alt Hacker NewsYou clearly haven’t tried to design anything complicated that has to run on safari iOS. Safari iOS is a massive piece of shit. I’ve been working on a web game for a while now using canvas and most of my pain comes from making it compatible with safari. So much stuff is broken on safari so you have to find work arounds. Like a simple but annoying one, CSS filters don’t work on canvas so you have to write all those filters your self and apply them by using imgData.
Also the constant crashing when using canvas and the web audio api, it’s a disaster to be honest and it feels intentional, like they want me to write an app instead so they can rent seek.
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As a non-web developer I'm interested if anyone can answer this question:
If you're designing for <X> browser, how hard is it to make it work on <Y> browser?
Because if it's hard when targeting Chromium and adapting to {Safari,Firefox} but easy when targeting Safari and adapting to {Chromium,Firefox} then honestly it seems like Chromium is the problem.
What I want to distinguish is the biases in being used to programming in one environment and actual ease of programming for an arbitrary browser. Regardless of what official standards are, there are "in practice" standards, what is used in practice.
What would be nefarious is if Google is promoting people to program in ways that are not compatible with other browsers, cementing its monopoly. (This may even be achieved without explicit direction. Achievable simply by Chromium devs building tools for devs but not carrying about compatibility with other browsers). After all, the web is for everyone, but just because it's open doesn't mean monopolies/oligopolies/collusion/<other nefarious actions> can't happen.
Tdlr: does developing on chromium encourage browser incompatibility?
The argument which has been provided so far about why Safari is crippled is that it does not implement non-standard Chromium-only features. There are other problems with Safari, but they are not found in the page we are discussing.
Seeing that there are cross platform game engines, it seems to me that making a web game is not the best way to go. How do you plan to monetize it? Get people to put their credit card on your website? How is your web game performing on Android? Have you tested the performance on the typical mid range Android phone?