Apple, I hate you (again) and the web design community too

[nudone]

Safari is the last browser I test web sites on. I don't use Macs, I'll only touch one if I really have to. So I've been trying several methods to avoid using a real bit of Apple hardware if I think I can get away with a simulator of some sort. But none of these simulators work 100% so I've finally accepted I need to use real Apple hardware.

So, I bought a cheap Mini Mac with Lion installed. This allowed me to download and install Apple's Xcode developer crap which comes with iPad and iPhone simulators. I thought it worth the cost as this was guaranteed to work perfectly - it's all Apple hardware and software and Xcode is designed for developing Apple apps. It has got to work.

But it doesn't. It is totally pathetic. The simulators are not 100% accurate. Which, to me, means they are a bad joke. I suppose I should expect this kind of thing from the messiahs of marketing manipulation.

What I don't like is that I've been searching for hours for people discussing this problem and I can only find two posts throughout Google - both of the them by the same person. It appears that the whole web design community is oblivious to how bad things are, well, all except the other guy and me.

I'm now going to be forced to use a real hardware iPad and a real hardware Mac and a real hardware iPhone (which I'll have to buy) just so I can test for the occasional "bug" in Safari's rendering of web pages.

Thanks Apple. Thanks for being absolutely, totally, rubbish. (I'll forgive the web design/development community as they are mostly Apple fan-boys anyway, i.e. already completely deluded.)

[KynloStephen66515]

If it doesn't work on Safari - Screw em...As long as it works in FF, Chrome, IE and Opera, nobody really cares.  Make them use a real browser instead of spending a fortune on closed-source systems.

[Stoic Joker]

If it doesn't work on Safari - Screw em...As long as it works in FF, Chrome, IE and Opera, nobody really cares.  Make them use a real browser instead of spending a fortune on closed-source systems.

-Stephen66515 (December 16, 2011, 02:03 PM)

Much as I hate all things Apple, I must disagree. Just because someone is using an iPad doesn't mean they are not going to want to goto/shop at your website. Apples native environment is/uses/requires Safari. So if you want to get money from the Apple folk (assuming the poor bastards have any left...) or just repeat visitors you gotta test to make sure your site will display properly on an Apple...with Safari (operated by a drunkin crackhead).


Last time I checked Safari on an Apple only supported about 6 if the new for HTML5 options. Oddly enough Safari on Windows supports all of them. Probably because Apple is to chickenshit to do any real testing on their own OS for fear of looking un-perfect.

P.S. I'm drunk...

[rgdot]

Safari, I don't even try to test. Opera is great and all but many elements render differently than all other browsers but I won't try fixes nevermind for Safari.

[Renegade]

@nudone - My sympathies.  Such are the frustrations when you're not drinking the kewlaid.

[TaoPhoenix]

I am guessing that by "Safari" we mean "Safari on the specific pieces of Apple hardware". I instantly thought "well why not test Safari (on Windows) unless that's a source of more errors because it's "dogfood Safari" or something.

Meanwhile I've been bitten by Opera a couple of times too on my hobby pages.

[KynloStephen66515]

Would be nice if there was a universal standard for cross-browser compatibility...shame it will never happen...no idea why ever Browser developer opts to render things totally differently.

Rendering websites in a different manner, on a new browser is a very bad idea, purely because nobody is willing to even bother trying to support your platform.  Look at how popular Opera is, and how many websites that still don't support it.  Look at how many websites still don't render for ANYTHING other than IE, and even some of those dont even support the newer builds of IE.

The web design market is a complete mess because of how painful it can be to test for all possible browsers.

[mahesh2k]

Test it on Chrome and Firefox, forget about the rest. I mean seriously, there is no point in testing for IE and safari.

[nudone]

I do agree that it's all a bit of a waste of time to test for Safari, I'd rather forget about it if I had the choice. I just seem to get clients passed onto me that expect their sites to work on their own iPad, which is reasonable; the annoying thing is that almost no one else on the planet will be viewing these websites on an iPad.

It would be nice if I could think of a good reason to use this Mac Mini now that I know it isn't going to be as useful as I had hoped. Any ideas to use it in a duel Mac and PC setup? I can't think of a good reason to use it over my PC.

[Renegade]

A friend of mine put Windows XP on his Mac Mini, and LOVED it. He said it was the best XP box he'd ever had.

As for testing...

Forget IE 6 & 7. They're GONE!

SING HALLELUJAH~!

THERE IS A GOD! IE 6 AND 7 ARE DEAD~!

WAHOO~!

HALLELUJAH~!

PRAISE GOD~!

http://news.cnet.com...ead-browser-walking/

Known in the past for taking a soft touch when it comes to forcing users to update their browsers, Microsoft's pulling off the kid gloves and going for a bullet to the head.

JESUS~! THANK YOU~!


Now, as for Safari... Sorry. It sucks ass, but you need to test for it. If you don't... You're being irresponsible.

Testing should include:

Dolphin
Opera mobile
Opera mini
Safari - tab & phone

And a few others.

Sucks.

This is one of the reasons why I think the web is just so ****ing retarded so often.

Oh, and I also hate web devs more times than not. Because they just don't test... Grrr...

[eleman]

Not testing for an environment used by approximately 5% of your clientele is not a good idea. Many businesses have such slim margins that 5% really makes the difference between red and black.

Don't underestimate small percentages, or overestimate large ones. Assume that the government has come up with a "terrorist test". The test has 99.9% accuracy. Also assume that there are 1000 terrorists and 1 billion (1,000,000,000) innocent people.

We make everyone take the test, and 999 out of 1000 terrorists are caught. Neat right?

Not so.

We just sent 1 million innocent people to Guantanamo.

In a nutshell, it is always a good idea to test for 100% of the target set, if it is reasonably possible.

[nudone]

I was typing on an iPad for my previous post so didn't really want to say much - other than something flippant.

The whole web is very retarded, definitely 100% spot-on there Renegade. Why we have to have all these engines rendering things in ever so pernickety ways I don't understand. Who gains from not following a standard, why can't each browser just do the job properly and conform to a single standard - who is it going to hurt? What possible harm will it do to make each browser render exactly the same - what imaginary war do the browser developers think they are fighting. Or is it simply down to incompetence being unable to develop an engine that actually matches standards and guidelines - or are the guidelines not precise enough to follow (I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they aren't).

So, yeah, I'll be testing out Safari. On the PC and on the Mac, and on the iPad and iPhone and on whatever else piece of sh*t device they bring out in a year or two.

Honestly, I understand why different web engines might render things differently from each other - but for Safari to work inconsistently across Apple devices (and PC), that's just beyond hateful. Well, for this Xcode crap to not even simulate what it is meant to simulate - I mean, WHAT. Are you kidding. Why. Who is developing Safari? Are they deliberately making each of their devices behave differently - are they all insane.

What makes me angry (as Renegade posted elsewhere) is that the typical advice from the "web community" would be to go out and buy a Mac, stick Xcode on it and then happily test everything - EXCEPT THAT THIS DOESN'T WORK.

I don't come into contact with any real smug Apple-heads. If I ever do, and they are web designers/developers, I think I will be forced to smash their Mac over their heads. I'm sure that would seem like a perfectly rational thing to do given the mental torture Apple is determined to put me through.

[Renegade]

The whole web is very retarded, definitely 100% spot-on there Renegade.

-nudone (December 17, 2011, 08:21 AM)

I probably understated my loathing of the web.

NSFW and a bit honest and a rant

I hate web designers. They are incompetent most of the time. (yeah... ranty - maybe a "bit" of an exaggeration... but not by much...)

I loathe web advocates. They wank to JavaScript and understand nothing.

I detest the corporate whoredom that seeks to fuck us all.

I fucking absolutely hate the shit the web has become. It's pure, unadulterated, fucking whoredom and shit.

Like just how fucking hard is it to test shit? Yeah... It's a pain in the ass, but Jesus fucking Christ... If you can't hit the big 4 or 5, fuck you. You're a complete shitfuck and should be neutered so you can't fucking further infect humanity with your idiocy.

But this is par for the course.

Cocksucking sales-wankers oversell shit so project managers are fucking hamstrung and then demand idiotic levels of productivity from web designers that have almost no understanding of anything because they've been forced into this tiny corner of shitdom. They then hack shit up in idiotic ways... Christ... Like WTF?

It happens again and again and again and never stops.

Anyone that puts a character restriction on a password should be sent off on a fucking ice-flow to die. Ok, maybe something reasonable like a number of characters, but not fucking 12 or less! Those retards should just be removed from the gene pool... jesus... like how fucking stupid can you be!

Just how fucking hard is it to salt and hash a password? Jesus Christ! This shit is fucking near trivial!

Just how fucking hard is it to not fuck up a postal code or a telephone number? Jesus fuck! This isn't that fucking hard to do.

Yeah... It takes a bit of time. But it's not like it's that fucking hard to figure out that not all postal codes are 5 digits or that not all telephone numbers are 7 digits. Jesus fuck... It's just too fucking simple! How do people possibly fuck this shit up?

But we all know that the web has been perverted in sick and insideous ways that go way beyond these simply technical rants of mine. Those are entirely different.

Now, there is a lot of fantastic stuff on the web. I love it. Like just how cool is the front page to TED.com?

There's a lot of brilliance happening out there. There's a lot of wicked cool stuff that just blows your mind.

There are a ton of amazing people out there that are putting out articles and videos that are just stupendous.

I love that I can just pull up a site and get some cool video. I love that there are people out there that the mainstream marginalize, and now I have access to them.

The web is ****ing amazing. I love it.

I just hate the idiocy that permeates so much of it right now.

[Edvard]

As far as I've been able to ascertain, there IS a standard which started with the HTML standard^w written long ago by Tim Berners-Lee and Dan Connolly, and now maintained by the IETF and W3C.

Problem (as I see it) is two-fold (well, three...);
1 - The original HTML standard was built from the ground up to be extended and improved by the people who used and programmed for it:

...the first proposal for an HTML specification...was notable for its acknowledgement of the NCSA Mosaic browser's custom tag for embedding in-line images, reflecting the IETF's philosophy of basing standards on successful prototypes.

(emphasis mine)
2 - (or 1A) Which I'm sure inspired Microsoft to inject their own ways and means into their Internet Explorer product, hoping to force new standards, which they could sell programming tools for (see what they did thar?).
3 - Which led to other browsers and their sponsors doing the same, no-longer-useful features being abandoned as the standard evolved (but left in coding tools and websites to languish for years to come), standards being incompletely supported (safari only complying with  with 6 of the HTML5 standards, IE8 leaving out support for the <abbr> tag, among others), new elements like Javascript and Flash (and Microsoft's 'me too' Silverlight) simply making up their own rules as they went along, etc. ad nauseum...

So, yes, blame everyone:
Web designers who rely on scripts and such more than they need to.
Browser makers who don't implement complete standards, and inject new stuff as they see fit.
The architects of the standards themselves who left Pandora's box a little too open from the beginning.

  - flavored with a grain of salt

P.S. As far as Apple not even implementing their own stuff correctly... wow, that's quite a facepalm.

[nudone]

Thanks for adding a bit an explanation for the insanity, Edvard.

We may as well just all embrace the chaos.

[nudone]

I may have got carried away with my Apple-hate (is there any ever a reason not to hate Apple though).

It now looks like the simulators that come with Apple's Xcode do simulate what they are meant to, at least, more than I thought.

The problem I was experiencing with the simulator was because I was comparing an iPad 1 Safari against the Xcode 4 simulator of an iPad.

It appears that the latest Xcode version is simulating the iPad 2 - which also means that the iPad 1 Safari appears to behave differently to the iPad 2 Safari.

Or, it could be that the differences are between the OS 4 and 5 running on an iPad.

So, in some ways I was completely wrong and jumping the gun to blame Apple's slack development tools. Now it seems the real problem is that I will have to test things on an iPad 1 and an iPad 2 to try and spot any bugs.

Or I could just give up.

(I can't wait until iPad 3 arrives. No doubt that will render things differently in Safari too.)