List of benefits given by some random company to its developer,
1- Medical, Dental, AD&D
2- Generous paid time off and holidays
3- Free fitness center in our building
4- Flexible schedule
6- Mac or PC, your choice
7- We and our customer don't use IE
8- Starbucks on the 1st floor
9- Generous 401k match
...

But I like 7th one the most!

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

I feel like premium content should be available via paid (ad-free), free (ads), or through web user small scale crypto mining, at the users discretion obviously.

I don't get why we have to have these ad blockers and ad creators trying to one up each other. The *option* for low-performance crypto mining while on the page would be cool to have as a choice.

So, I browse to a video livestream and an annoying ad starts before the livestream is shown. Furthermore, the page jumps around because of a cookie notification that also blocks some UI elements at the top.

Note: this is the website of a public (government-paid) national news website with very high standards and a good reputation.

Action 1: refresh page; I hope the ad is skipped. Nope, annoying ad restarts. Page jumps around again because of the cookie notification.

Action 2: accept cookies to remove notification blocking the top UI (it's OK, I know it can't actually save any cookies on my machine). Instead of some nice JS doing it for me in the background, the page refreshes because you know, HTTP requests and whatnot.

Annoying ad restarts again... FML 🤬

Lessons to be learned from this for any web dev: these annoyances can and *will* exponentially get worse if used simultaneously against your users, instead of being used to help or inform your users.

As a user of you website, I want to watch a livestream. I don't care what stupid legislation forced you to shove a fucking cookie notification in my face. Make sure it is not annoying me to the point that I close you website and take minutes to rant about it!

Also, give me the freedom of choice to watch an ad or not. You and I both know that some ads simply are not for me. Better save yourself and myself the bandwidth.

And go get good at web development. You're a news site. That's more than just text and images. If you want great apps, social media coverage, videos, live streams, blogs, etc. go get some better web devs. Your current web frontend devs only qualify to get fired.

How is it that Facebook ads play right before the climax or high point of any video. Just when I'm interested to see what happens next, bam, like clock work, an ad pops up. It does not seem to be a fixed time, but more to do with the specific content of the video. Is it just me or is there some sinister algorithm at work that can detect the moment in a video the viewer will be most interested? so the viewer will have no choice but to sit through the advert to see what happens next. Or is the timing of the ad predetermined by some other means ?

For a project we have a choice between:

Storing documents, images, videos and textual data in a database. Provide relations for searching and a GUI for uploads. Web and mobile (I only have experience with RDBMS)

Solution for digitally signing documents with asymmetric cryptography. Provide web and mobile GUI. Also something about ad hoc signing (possibly insert usb stick to sign?)(know a good bit of cryptography already)

Which one should we pick? (5 man group)