I don't know anything about WebKit development processes or community management, so please forgive me if I say something wrong.
Isn't it interesting how the engine has been implementing new features and generally running on a lot of steam coincidentally since the EU's Digital Markets Act (which will force other web engines on iOS) went into effect?
Or maybe the dev process and community interactions has always been like this, in which case disregard what I just said and feel free to correct me.
Safari took a leading role in interop-2022[0] from the very start. So the change in Safari's philosophy stretches back at least to start of 2022, but they've also led the way on adoption of a number of other web standards like the new colorspaces which they've had since 2021 and which Edge and Firefox still don't support (well, FF has a feature flag)
Historically the webkit team has pushed the web possibilities a lot. Just take a look at the amount of APIs that you had to add the `webkit` prefix, for example. Not sure if you work with browsers, but constantly you meet something that they implemented first.
I honestly think that developers are very wrong when they think that Safari/webkit is slowing the web down. Yes, some things like lack of notifications etc are very annoying, and they could've been implemented. But I still prefer this approach over the Blink one, where they develop half-baked ideas just to track you better.
It's not just getting those features implemented, but also shipping those to the user. Safari is the only browser that doesn't have autoupdate and has versions tied an operating system in 2023 and that's one of the biggest problems.
While you can be happy only supporting say the last version of all other browsers, Safari requires you to give it years before the marketshare of the new versions are enough that you can migrate to new features, thus making the fact that webkit had implemented those features first completely irrelevant.
Furthermore, the fact it only runs macOS makes it a true pain in the ass to test, you need to have access to an apple machine to test it, be it virtualized or remote, which sucks because even Edge has support for Linux at this point.
Even worse is the fact that there are indeed a lot of features Apple simply refuses to implement, specially related to PWAs, which has slowed down the adoption of PWAs by at least 20 years, ane that's if they ever make a comeback after the crippling Apple did to them to maintain App Store supremacy.
I could go on and on and on and on. Webkit is great sometimes, but Safari absolutely sucks and has been slowing down web development ever since IE stopped being a problem for most developers.
Doesn't sound interesting to me. Safari also implemented a very popular feature first a year ago, long before that act (:has() selector).
Even if Safari were to be the best browser ever, I don’t think that would save Apple, so any development effort would be futile (especially compared to lobbying)
Isn't it interesting how the engine has been implementing new features and generally running on a lot of steam coincidentally since the EU's Digital Markets Act (which will force other web engines on iOS) went into effect?
Or maybe the dev process and community interactions has always been like this, in which case disregard what I just said and feel free to correct me.