Nolan Lawson is a software developer at Squarespace, focusing on Android and the mobile Web. This piece originally ran on his site, nolanlawson.com., and it's syndicated with Lawson's permission. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of Ars Technica or of Squarespace.
Last weekend I attended EdgeConf, a conference populated by many of the leading lights in the Web industry. It featured panel talks and breakout sessions with a focus on technologies that are just now starting to emerge in browsers, so there was a lot of lively discussion around Service Worker, Web Components, Shadow DOM, Web Manifests, and more.
EdgeConf’s hundred-odd attendees were truly the heavy hitters of the Web community. The average Twitter follower count in any given room was probably in the thousands, and all the major browser vendors were represented—Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera. We had lots of fun peppering them with questions about when they might release such-and-such API.
There was one company not in attendance, though, and it served as the proverbial elephant in the room that no one wanted to discuss. I heard it referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain fruit company.” Its glowing logo illuminated nearly every laptop in the room, and yet it seemed like nobody dared speak its name. Of course I’m talking about Apple.
I think there is a general feeling among Web developers that Safari is lagging behind the other browsers, but when you go to a conference like EdgeConf, it really strikes you just how wide the gap is. All of the APIs I mentioned above are not implemented in Safari, and Apple has shown no public interest in them. When you start browsing caniuse.com, the list goes on and on.
Even when Apple does implement newer APIs, it often does it halfheartedly. To take an example close to my heart, IndexedDB was proposed more than five years ago and has been available in IE, Firefox, and Chrome since 2012. Apple, on the other hand, didn’t release IndexedDB until mid-2014, and when it did, it unveiled a bafflingly incompetent implementation that was so bad, it’s been universally derided as unusable. (LocalForage, PouchDB, and YDN-DB, the major IndexedDB wrappers, all ignore Safari’s version and fall back to WebSQL.)