Safari and HTTP/3, their relationship status should be set to "It's complicated"

Hey folks! 😁

So yeah, I know, it's been a while... yeah, since October 2025, I know...

But I haven't forgotten you, promise.

Where have you been all this time?

How can I put it...

Let's just say business exploded in 2025, and over the past few months, well... I've been working, like really a lot. By the way, today's article actually comes from the fact that I was working... well yeah, for me to discover this stuff, it has to come up while I'm in the trenches...

Whether it's my freelance activity or the various services I offer that you can see on the homepage, everything has scaled up, so I didn't really have time to blog anymore, and, to be honest, I didn't have anything interesting to share with you... but now, I think this is a piece of info (that I personally didn't know) that you'll find interesting.

Yes, even in the era of generative AI.

Why this article?

Right now, I'm paying for past mistakes. Well... mistakes, the things I did back when I didn't have a dime and had to make do with whatever I could... I had the whole Revolut Business account fiasco, kind of a mess, among other things... but I'll save that for another day.

And back then, on some projects, I was using Cloudflare Free, because hey, 20 dollars a month was a lot at the time.

The real limitation of Cloudflare Free

So first things first, let me get this out of the way: Cloudflare is a great service, personally I love it, it lets my readers all around the world enjoy crazy fast loading times, and for that it's awesome and I happily pay for the service... BUT.

You need to know that on the free tier, they enable features by default, or sometimes later on, without warning you. For them, the free version is a giant lab (and at the same time, it's free, so fair enough...).

Can you see where this is going with HTTP/3 being enabled on one of my Cloudflare Free domains?

Where's the CSS?

Alright, like I said... right now I'm paying for past choices, including a recent one, the choice to put a domain on Cloudflare Free back in 2022 that I had since forgotten about...

Lately, I've been on the move a lot: Paris, Metz... Luxembourg, and I like checking in on how the shop is running even when I'm not around...

And then one day, I'm checking how the reservations are working for Les Frères Marchand (you know, the first ones with their custom version of ViteUneTable?).

And there, on my iPhone on 5G, I see this...

Now, this is a reconstruction, because honestly I don't feel like reintroducing the bug 😁.

Being far from home, I think it over and figure this bug must be coming from Cloudflare, so I disable it on the domain. I had planned for this: my servers can take over without Cloudflare with no problem.

But wait? This app is a fork...

And that's where my brain glitches...

The LFM reservation app is a fork of ViteUneTable. Today, they're no longer compatible with each other because ViteUneTable has evolved a lot 😎.

But the base is the same!

Yet ViteUneTable has been running on Cloudflare Pro for months without any issue... so what's the problem here?

Could it be Cloudflare Free? Yeah... almost.

I'm a bit obsessive

Even though it works perfectly fine without Cloudflare, it bothers me a lot: I want everything to be perfect.

And we get traffic (like on this blog) from all around the world... I want tourists booking at Marchand to have the same experience as the people in Nancy.

And for that, I rely on Cloudflare's network.

So having it disabled... bugs me... first off, we're going to upgrade it to Pro... because if it works, I really don't mind paying.

But... is that really the issue?

The checkbox that ticked itself...

Like I was telling you earlier... the real limitation of Cloudflare Free...

On my Cloudflare Pro setups, no problem, this option had stayed disabled... but on the Free ones? Bam, right in the face.

And that's what broke everything on Safari...

Do you actually care about Safari?

Yes... across all services, it's the second most-used browser after Chrome.

Conclusion

Disable HTTP/3 (with QUIC) if you have a large user base on Safari.

As for us, see you next time. I don't know yet when... if I have something interesting to share. Otherwise, well, no point in writing for the sake of it.

This article might save some of you 😁.

See you next time, and take good care of yourselves.