this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Only in that they are both particularly anti-competitive. Mobile Safari is, whatever all others may say, far better than chrome, and it’s a pretty awesome browser.
But it does have some limitations to it that a very vocal minority absolutely hates. And that’s fair, but let’s get real about what is “holding back” other browsers: market share in monopoly.
From a web developer's standpoint, Safari is basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It's not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it's definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn't care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
Does it still do that thing where it claims to support a feature but then when you actually try and use it it turns out that it doesn't work? I remember ut used to have a problem with masonry layouts, where it claimed to support them but if you actually used it, it just ignored you and used floats of all things for everything instead.
Literally, none of this is true. Just because you don’t like Safari doesn’t mean you need to lie about it.
I feel like mobile safari is more locked into mobile functionality, less capable of doing “real” browser stuff. I’ve only had an iPhone for a few months and I never felt this limited on android using chrome and Firefox.
Apple only allowed browsers on ios to use webkit, so they quite literally were holding back browser development.
This has only recently been changed, and it appears you can only use an alternate browser engine in the EU, so they are still holding back mobile web browser development for people in most countries.
That’s not holding back browser development, that’s just holding back browser usage.
That’s definitely not the same thing.
Kind of a strange semantics argument at that point. Saying you can only build with X tools certainly impacts development. Why develop something that would never be allowed to be released?
That’s the exact argument you’re making: that X tools are the only way to develop a browser. Ignoring the entire world of other devices available.
If you are only allowed to use internal combustion engines how do you expect to get an electric car?
If you have no where to sell your product, why develop it?
We got electric cars when all we had was the internal combustion engine. What a silly metaphor.
But it’s nice to hear you admit that I was right, and that the browser could definitely still be developed. The proof, of course, is that there are dozens of web browsers out there in active development.
No you just don't understand the metaphor.
If electric cars cannot be sold, If for example they were actually illegal, then how do you sell electric cars? If
If you have to use the Safari engine for everything and the Safari engine doesn't support a particular feature, then there is no way to use that feature on iOS. You can't develop a workaround because the work around would require you to have access to arbitrary system commands, and that's not how web development works.
For example, there is absolutely no way to implement notifications on iOS without iOS support for web notifications, without that API there is no way to interface with the operating system. There is no way you can build workaround code for that.
After a tantrum like that, I’m not the 12-year-old here.
Irrational hatred of a web browser really isn’t a very valuable pursuit of your time. I suggest something else.
I actually didn't mention my preference of web browser, I just commented on how obviously stupid you were being due to your being unable to decipher pretty simple comments. Interesting assumption to make though.
Sorry I wasn't granular enough for you I figured you'd get the whole thought - if I am not allowed to sell anything but ice cars ( can only use WebKit on the largest group of consumers) what would be the incentive for me to create one unless I can also afford to create a platform or brand to release them on (nobody with the capital to do this is going to make something to the benefit of the users)
You’ve let your metaphor run away from you. This isn’t even close to the actual situation at hand.
That maybbe true but feel free toTell me what is then. Developers are less interested in developing for a platform with heavy restrictions. If you have some sort of alternate take on that I'd like some of whatever you are smoking.
It’s not my job to think for you. I already explained this more than once. You have trouble understanding it, have someone else explain it to you.
It has nothing to do with usage. It's a restriction that's imposed on the browser developers.
Mozilla themselves claim that this makes development harder for them.
By forcing developers to have the same limitations as their own browser, apple has made it difficult for competitors to gain an edge over safari.
Safari definitely gets more hate than it deserves. I find it to be perfectly acceptable.
I would prefer more competition though, even though I know today it’ll be a ton of “cram some AI into it” slop.
Personally, I find Safari to be a goddamn amazing browser, especially considering a lot of its features. People here, the free and open source folk, absolutely hate it on the sole purpose that it is owned by a corporation. And, although it does share user data, anonymize’s that data to a great degree, and also prevents fingerprinting. Also, Apple does not sell it data that it collects, they only use it for internal purposes.
I find no problem with that. I think another huge issue is the difficulty in writing Safari extensions – – especially, that you have to pay for access to the developer store (although they may have changed that for Safari ext devs).
I’m a user experience, designer, so whenever gives the best experience to the end user is, obviously, the correct choice. There’s only so much the “experts” get to have a say in how any random individual uses the tools at the disposal.
That said, I absolutely love Safari as a web browser, but I definitely understand how a lot of people do not.
I hate Safari not because it's owned by Apple, but because it makes my life more difficult when doing web development. It's basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It's not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it's definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn't care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
Literally, none of that is true. Your heat has made you unreasonable. I don’t have time for unreasonable people.
Regarding extensions, my understanding is that Apple makes it hard to prevent a bunch of trash extensions showing up that don’t do anything worthwhile.
Orion browser, created by the folks at Kagi, allows both Chrome and Firefox extensions. It’s way better than it was a few years ago, but still has some rough edges. Better than normal safari at least!
I have no idea exactly what that means.
But Apple provides extensions for most functionalities, but, as you mentioned, they’re more limited because Apple used to require that extension developers register a $100 per year account in order to develop extensions.
They don’t do this anymore, but it was a big reason why Safari got held back, especially in the beginning of the browser wars.
I get your point that it's not specifically Chrome or specifically Safari that are holding other browsers back, but Apple and Google own the vast majority of market share in mobile devices and by extension, browsers used in mobile devices. I think that's the crux of what the investigation is getting at
Although I may not have been as effective as seeing it, that’s pretty much what I was trying to say. Thank you, I suppose, for putting it into more understandable and relatable terms.