Safari is still relevant due to iOS and iPad not macOS, and although I mostly use FF privatly, it is seldom a project acceptance requirement to also validate against it.
Ironically it were the IE haters that kind of helped this to happen.
Apple doesn't cripple Safari. They just don't want to engage in a losing war of implementing half-baked underspecified standards that Chrome rushes against any objections.
Mozilla is increasingly on the Apple's side these days.
This shouldn't be a hot take, but moreso a sobering reality.
That said I'm glad more people are starting to acknowledge this and bring it up in these discussions. Firefox is not really a counter to Chrome's dominance and WebKit only really still is due to Apple being too big to push around.
If I'm stuck choosing between those two evils, I'd sooner take Apple... then try to figure out what a better solution is than just "make Apple change because I don't like Safari".
First of all thank you for relativising my one-sided comment. Let me clarify what I mean a bit.
I agree with you on your arguments about Chrome. I don't support Chrome specific features. They even have broken things in the past.
My perspective on this is that iOS locks out non-Safari browsers, so users are forced to use it and as a developer I'm forced to make workarounds for it.
With IE11 I don't have this problem anymore. We're at a stage now where I can convince my clients of "This is a browser, which is losing official support soon. I can make this feature work/look better on IE11 if you really want, which costs me this much time". IE is being faded out just by the fact that more new stuff looks worse and works worse.
With Safari this is not the case. There is no "Oh this website works better with Firefox, you should install it" which is likely the biggest factor for browser adoption and my gut feeling says that Apple knows and uses this.
This particular statement seems questionable:
> My main point is that Safari is not flouting or disregarding established W3C/WHATWG web standards but, rather, being very careful about how it implements those standards which takes time.
In some cases their actions simply don't make sense, except if you look at it from a perspective of protecting their iOS App platform. For example breaking localStorage in the name of privacy (which is ridiculously paradox) and not supporting obvious, simple UX improvements like scroll-anchoring.
Safari is in some cases stricter/more standards compliant than Firefox and especially Chrome. But in some cases like above the feature intersection of Firefox and Chrome is the one that makes the most sense for the web.
This is untrue: I regularly deal with companies forcing people and other companies to use Chrome on Windows and such. Your lack of experiencing it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
But you're also missing the point: Without Safari, there's no longer further incentive for Google to participate in the web standards process, over just forcing people to use Chrome.
Do you have specific examples of how you consider Apple to be "stifling" progress to defend Safari?
I use both Safari and Chrome (and WebKit nightlies). I vastly prefer Safari to Chrome, but their underlying use of WebKit seems quite similar.
Competition has seemed to help WebKit in the past (especially between Apple and Google). If you recall, they both contributed a new process model to WebKit (http://betanews.com/2010/04/09/the-big-change-coming-to-safa...). It could be argued that Apple's contribution in this area was more useful to users of the WebKit framework, while Google's was restricted to Chromium. That said, Google makes many great contributions too.
I'm not specifically defending Safari, it has many other problems (speaking both from user and developer POV). But I'm realistically looking back at that battlefield, and weep the loss of Presto, EdgeHTML, KHTML, the stillborn Servo, the irrelevant "other" WebKit browsers... Meanwhile the corpus of standards keeps growing to ensure no other player can hope to enter this space and remain competitive.
My problem very specifically is with this messaging: "use Chrome". I mentioned WEI not because remote attestation is evil, but because Google (in this case and in many others) ignored the process, and declared itself the law.
Yet I don't have a problem supporting Firefox, or honestly even desktop Safari for the most part. It is specifically iOS Safari that is being deliberately held back by Apple to protect their App Store monopoly.
If Apple allowed other browsers beyond Safari, Google would stop supporting Safari and force people to download Chrome (or FF, their supported also-ran). We'd be back where a giant company 100% sets web standards.
Apple standing against that is important for the open web.
I hate this logic. Neither Safari nor Chrome are good for the open web, Google being worse than Apple does not make Apple some kind of hero.
As far as WEI goes, I certainly do not expect Apple to save us considering they've already been happy to implement remote attestation in their platforms and of course, in Safari, in the form of PATs.
Meanwhile, Safari lags on web standards that are actually good, (while still implementing remote attestation in their browsers,) forcing you to test all of your stuff on Safari. I never have to test my stuff on Chrome, because well, Chrome implements every standard I care about that Firefox implements. But with Safari, I never know.
I'm the resident troubleshooting guy for a bunch of people, and it's difficult to express the confusion and anger I get when I have to explain to people that yes, Safari on iOS really, truly still doesn't support WebM or Opus fully. Some people (insanely, imo) believe WebM is somehow evil, but I would love to hear why Opus is evil.
What Google and Chrome are today is vastly different and far worse (IMO) than what Microsoft and Internet Explorer were for the web and internet. Microsoft was also bad for the open web, but they couldn't dream of something as devious as WEI; the technology wasn't even there yet. Meanwhile, Safari is basically hated for the same reasons as IE: You have to test with it to make sure things work (and of course that includes needing to own Apple products to even have the privilege of doing so...)
Marketshare is only one factor. In mid-late 2000s, you could have pushed users to install Firefox and then Chrome and say IE is not fully supported, didn't work with enterprises but for captive audience and startups it made sense. Now that isn't an option as users can't migrate away from Safari. So, it is worse now, Safari will decide the baseline and if it doesn't support some feature that you need, you'll have to let go richest x% customers or move to the walled garden.
Safari does not compete on any OS other than MacOS. It was placing no competitive pressure on chrome, and Apple most certainly cost Firefox many billions in search revenue due to lost market share on iOS.
Also our main and primary goal is to ensure that web apps become viable. That was never going to happen, while Apple had no incentive whatsoever to invest in Safari to the level required to make a competitive browser.
OWA was only formed out of deep frustration with both the feature set and stability of Safari, born as a result of a lack of competition.
Well, Firefox users may never make up quite as much marketshare as it used to, but it does have one advantage: we're a lot louder and more annoying than Chrome users when stuff is broken. It's a feature! (Okay, I try not to be annoying. But I'm pretty sure absolutely nobody is thrilled when I report bugs about Librewolf not working. Shoutouts to SoundCloud for eventually fixing one of said issues.)
I doubt Safari will actually die on iOS. The truth is, Safari on iOS is kinda good. That said, honestly this whole line of thinking has gotten pretty tiring. I'm not really sure that an Apple/Google duopoly on browsers is really that much better than the seemingly inevitable Google monopoly. It's not like either of them are particularly good citizens, but Apple's relatively small influence has been very negative in a lot of ways. I'm not even a huge fan of using regulations to solve every problem, but even I must admit that EU regulations have done far more to start to reel in Google than Apple ever could, anyways. As for poor WebM support and pushing wgsl into the WebGPU spec, good riddance.
It's really sad that Google can't be trusted more. There's a lot of people there who are doing good work on Chromium and other web-related projects, and it's besmirched by greedy decisions at worst and optically blind decisions at best. When I was at Google, I did spend a bit of my time trying to make some intranet stuff work better in Firefox... It's probably a token gesture at best, but oh well.
You know we're at a weird point when the underdog competition in browsers is Apple, one of the richest and most resourceful companies of all time.
Chrome already won, non-Apple users basically don't have a choice.
Please tell me how Chrome has "slowed down" after reaching the current market share years ago. It's not like Safari is the one making on-spec progress like Firefox did in 2005. Sounds like you're the one not understanding the early browser wars.
The reality is people want freedom to use Firefox or Chrome in iOs, they don't want a monopoly , imagine if Microsoft would not have allowed you to install a third pary browser unless it uses their engine and it accepts their rules, then we would all still use IE6 but with different themes and superficial features.
Safari needs to implement the standards and offer decent performance, adding on top of that very good integration with the OS and it should win on Apple OSes.
Also Apple users please demand Apple to sacrifice a bit of their profit and offer web developers some way to test their websites/code on Safari(including Betas for free) , either by providing test virtual machines images or some Web Based service. Safari Beta not only requiers you have Apple hardware and OS it requires you update to latest version (you maybe don't want to be forced to latest version).
You’re greatly overstating the problem of using Safari. Google’s devrel team has astroturfed a lot about that but if you’re the average working web developer it’s been easy to support all of the evergreen browsers for years - the big win was dropping IE11 support — and you’ll see a significant performance or battery life win by dropping Chrome, which the average user will appreciate a lot more than not having WebMIDI or sites nagging them to enable push notifications.
The mistake here is seeing only one company abusing its market position when it’s really two. While I don’t like how Apple handled this — Firefox deserved better — it’s also the case that Google used their dominant positions in search, email, maps, and video to promote Chrome. I’d be a lot more comfortable allowing Chrome on iOS if it was accompanied by regulatory action banning that and requiring Google to do real QA on other browsers and not use proprietary Chrome APIs on their production sites, which held back Firefox and Safari performance on YouTube for ages because they were using the web components standard instead.
I don't disagree with the assertion that iOS needs greater browser choice, but, even were that to happen, Safari falling behind other browsers in standards support would still be an issue.
IE6 remained a thorn in the side of the web development community long after viable alternatives appeared.
It's more traffic than Safari, but Firefox also runs on platforms like Windows or Linux and has disproportionately large mindshare among open source developers. Give how much higher that number was 10 years ago, I think this counts in support of the original point: Google has poured a ton of effort into promoting Chrome and “accidentally”[1] offering a worse experience for other browsers in their site and nobody other than Apple seems to have been successful at resisting this.
1. Whether this is an overt policy or simply choosing to skimp on testing, it's a choice.
IE literally refused to implement standards, rendered broken dom elements, allowed for proprietary native extensions and had many different apis for them. They had 90% of the market share and no other viable platforms.
All of those things are true of iOS Safari as well, except that on iOS you literally can't use any other engine so 100% of the browsers on Apple phones and tablets are restricted by whatever limitations or flaws Safari brings.
Safari is still relevant due to iOS and iPad not macOS, and although I mostly use FF privatly, it is seldom a project acceptance requirement to also validate against it.
Ironically it were the IE haters that kind of helped this to happen.
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