Ask HN: Reliably Testing on WebKit from Windows

2 points by h4ch1 3y ago ↗ HN

Hi all, I've been stuck on this problem for way too long (by way too long I mean more than I ideally should).

I recently made a comment regarding testing webapps and compatibility on Safari (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35421554#35436004) and got a pointer towards https://webkit.org/downloads/ but these are browsers/implementations on Linux, as a primary Windows user do I have to use Linux in order to test WebKit?

Why isn't there a WebKit based browser for Windows; I am pretty unaware on the topic and a lot of forum-searching and trying to build my own WebKit wrapper to run on Windows has led me to the conclusion it's a very painstaking process to work out a maintainable WebKit browser for Windows.

Here are a few things I have tried to test on Safari, purely from Windows:

- Install Epiphany on WSL2: This is slow but bearable; works OK but took a lot of setup since WSLg doesn't work well with Debian/Fedora and I had to give into installing Ubuntu.

- Use BrowserStack: Expensive, slow, don't want to pay just to test on Safari.

- Playwright Mini Browser: Very minimal, drag/drop events don't work; lot of incompatibility, not well-maintained.

- Using TeamViewer to use my partner's Mac

- The worst of them all; setting window.* as undefined to mimic features not supported on Safari.

My question therefore is, how do you all test on Safari who may be stuck in a similar position as me, unable to afford a Mac; and a primary machine on Windows. Note; I have a dual-boot Linux system but I parallelly work on some CUDA applications whose drivers have been horrible to set up and I do not want to keep switching OSs whenever a bug arises.

3 comments

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politelemon 3y ago ↗

Safari is an awfully platform to support. Its prevalence on iOS and the Draconian way in which its presence is imposed makes me consider it the new, and worse, IE.

In the past I would test it via crossbrowsertesting.com, and that's worth a shot, as it can provide tunneling software to your local environment.

Recently I've chosen to treat it the same way as any other closed platform: I don't support it and don't wish its poison to propagate further. Granted, I am but an irrelevant drop in an ocean.

h4ch1 3y ago ↗

Yeah, it's really unfortunate but a lot of people are users; they'll buy a Mac and Safari will satisfy 99.9% of their requirements; but it becomes horrible when you have to build web applications to support it, and it becomes a really tedious conversation when you have to explain how the browser they're using is an afterthought and they're better off using Firefox/Chromium.

phillipseamore 3y ago ↗

It is a useless endeavor since Safari on Mac, iPad and iPhone all have different feature flags set and their own quirks related to how they are tied into system libraries on each platform. You would also not be able to test bugs related to interactions or the behavior of the GUI chrome. Browserstack is the closest solution to testing without being hands-on with a physical device.