What you're perfectly fine with is slimmer browsers. Crippled browsers, as in the ones in Apple's world, are browsers where the supported specs and features are selectively chosen for political / competitive reasons. It's absolutely not healthy.
I don't get author's point -- they say it themselves, "Apple will want to ensure it doesn’t become too capable."
Why would one respect something that is deliberately crippled for no good reason? It is bad for technical users, bad for non-technical users, bad for web developers, bad for businesses..
(One could argue that we need a "counter-weight" to Chrome and browser diversity is good... but this is not an argument author is making)
1. Today we have 4 browser implementors. Only one of them doesn't also own an operating system (FF). We lost opera year or two ago. I would argue that a significant factor in this shrinking landscape is the fact that Apple has locked away ~10% of the market forever (and this 10% is not a random sampling - it includes many high value customers). Sure implementing a browser is technically challenging - my argument is that Apple's policy has altered the environment in such a way that there is no longer any reward for overcoming that challenge unless you have an operating system or some other large interest that requires you to make a browser. This will have effects on the web as a platform for years to come.
You are wrong. I get you’re making a political argument because you have something against Apple, but what you’re suggesting is just wrong on the merits.
Apple’s global iPhone marketshare is around 15%; it’s 35-40% in the US.
When the W3C was going to shove XHTML 2 down our throats, where you had to have perfectly conforming XML markup to have a valid webpage, Apple helped form with Mozilla and Opera, the WHATWG that lead to HTML5 and web standards that made sense.
It was Apple that said no to shipping Flash on the iPhone, which was the beginning of the end for proprietary media plugins.
You seemed to forget about the ecosystem of open source developers that have lead the charge on implementing new open standards; Igalia was obviously able to work with Apple (and Google) to implement CSS Grid: https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2017/03/16/css-grid-layout-is...
Sure, they were behind on several important technologies, but they’ve made a ton of progress this past year or so. I created a Service Worker in the latest Safari Tech Preview that shipped two days ago: https://webkit.org/blog/8042/release-notes-for-safari-techno...
Apple is a convenient target for a lot of things; I get that, but I can’t see how anything you’ve said holds up when we take an objective look at things.
True, but in some ways this is Apple doing a favor for competing browsers. Imagine how loudly people would complain if Apple did the opposite — provided no support to other browsers, and left them to compete without Apple's inside knowledge of its OS and hardware. No other browser could come close, and we'd all be on Safari all the time. While it's not ideal to be forced to use Apple's rendering engine, at least we can access the many other features that alternative browsers offer.
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.
Apple intentionally cripples their browser here and there to nudge developers toward creating actual apps that are served through the App Store and to discourage them from making things that can load through the browser.
The day Apple allows other browsers is the day you can put a countdown clock on the entire web only working with Chromium in a way that Microsoft could only dream of during their IE on the desktop period. Not because Chrome is better, but because Google has been very effective at using its dominant web position to force people to "upgrade" to Chrome.
Even Microsoft, which invested huge amounts of money in Edge, packed it in when Google kept telling people that Edge was going to kill their firstborn (or whatever other tactics they use, like allegedly making YouTube not work properly.)
So, yeah, I'm fine with allowing other browsers - a few years after we've seen Google successfully broken up.
Meanwhile, I'm fine with websites just not using Optional Chaining operators. It's syntactical sugar. And frankly, rapid iterations on JavaScript, adding optional features only supported on Chrome and then making people think the web is broken without them, is a huge source of Google's ability to bully people into using Chrome.
They risk losing market share if another unsupported browser is seen as sufficiently superior that users avoid choosing Apple products on that basis. I don't even mind Safari, but I'm still in no hurry to lock myself into the iPhone ecosystem, partly due to those sorts of restrictions.
And it's right to be wary of Apple. They have many of the same negative incentives as Microsoft had: if the web outshines their proprietary app platforms, then what good are those platforms?
However, out of the two behaviors ("embrace and extend" versus "slow standards adoption") I think that Chrome's "embrace and extend" is the one that's actually a threat - and to me, that's what really made IE dangerous: it was a threat to the web.
Safari's pace of standards adoption is merely annoying. I'm a developer too; I get it -- I want to use the cool new shit! But Safari's not going to break the web in the way that propietary browser lock-in could break it.
Most of those apps are not crippled to get people to switch. They're crippled because of Apple's policies.
Specifically you can't make another browser be the default. You can't make another browser period, you can only skin the one that's built in. So no V8, no JägerMonkey, no Gecko, etc. Google Maps can't be the default map app. The Kindle app can't sell books. The Amazon MP3 app can't sell music. (or at least can't competitively sell)
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