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.
Maybe I'm wrong and there are consumers that harmed by the lack of chrome or Firefox on ios
Well, developers of modern web apps can offer a qualitatively better experience on those other platforms in some ways than they can with iOS Safari. The offline working features are one clear example. The use of open (=> cheaper and sometimes better-performing) standards for things like audio and video content is another.
Unless you contend that the only reason any web developer ever uses the features available in other browsers but not iOS Safari is to abuse or exploit users, in other words that no-one is (or would, if Apple supported them) make any legitimate use of those features that would improve the user's experience in some way, it is clear that users are materially disadvantaged by the limitations of iOS Safari, unless they have the choice to use another browser that does offer those features instead.
I don't agree with you and as a developer I find way more issues with Safari than with Chrome/Firefox/Edge.
Also, what matters in a browser it's the engine. If it's always WebKit and you find a issue or something else in iOS you can switch the browser but the result will always be the same since Chrome and Firefox are forced to use WebKit.
Chrome's engine it's Chromium which is open-source and used by other browsers like Microsoft Edge for example, so I don't see as much of an issue with Google Chrome, since you're not actually forced to use it.
> Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share
Even Firefox has it's own non-standard features and I don't see people complaining about it.
I don't find effectively forcing Safari on users to be a good thing. Even if it takes some market share away from Chrome, it just makes a new platform specific monopoly, and arguably a worse one with less pressure to change.
As a web developer iOS is the most infuriating platform at the moment for me. There are some random nonstandard features.
Just this last month I had an issue with ios "low power mode" causing webkit to throttle all browser animation frame requests by half, with no way to override or even check if it is on. There are open complaints and issues about this going back years but nobody can change it without Apple's blessing, which they don't give, so it affects every browser on iOS with no recourse.
I have had tons of iphone browser specific issues and I am pretty sure their platform monopoly is a big part of why they go ages without being addressed. If there was real competition on the ios browser market they might push each other to do better by comparison.
> Safari certainly cannot match the first two reasons.
1. Most users view websites on their phones. Safari is the only browser on iPhone (there are other browser skins, but they're all forced to run on top of Safari). The market share of iOS devices is usually about at least 50% in developed nations.
2. iOS has proprietary features, it is known as the App Store. If you want to develop certain things, you must use the app store, the browser is locked out of those features (even if all other browser vendors have them).
> But it cannot match the third either, because the development of standard web features is going on at good pace (see <https://webkit.org/status/>).
3. I probably don't need to go into this point since it's common knowledge that Safari has always been the least compliant browser in terms of web standards. Their history of holding back features or implementing features with critical flaws that make them useless has been a recurring trend for the last decade. Just because they have checked a box on a table, doesn't mean the feature is anything close to useable.
This is a misrepresentation, before even getting into lack of modern feature support, webkit introduce a lot of long lived regressions on each release and Apple have changed various behaviours in non-standard ways in Safari over the years then left them broken and unpatched on old devices (looking at you autoheight iframes). This has nothing to do with adopting standards and everything to do with a lack of resources, stagnant release cycle and lack of care and support from Apple.
It's not necessary to talk about chromiums bleeding edge non-standard features, webkit easily has the least support for unopinionated standards released over the last decade and adopted by the other two.
> no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.
What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari. If you install firefox or chrome or anything that is a "browser" on an iOS device, it's forced to use Safari webengine underneath, so it's essentially safari with different UI, and this is apparent in the useragent string so any decent stats will show that essentially every iOS user == Safari user.
if you weren't allowed to install your own browser engine on other platforms we'd all be stuck with IE.
There's a reason internet standards progress so slow on iOS. It's because Apple disallows any competition. If they allowed real Chrome and Firefox they'd be forced to keep up. Users would have a choice. Chrome has proven to to be around 10x as secure as Safari on macOS based on exploit report. There's every reason to believe it would be the same on iOS. I'd prefer to be able to choose the more secure browser with more modern features. that's would be a pro user feature to me.
I disagree. While I agree with you that it is highly problematic that iOS/iPadOS users have no alternatives to WebKit in terms of what rendering engine their browser uses, I disagree with the sentiment that Apple has a level of control over the web that is remotely comparable to Google’s.
Why? For one, Chrome has much higher marketshare than Safari on mobile. While Apple has a huge marketshare in terms of revenue, Android devices are much more popular than iOS/iPadOS devices in terms of sheer numbers, and these devices predominantly run Chrome.
As such, Chrome dominates both the mobile and desktop browser market, and the only way for the consumer to work against that is, simply put, to run Firefox/Gecko on his computer and his (Android) phone, or if you’re basically anti-Google like me, WebKit on your iPhone.
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.
> Typically, cutting edge features are deployed by browser makers in their own engines first, then, using real world feedback over several years, eventual standards are created. No feature starts out as a web standard. – Walled Gardens Report, Open Web Advocacy [1]
Apple dragging it's feet will impact this, but Apple outright banning competing browser engines kills all progress. Having competing browsers on the platform will allow the market to decide what features are useful and what are not, and the standards can follow suit. I agree there are privacy concerns with some of the proposals (especially some of the ones by Google), but not having the choice of browsers is much worse for the open web.
At the moment, we just have to trust Apple has our best intentions by supporting/not supporting certain features and standards. However, we know from the work the Open Web Advocacy has done that this isn't true. The primary driver for both stifling progress on Safari and keeping browser competition out is the profits from the App Store [2].
This is an important point, but it's ancillary to what I'm getting at here. (And, contrary to sibling comment, I'm well aware that "Chrome on iOS" is just a wrapper around the Webkit view.) There's an important role of competition, and I sometimes do wish that Apple allowed alternative implementations. On the other hand, alternative implementations are also alternative vectors for security holes, and one of Apple's primary business differentiators at this point is "security and privacy"—so I'm also sympathetic to the reasons they don't allow other implementations on their system.
I agree that Google's Chrome tactics can be perceived as evil, I won't discount that, because it causes issues when you are forced to use a particular browser.
But if your client only runs iOS for their entire business, you can't even complain about Chrome to them. And if their browser doesn't support something as simple as offline html5 features properly, and you need this, across multiple platforms (cause they have a few laptops too). Then you can't use a browser based platform. Or if you do, you have to live with many compromises.
This is how I see Apple working. If the market didn't force them to upgrade Safari, I think they never would. They'd just say "browsers are for html, and the Apple App Store is for everything else".
But my client just wanted their stupid form to work offline. At least Chrome can do this, their adding of extra stuff doesn't _limit_ what is possible.
And I don't think many of these features are "new and shiny", I think they are fundamental to the web now. If they were new and shiny only, then Firefox would have had it's ass handed to it by the big-boys. But instead, we see MS and Apple falling behind a simple non-profit in the web standards support area.
Remember, Apple has more money in the bank than any company ever in the history of the world. It's a choice they are making not keeping up with web standards.
So the question has to be asked, what benefit does Apple get from keeping web standards very low on it's locked down platform? (any answer besides forcing devs into their store?)
Initially, I held the opinion that Apple's mandate regarding browsers on iOS/iPadOS, wherein they function as mere skins atop the Safari web viewer, constituted an anti-competitive measure. However, presently, it has emerged as one of the few non-Chromium browsers with a substantial user base, necessitating web developers to accommodate its requirements. As a fellow web developer, I find myself utilizing Safari for personal browsing while resorting to Chrome for development purposes due to far superior developer tools.
So-called "web standards" are dominated by Google so Google is flexing their muscle here as well. A standard is not "what Chrome does", but what is widely supported.
Not Safari, but Chrome is the new IE. In any case, dropping support for iOS Safari isn't a clever thing to do.
If Apple were forced to allow Chrome on iOS, Chrome's influence would grow even stronger. So why do you think that's an argument against wrappers around Safari?
Apple forces you to use rendering engine, not the browser. You can download Chrome to your iPhone.
Anyway, that's not the point. IE wasn't bad because it was a shitty browser. It was bad because it had features that other browsers did not have and it was very popular because it was very innovative and it was heavily marketed. This resulted in websites being bade for IE only, which resulted in a lockdown of huge userbase that even Microsoft couldn't get rid of once decided to get rid of IE.
Safari is nothing like that and there's not Safari lockdown. On the other hand, Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share, forcing web developers to make everything for Chrome. That's exactly like IE.
If anything, Apple's refusal to allow Chrome engine into iOS is the only thing that keeps us from complete lockdown inti Chrome.
The article exaggerates a lot. Denying users to have a browser other than Safari does not make iOS a better platform. Safari(and other similar apps) is not the best there is, the there ever was and the best there ever will be. Someone may create a way better browser then Safari at any time.
There is something we call competition in a free market. Example: when only IE was relevant, Microsoft couldn't care less about making IE better, but when things started to heat up, Microsoft took up the challenge and made IE a lot better.
Apple shipping a default browser and whatnot is good, but not letting developers compete with them is terrible.
As absurd as it is, Apple forcing people to use Webkit/Safari is, at the moment, good for the browser landscape. You already have websites that say browsers that aren't chromium aren't supported, if iOS didn't force Safari on people this would be way more common as people would flock to chrome and websites decide it isn't worth it to support other browsers.
I use Firefox on my non-work machines ... in an ideal world, enough people would do that to prevent the "best in Internet Explorer" web of the dark ages, but I'll take getting forced to use Webkit on my phone over that, even if I'd prefer a "true" Firefox.
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.
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