here speaks from a different environment, and everyone’s scenario will probably lead to a different choice.
Mike is right–not supporting Safari means you will likely lose customers. But from the business side, is it just one or 100?
December 19th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
Yes, JavaScript support in Safari is, well, surprising. But that’s only the core issue. A bigger problem is that when people can get their hands on a Mac, debugging in Safari gets real confusing because the error messages aren’t helpful. This has improved in the latest 2.02 release, but it’s still a pain. Then the bugs you find make no sense, they usually boil down to incorrect support of the language, which isn’t always easy to work around. Also people have not build up knowledge of what will and what won’t work in Safari, as opposed to IE/Firefox.
December 21st, 2005 at 4:47 pm
The bottom line is this: Mac browsing today means Safari. Period. I don’t know the numbers, but I bet 90% of all Mac users are using Safari. So, if you elect not to support Safari, then for God’s sake don’t try to tell me you have Mac support.
The Gap claims to support Mac users. By “support,” they mean you can install Firefox and their site will work. That’s not good enough. No one says they support Windows if they don’t support IE, and it’s exactly the same thing.
If you say you support Mac, then you MUST support Safari. If you choose not to support Mac, fine — but don’t claim to when you really don’t.
December 21st, 2005 at 5:03 pm
What about the other way around. Do Mac users always support PC users? From what I’ve experienced not… I spend 5 full days repairing html code because he was ’special’ with his Mac… The problem is that most people don’t have enough money to have both (all three if you include Linux) systems.
I really try to make my code as good as possible, but I *just can’t* test it on a Mac…
December 21st, 2005 at 5:27 pm
For the guys without macs: try Browserpool.com. You can download a free software (a VNC client, I think) that gives you remote access to a range of systems, including Mac OS and Linux.
It’s (currently) only available for windows though, that means that mac users still have to spend cash on a PC just to test in IE – or walk over to a friend everytime there’s something to test ;)
December 21st, 2005 at 5:41 pm
Not having a mac around to test on because their to expensive is a poor argument. I got myself a secondhand iMac (dating from ‘98!), installed OS X panther on it (yes, it’s possible) to check all my pages in Safari. Works perfectly and cost me 75 euros (about 90 US dollars)
December 21st, 2005 at 6:15 pm
It’s not just Safari that you are locking out - it’s all WebKit applications. After all, Safari is really just a GUI wrapper around the WebKit framewotk, and WebKit is also used in dozens of other applications on the Mac. For instance, I’m posting this from NetNewsWire’s browser pane.
…oh, and Safari on my 3 year old Powerbook (867 MHz) is still a faster, cleaner browsing experience than Firefox on a 3GHz Dell PC. Go figure ?
December 22nd, 2005 at 4:14 am
I just wanted to point out the blindingly obvous circular argument that a lot of the above posters are using to justify not supporting Safari:
“We don’t suport Safari because only a tiny percentage of our users use Safari”
erm. Maybe only a tiny proportion of your visitors use Safari precisely because you don’t support it ? Maybe they have you flagged as a site that frankly doesn’t care about their custom, and hence have gone elsewhere.
The hard fact is that on the internet there is always another site that offers the same services you do. Mac Safari users will avoid the sites that don’t support them, and use the ones that do.
December 22nd, 2005 at 4:29 am
Andy makes a point, which I will expand on just a little:
Web statistics software is subjective. It is not a capture of your target audience. Just because people do not use your site in Safari does not mean that you have not already run them off!
Most companies I’ve seen often fail to do small group research. No staging whatsoever. They just launch the dang thing and look at the webstats.
That’s just the wrong idea, plain and simple.
December 22nd, 2005 at 5:39 pm
As the old saying goes, there are the lies, the damned lies, and the statistics. People seem to think that “oh, it’s only 1%” or “oh, it’s only 5%” is justification for locking users out of a site, because, come on, who cares about such a tiny percentage? Well, setting aside the fact that most businesses would probably care about that percentage if they knew about it, let’s bring in some other statistics about that measly little percentage of the market:
Mac users are more likely to be educated professionals with good jobs and disposable income.
Mac users are more likely to show strong brand loyalty.
Apple has, for several years, been one of the strongest brands in the holy “youngsters with money to burn” demographic.
In short, Mac users are the sort of people your marketing department drools over. But hey, they’re just a tiny percentage of your users, so who cares? Go ahead and lock ‘em out.
December 23rd, 2005 at 2:17 am
“If you don’t care about Safari, then you’re saying you do not care about the Mac user base. It’s quite simple.”
Can’t quite agree here. There are plenty of alternatives, and while Safari might be the biggest browser on Macintosh, it’s not the only.
And no, I don’t test in Safari.
December 27th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
Lets try an analogy for a second. How about rather then see them as browsers we see them as religions (bear with me, it will make sense soon).
So lets say you have a stats package that tells you what religions people are that come to your site. You see that Jewish people make up 3% of your traffic. So you decide, hey its only 3%, so we’re gonna say you can’t use our site because you’re Jewish. Or, even better, just be tell them “You can come to this site, just convert to one of these other religions.”
How do you think that would come across to your visitors?
December 27th, 2005 at 11:42 pm
Hi, I think this tool will be useful for many of you:
http://snugtech.com/en/safaritest/
As soon as possible I’ll add VNC testing to allow live test of websites.
December 28th, 2005 at 9:36 am
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