I'm confused why Apple should get to compare the stuff in their Technology Preview, instead of the actual browser that people are using day to day. It took Apple eons to ship `navigator.getUserMedia`. This was a serious hindrance to those that wanted to provide a cross-browser video upload experience. Yet if we went by their Tech Preview, one would be able to argue that they supported it.
Apple if very frustrating in this way. They have a massive amount of resources, yet they choose not to put those resources into developing their browser. That's fine, that's their choice. But telling everyone that they support something that they only "intend to support at some future date" is less than honest.
In this case there Non-tech preview version of safari scored higher, due to a bug in the testing framework which was not correctly updating the tech preview version used.
Yet they still used the tech preview number which was much lower, in their slides
That's why there's uproar, chrome dev tools team showed the lower score which was caused by a non-updating test framework and people ran with it
MacOS 11 isn't allowed(?) to be virtualized, so the Safari TP, which is tied to MacOS updates, couldn't be updated.
> That's why there's uproar
Was there an uproar? There were some objections from some Safari devs that they understood the difficulty in getting the latest number since the web platform test runner can't run the latest Safari Tech Preview (which they've also known for some time), but since the whole point of this was to show how browsers have improved their compatibility on this set of tests, it was hurtful and counterproductive to leave out their latest work. Chrome devs apologized and now we have this article, and it looks like the test runner will start running WebKitGTK for this set of tests so at least the Compat 2021 dashboard[1] will show the latest results.
Note that web-platform-tests has frequent runs of the included browsers in both nightly/dev/tech preview configurations and in stable configurations. And in all browsers there can be things which are enabled in these experimental builds which aren't going to ship in the next release. One can argue of course that it makes more sense to make all the comparisons on the basis of what's actually shipped to users, but that wouldn't have changed the story here.
Agreed. In the article he mentions that it's only fair to include tech preview features because the chrome team gets to include canary features. However, there is a clear process from canary -> production that doesn't exist with safari tech preview.
Except that there's a very big gap between what's being actually shipped in each browser. Comparing Chrome edge with Firefox edge is okay since they have a similar release schedule, Safari is much much slower though.
I double checked on Wiki, it seems for the past 6 years Safari has been on a 6 months release cycle. Major version in September and minor release in March / April.
So this isn't as bad as I thought. The difference being previously their development speed have been very slow so it felt not doing enough. They picked up their progress since Safari 13 and are now catching up in lots of areas. You will notice Safari 15 TP release note is getting long with every release.
So may be in terms of webpage it is not that bad anymore. I know people who develop Web Apps will have a different list to complain about :).
I remember seeing a tweet by the Safari team that they have more openings than ever; great news, they have a lot of catch up to do! I really hope they can gain an equal footing and start having a better (bigger?) impact on the web.
And apple still has crippled version of the browser available to native app developers... that lacks support for navigator.getUserMedia and ServiceWorker...
Apple if very frustrating in this way. They have a massive amount of resources, yet they choose not to put those resources into developing their browser. That's fine, that's their choice. But telling everyone that they support something that they only "intend to support at some future date" is less than honest.