Safari is the new IE. Apple's ecosystem is holding back the web severely by shipping a crippled web browser. Safari severely lags behind other browsers, and due to how iOS and the like require other browsers (like Chrome) to use it's archaic rendering engine, it hurts competition as much as the 30% store tax. No PWAs, no notifications, no native experience.
I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.
Also you can't test on it without paying them thousands of dollars for hardware.
I remember maintaining a bunch of sites and university, and while IE11 was missing a couple of APIs (like Promise) at least I could download a VM straight from Microsoft and figure out what was going wrong. I still have no way to test on Safari which is becoming more and more annoying as they "fall" behind.
I learned that on Linux, GNOME Web (Epiphany) is basically Safari. It will exhibit most of the quirks and rendering issues, and it has a decent dev console. It definitely helps avoid paying the Apple tax.
The Igalia team maintains WebKit for GTK+ (among many other platforms). They are certainly smaller and more resource-starved than Apple, but they do a fairly decent job of keeping it running.
>I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.
Ostensibly, this is a fine position to have. But would this not more than likely not just result in Chrome having near total dominance of both the mobile and desktop rendering engine market. From a completely practical point of view, it seems that Safari on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome's engine from having total market dominance.
I don't want to say that Webkit's dominance of iOS is a good thing, but it appears to be the lesser of two evils. I'd rather have Webkit dominate iOS, than Google and Chrome dominate everything. Google being the only major player in web standards is good for nobody but Google.
Web notifications are great for developers, but I'm not convinced they've been all that positive for end users. I've noticed that more novice users tend to inadvertently opt-in to a lot of very spammy web notifications, particularly from online retailers and adult websites. And because they're novice users, they generally do not know how to filter or disable these notifications. I'd suggest that web notifications need a better mechanism to filter out notifications from bad actors, before said notifications reach end users. Otherwise the standard is doomed to be littered with spam like SMS or email.
Safari is more limited but some of us like the tradeoff for more privacy.
I like to see Google experimenting with new tech in Chrome but I don’t want everyone to be forced to use Chrome because a few high profile web properties only work with Chrome.
Also, I don’t see anything wrong at all with individual web developers to make some of their sites only work with Chrome if that is what they really want. The global market is huge and targeting subsets and niches is not so bad for small businesses.
Firefox could be a fewer compromises option if the end goal is more security (I am tempted to say no-compromises but that is my own bias, because for my use case Firefox is a perfect chromium replacement, but it might not be for you). Rather, Safari seems to be nice from an integration standpoint if all your ecosystem is apple based.
BTW Sony devs are contributors to webkit because it's the default browser of the PS3/4. I hope they will improve chromium instead for the PS5 instead of wasting resources on an obscolete decision, just like QT did
I would love to see someone push for iOS to allow any browser/renderer to run.