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.
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.
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.
