Safari in Windows - come on, who really bothers?



  • So having been burning the midnight oil getting an app ready for a customer, we have had it fail UAT because it doesn't work in Safari when run on a Windows machine.


    What happens is that it spontaneously hangs up, because of some damn-fool bug with its AJAX calls whereby it appears to lose the session ID and thereby goes into alzheimer mode.


    We announce this to the customer, who say, "That's no good at all, we advertise all our products as working in all browsers in all machines." And don't we know it - we had to provide a "Pure" presentation because apparently there are troglodytes out there who won't allow javascript to run on their machines. Bloody nightmare.


    "But there's a bug in Safari such that it doesn't work reliably in Windows."


    "Humph. None of our other applications have this problem. We don't believe you. You sort out the bug in your application, then maybe we can approach the negotiating table again.


    It took us the best part of a week bashing away at some of their live web pages in Safari on Windows to demonstrate that yes, their existing sites do exhibit this problem with Safari.


    "HAA-ha!" we almost said, but instead offered a compromise: on detection of Safari running on Windows, we force the application into the Pure presentation, which, as it does not run Javascript, will not exhibit those problems with Safari in Windows.


    So what's the proportion of users who do regularly use this configuration? Very few, one would surmise ...



  • Safari Windows has been discontinued for like 2 years now. Do they really mean ALL browsers? Even discontinued ones? Like Netscape 3?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Safari Windows has been discontinued for like 2 years now. Do they really mean ALL browsers? Even discontinued ones? Like Netscape 3?

    May 2012, so a little over a year. If your policy is based on market-share it's absolutely right to discontinue support, but if based on time it's a little too soon.
    It would be "funny" to get IE4 to run and show your client the broken mess it produces... (right? right? Please tell me you didn't have to make it compatible with IE 6 or lower)



  • On one hand, I hate those people. "Oh, our product doesn't work on <some totally random and probably obsolete configuration that maybe two people in the whole world use>? FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY!

    On the other, I can only imagine the hilarity that's going to ensue when one of them stumbles upon the fact that there apparently are people using telnet to connect to webpages.



  • This is why we always list targeted browsers at project onset, and review that with the client using actual usage numbers from their tracking.



  • "Although it lacks the sophisticated user interface of Lynx"

    I've never heard anyone call the UI of Lynx sophisticated.

    Oh, wait.  Look at the date of the post.  4/1.  Yeah.  We've been had.

    Although, I believe the last 2 minutes hate on Stallman noted that he reads web pages by having a program wget them and then email to himself.  That's certainly doing it wrong.



  • @dtech said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Safari Windows has been discontinued for like 2 years now. Do they really mean ALL browsers? Even discontinued ones? Like Netscape 3?

    May 2012, so a little over a year. If your policy is based on market-share it's absolutely right to discontinue support, but if based on time it's a little too soon.
    It would be "funny" to get IE4 to run and show your client the broken mess it produces... (right? right? Please tell me you didn't have to make it compatible with IE 6 or lower)

    Not IE6 or lower, thank goodness, but we're having a challenging time getting it straight for the non-CSS3 browsers that are IE7 and 8.

    Never mind ... I'd better get back to it, there's still work to be done ...



  • @stinerman said:

    "Although it lacks the sophisticated user interface of Lynx"

    I've never heard anyone call the UI of Lynx sophisticated.

    Oh, wait.  Look at the date of the post.  4/1.  Yeah.  We've been had.

    Although, I believe the last 2 minutes hate on Stallman noted that he reads web pages by having a program wget them and then email to himself.  That's certainly doing it wrong.

    What was this in response to?



  • @stinerman said:

    "Although it lacks the sophisticated user interface of Lynx"

    I've never heard anyone call the UI of Lynx sophisticated.


    There was and I suspect still is a good use case for using lynx or it's tiny bit more advanced sibling links though. They happen to work on 80x2 Braille terminal (yes, that is two lines).



  • @stinerman said:

    "Although it lacks the sophisticated user interface of Lynx"

    I've never heard anyone call the UI of Lynx sophisticated.

    Oh, wait.  Look at the date of the post.  4/1.  Yeah.  We've been had.

    Alarm bells didn't ring when you read the quote from "April Erste, Public Relations Manager at the First National Bank of Oki Koki"?



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    On the other, I can only imagine the hilarity that's going to ensue when one of them stumbles upon the fact that there apparently are people using telnet to connect to webpages.

    Pfff, telnet? Everyone knows that nc is the new hotness.



  • Mea culpa. My resistance to April Fools' jokes tends to be somewhat impaired in June.

    Granted, my previous post still applies - the people I mentioned aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either.


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