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.
About Mike Rundle
What about Opera?
:)
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.
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.
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”
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.
The GAP doesn’t support Safari? Funny, some GAP people sit on Apple’s Board of Directors.
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.
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!
There is IE for MACs. Lots of people use it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
HTMLarea and this works absolutely fine in Safari
Huh? HTMLarea has never worked in Safari for me.
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.
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.
Amen.
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.
Get a real OS…
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.
“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.
Either Support Safari, Or Lose Customers…All Three of Them.
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.
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.
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.
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)
“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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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…
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 ;)
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)
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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?
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.