[theo-steiner]

Oh wow, the comments on here really go into the opposite direction of what I was expecting. How come people fear chrome becoming the only option for browsing, but at the same time don't agree that apple should be incentivised to better safari? I mean, who if not Apple has the ressources to compete with google on the browser front.

[pwinnski]

I'm not sure why you think people can't, or don't, do both?

I don't want Apple to ever allow non-Safari browser engines onto iOS, because I've been around long enough to know that Chrome will inevitably be the only target for webdevs. The only reason any webdevs support anything but Blink currently is iOS.

I also think that Apple should improve Safari. You and I might disagree on what it means to improve Safari, though.

If you can think of how to avoid the first problem, I welcome your suggestions, but so far the only answer I ever see is, "that won't happen," almost always from people who never ran the NCSA Mosaic browser or used gopher.

So let's advocate for Apple to make Safari better--assuming we can agree on what that means--but never by insisting that they allow a Blink-based browser onto iOS.

P.S. CSS issues, yes! Push notifications and a few other PWA-specific issues, please no.

[ocdtrekkie]

So, the issue is that the "innovation" Safari is often accused of "holding back" is privacy-invasive features proposed by Google engineers.

Which is to say, Safari (and the requirement of iOS users using it) is the last thing holding back Google from complete control of the web at this point.

[rejhgadellaa]

Which features are we talking about? Bluetooth? NFC? Contacts? Because native apps enjoy all of them, AFAIK. These same features tend to have extra protections built in that native apps do not to ensure privacy and security. The web is extremely paranoid when implementing these features.

From what I've learned, WebKit is not engaging in discussions regarding these new features. They could have a say in shaping the web, come up with alternatives, new features, etc. Instead they dig in their heels.

If Safari needs "the requirement of iOS users using it" to hold back Chrome, it tells us people actually want to switch.

Letting Apple decide what's best for us (for reasons that have nothing to do with "what's best for us", I think is safe to assume) is not the solution for the monolith browser problem we're seeing.

[theo-steiner]

I built a "creative" website over the last few months. I had to jump through many hoops to get very standard css behavior to work on safari. Transform scale for example leads to text being rendered pixelated while transformZ is not 0. Firefox and Chrome don't have this bug, which has been around for years on Safari. Last time I checked, CSS was not privacy invasive.

[tored]

Apple is not a web company like Google. Apple sells hardware with bundled software. Apple sucks at web, understandable so, thus competing with Google on their terms is foolish, better to compete with Google on things Apple understands, hardware.