Why is it that Safari gets dragged for not supporting an endless rabbit hole of “web app” standards, and nobody cares that Chrome and Firefox haven’t found the time to get P3 color working in five or six years?
> Why is it that Safari gets dragged for not supporting an endless rabbit hole of “web app” standards
Because there's a contingent of loud HNers who reflexively drag Apple and Safari because they believe:
A. Apple is intentionally limiting Safari to protect its App Store business
B. Apple is some kind of illegal monopoly for only allowing (for now) WebKit as the browser engine on iOS and iPadOS; therefore Apple is evil.
C. Safari is still the buggy and slow to adopt web standards browser from 5 years ago, even though most of them haven't used or tested against it since then. Some of these people claim Safari is the new IE; either they have amnesia or weren't doing web development when IE 6 was the bane of every developer's existence; otherwise they would know better.
D. All the above… and more.
> nobody cares that Chrome and Firefox haven’t found the time to get P3 color working in five or six years?
Unfortunately because Chrome has approximately 70% of the browser market and Firefox's marketshare is in the single digits, if a feature doesn't ship in either browser, it's like the feature itself doesn't exist.
Same thing with the :has() selector… the most anticipated CSS feature probably ever. Safari shipped it in March of 2022 and usual suspects acted like it was no big deal. Chrome didn't ship it until the end of August and Firefox still hasn't shipped.
And even though progressive enhancement is a thing, many of the most vocal posters on HN don't seem to practice it.
They could use the following media query to test for a P3 display, supported by Chrome and Safari:
What lead you to believe nobody cares? One of my biggest complaints about Firefox is it is still in the stone ages of doing ANYTHING outside or sRGB, even video. Chrome at least has long had video and image support and has been working heavily on canvas, CSS, and WebGL color space implementations for display-p3 and rec.2020 as well as participating in the standardization of it. The hard part here is it has to work on more than the way their OS does wide gamut with a single color alternate color space.
An overly-simplistic explanation may be that most engineers don’t care about “how red a red is”, whereas most designers are super interested in their reds being very red.
Both camps can be very vocal, but most of us probably hover around other engineers and sparingly around designers.
> An overly-simplistic explanation may be that most engineers don’t care about “how red a red is”
It certainly is overly-simplistic.
The Display P3 color space is about 50% larger than sRGB… there are many thousands of colors that occur naturally that can't be displayed in the sRGB color space, yet our cameras and phones have been capturing these colors for years.
Not being able to display graphics and images at full fidelity is a form of information loss and most engineers shouldn't be okay with that.
Apple's article "Improving Color on the Web (July 1, 2016)" [1] where they describe how a 2015 iMac and a 2016 iPad Pro had the ability to support Display P3 and how it's supported in the operating system and browser.
The demo picture includes someone's orange sneakers standing on grass; many of the green colors of the grass are outside the sRGB color space. Sure, most browsers will display the closest color it can display but the picture isn't as good as it should be.
Lost among the recent fuss about image support (JPEG XL, AVIF, WebP) is being able to use better color spaces natively without having to attach or embed a Display P3 color profile (which regular JPEG requires) which are often stripped out by CMSes and unaware web developers.
Using Display P3 would probably save online merchants millions of dollars in support costs and returns since fabric dyes are often outside of the sRGB color space and can't be displayed accurately for those customers using (at least today) Chrome or Firefox on non-iOS devices.
What's odd is the latest Pixels from Google don't seem to support Display P3 but every device from Apple except the entry level iPads do. The iPhone 7 from 2016 supports Display P3.
> Not being able to display graphics and images at full fidelity is a form of information loss and most engineers shouldn't be okay with that.
Ultimately, I think it depends pretty highly on the definition of “okay” (as far as the web is concerned, we’ve historically always been okay with many levels of compromise), but I don’t think I’m off the mark in suggesting that the in the hierarchy of concerns of the typical web developer (whatever that may be), P3 color simply isn’t ranked very highly. So “doesn’t care” probably isn’t an entirely accurate way of painting it, but like I said…it’s an over-simplified explanation.
Personally, I like to think that I’m pretty aesthetically inclined compared to a lot of my peers, but this is actually the first I’ve even heard of Safari supporting it!
I think it's also an example of skating to where the puck is going… clearly Apple understood the importance of better color support on the web was going to be important nearly 10 years ago and started working on the hardware and software that would enable it to happen.
> Chrome and Firefox haven’t found the time to get P3 color working in five or six years?
The irony: Chrome and Firefox do support Display P3 on iOS because they use WebKit as their rendering engine. And yet Chrome doesn't support Display P3 on Android…
