For me Safari, Messages, Facetime and Photos all share a fatal flaw. They only work with the Apple ecosystem and/or when the person you want to communicate with are in the Apple ecosystem. But I suspect most here are ok with that. It is one of those things which Apple for some reason generally gets a pass for on HN but others such as Google do not. Whenever a Google application doesn't function, functions suboptimally or Google introduces a proprietary solution HN tends to work itself into a frenzy but Apple restricting it apps and services only to Apple products barely raises an eyebrow.
Safari also suffers from slow adoption of new standards and a dearth of extensions compared to either Chrome or Firefox.
The ecosystem argument I understand when talking about iMessage and FaceTime. How the argument pertains to Photos or Safari is unclear to me.
I uses Photos as a personal photos archive, and it works.
And Safari is just a web browser, and the best one at that IMHO. It's fast and sleek, with the smallest browser chrome of them all. And I'm curious which standards it (you must mean WebKit) has been slow to adopt. I doubt there's enough of them, compared to Chromium, to call the whole browser slow to adopt.
I use Safari even for Web development purposes, as I personally don't need anything else besides the stock Inspector/Console. Hence extensions don't matter to me as much.
The ecosystem argument pertains to Safari because Apple doesn't produce versions of Safari for other platforms which means bookmarks and extensions can be shared across platforms as they can with Chrome and Firefox.
For Photos the argument pertains because it doesn't tie in with any other photo storage services except their own. For instance macOS has my Google account information and the ability to use it for Mail, Contacts, Calendars and Notes but Photos won't use Google Photos to store web albums.
Safari is an app using WebKit which means if WebKit is slow to adopt than Safari which uses it is also. Some of the technologies I care about that Safari/WebKit has been slow to deploy include WebRTC, a variety of standards around progressive web apps such as service workers and the Push API and support of open audio and video codecs.
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