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It hurts me to complain about an Apple product, as I use my Mac / iPad / iPhone everyday, and they are the tools on which I run my business, and often my life.

However, it has got the stage now that as a development shop we struggle to manage the mess that is Safari.

Back in the day, we built a Research system, that was developed in the Internet Explorer 7 era, where IE7 was just so off the wall, and the client only used IE7 internally. IE7 had to be specially coded for all the time. The system we developed ended up with a full 1/3 of the code being IE7 specific code.

Now we have moved on, and IE11 is good and solid, Chrome just works, Firefox has issues that can be overcome, but Safari is now a developers’ nightmare. And I see this consistently in what we build and indeed what I use on the Web.

Safari on the Mac and iPad has a number of unforgiving issues, in addition to the very slow response times compared to Chrome.

It has some great features too. The tabbing works well, sync between my platforms is very good, Keychain is a major benefit. Still I end up moving regularly, and soon may move fully to Chrome.

Simple examples that cause me obscure problems, and force me into Chrome daily now:

  • HSBC (and other retail banks) use Trusteer to protect the website for good reason. If you use HSBC in Safari, something in the plugin causes MacMail to not be able to reply. All replies are blank. (Why, we will never know…) Shutting down Safari solves the problem, or using Chrome…
  • Contactually, a mail / marketing tool, just won’t display on Safari anymore. If you try and send a mail it falls off the page, and you can’t get to it. Solution use Chrome
  • Connect, our own platform, has to be coded specifically for Safari for all builds. We have five ongoing right now. Until the Devs have time, I test the releases in Chrome

I know that Apple has lots on it’s plate, but even today our main use for the tools we use is to connect to the Internet, in fact more so.

So come on Apple, pull your finger out and fix this !!