Luckily I've never had to bother with supporting Safari, but isn't one of the only good things about dealing with it that customers generally update Safari relatively quickly?
I don't really understand the Safari release schedule myself (browser updates only seem to come with combined operating system updates?) so I don't know what's keeping users from updating their browsers. Are these Apple users all running vulnerable browsers for some reason?
I find it nice that Safari <15.4 is still considered a valid target for your company, given that its market share is about that of Firefox (https://caniuse.com/usage-table). Must be hell to develop for, though.
Perhaps the upcoming inclusion of non-Safari browsers on iOS will help users stuck on old versions of the OS use a normal browser so these problems can go away. Chrome and Edge manage to release monthly updates that almost everyone installs so hopefully that option comes available to iOS users as well.
1. How do you get away with not supporting the second-most popular browser? [1]
2.
> help users stuck on old versions of the OS use a normal browser
Funny, iOS tends to be upgraded further back (ie support older devices), and faster [2], than (say) Android [3], because Apple is aggressive about updating users.
This. Why is there not a billion devices using QQBrowser or something other obscure at place two? Mobile IMHO is different - not every website will work.
Which really sucks on iPads, because not real free adblockers, faulty SVG rending in safari for a project I ran two years ago, and less support for browser features (PWA features mostly, so classical web often kinda works) makes browsing the web with touch often easy, yet very hard, when something is broken or nagging.
Depends on the industry and use-case. Some line-of-business apps might be designed without caring about any mobile/responsive usage. Others might be meant to be used at a specific workstation that has a computer as part of it (for example, the app might be controlling some equipment), or in some other environment in which mobile usage makes no sense.
> 1. How do you get away with not supporting the second-most popular browser?
Quite easily: desktop SaaS web application; no Macs in the office and no interest in buying them specifically for iOS; no customers using Macs. Also, Safari works Well Enough (TM) for people not to complain about the minor CSS offsets and if they do they can always install Firefox. I don't work there anymore, but I doubt any customer will even try to switch to Macs in the next five years.
For my personal use cases: if my site doesn't work on Safari, I can't legally test it on any of my devices so I don't bother. Even Microsoft published a cross-platform browser, I'll care about Safari the moment I can apt-install safari-dev/winget install safari.
> Funny, iOS tends to be upgraded further back (ie support older devices), and faster [2], than (say) Android [3], because Apple is aggressive about updating users.
Yes, iOS updates devices faster. However, Chrome isn't tied to the OS.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: my perfectly good iPad 2 is useless despite its quite competent CPU purely because there are no browsers for it. Had it run Android, I could just install Chrome and use it for slower but quite usable browsing; with the Safari lockdown the device became useless.
You can't install an up-to-date version of Safari onto iOS 15 because of Apple's architecture decisions, despite iOS 15 still receiving plenty of other updates, which means you're restricted in features if you can't install the latest major upgrade.
Google decoupled WebKit from the system image years ago and has always allowed alternative browser engines like Firefox, which means you can install the latest version of Firefox on Android 5.0 (November 2014) or Chrome on Android 7.0 (March 2016), but not Safari 16 on iOS 8 (September 2014) or iOS 10 (September 2016). My Oneplus One (April 2014) still browses the web fine, and it's a mere budget device compared to something like an iPhone!
> 1. How do you get away with not supporting the second-most popular browser? [1]
Not speaking for the OP, but the internal tools I work on only supprt Chrome - you can only login to these systems using Single Sign On, which is only possible to login via Chrome (Google SSO). Makes devving loads easier!
I don't really understand the Safari release schedule myself (browser updates only seem to come with combined operating system updates?) so I don't know what's keeping users from updating their browsers. Are these Apple users all running vulnerable browsers for some reason?
I find it nice that Safari <15.4 is still considered a valid target for your company, given that its market share is about that of Firefox (https://caniuse.com/usage-table). Must be hell to develop for, though.
Perhaps the upcoming inclusion of non-Safari browsers on iOS will help users stuck on old versions of the OS use a normal browser so these problems can go away. Chrome and Edge manage to release monthly updates that almost everyone installs so hopefully that option comes available to iOS users as well.