Skype for Web Drops Support for Safari

Chance Miller:

In a statement to VentureBeat, Microsoft explained that Skype for Web uses a “calling and real-time media” framework that functions differently across the various browsers. Thus, it decided to prioritize Skype for Web support in Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome[…]

Previously:

• We Need Chrome No More
• Microsoft EdgeHTML Replaced by Chromium

Update (2019-03-11): My hospital’s Web site just stopped working in Safari. The login page just endlessly reloads itself. It works in Chrome and Firefox.

Update (2019-04-09): Jeff Johnson, quoting the IRS Web site:

We cannot recommend Safari, due to current compatibility and display issues.

Update (2019-04-16): Gus Mueller:

More and more sites aren’t working in Safari, or they are just stupid slow or rendered bad and I’m having to use Chrome more and it’s making me sad.

Johnathan Nightingale:

When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself.

When chrome launched things got complicated, but not in the way you might expect. They had a competing product now, but they didn’t cut ties, break our search deal - nothing like that. In fact, the story we kept hearing was, “We’re on the same side. We want the same things.”

I think our friends inside google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other.

But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. gmail & gdocs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as “incompatible.”

All of this is stuff you’re allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we’d say “hey what gives?”

And every time, they’d say, “oops. That was accidental. We’ll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.”

Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We’ll fix it soon. We want the same things. We’re on the same team.

There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?

I’m all for “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence” but I don’t believe google is that incompetent.

I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done.

Update (2019-05-30): I’m now having problems accessing the US Social Security site with Safari, and accessing the Internet Archive fails with a kCFErrorHTTPParseFailure error, despite working in other browsers.

Update (2019-05-31): Colin Cornaby:

I still use Safari as my only web browser. But it’s bumming me out that more and more I have to open Chrome for a one off use of a web page.

I don’t know if Chrome is breaking things or Safari is falling behind. But it feels like the early days of Safari again.

Update (2019-07-08): Tyler Hall:

Except that Shutterfly’s website uploader doesn’t work in Safari. Like everyone else doing “modern” web development these days, I’m sure they’re only testing in Chrome.

Update (2019-07-23): Amazon, when I clicked on a Prime Day deal using Safari:

Sorry, the browser you’re using is incompatible with this promotion. Please open this page using one of the compatible browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

Update (2019-08-29): The Subaru configurator works in Chrome and Firefox, but not in Safari.

Update (2019-11-02): Safari repeatedly failed in updating my billing information on Microsoft’s site, whereas Firefox worked.

Update (2019-11-27): Paddle stores don’t work with Safari 12, which is the latest version that macOS 10.12 can use.

Update (2020-02-07): Charlotte Henry:

I’d regularly get warning messages at the top of the browser telling me that a webpage was using “significant memory” and affecting the performance of my Mac. Those webpages would invariably become so slow as to be useless. Not exactly helpful when trying to do research for articles I’m writing. This does not happen in Chrome, and those same pages work smoothly.

Furthermore, Google Hangouts, which I use on a daily basis, can often go wrong in Safari. It also does not have a plugin for sending webpages to my Kindle, which I like to do if I want to read an article at a later pint. Even mundane things like moving tabs seem to work better in Chrome.

Update (2020-02-24): After filling out all the information to book a hotel stay, Safari wouldn’t show the button to agree to the terms. I tried again with Intelligent Tracking Prevention off, and it still failed, but it worked in Chrome and Firefox.

Update (2020-04-17): Luc Vandal:

The fact that after over a year @zendesk still hasn’t fixed Safari support is inexcusable.

Firefox Google Google Chrome Mac macOS 10.14 Mojave Microsoft Paddle Safari Skype Web

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