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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
I remember reading an article in .net magazine (now apparently defunct) about IE6 and how it was holding back the web. This sort of thing has been going on for ages the problem isn’t crap browsers the problem is crap browsers being dominant. Equally dominant browsers aren’t a problem unless they’re also bad.
So I’m not really all that bothered about Chrome, it’s fairly feature complete and although there are other reasons to not like it, lack of support for the latest standards isn’t one of them. Safari however has been truly awful for a very very long time now. They’ve been memes about how bad it is for well over a decade.
chrome can use their dominant market position to kill all other competing browsers, then they can use their monopoly to kill addons and extensions they don’t like, slow down or break webpages which go against their interests, and so on.
google having a near-complete monopoly on the web scares me more than most issues in tech
Maybe, maybe not – but I’m discounting anything the UK government says on Internet-related issues, so long as they’re trying to insert encryption backdoors into everything. For all we know, this is just an attempt to blackmail Apple and Google over the encryption thing.
Please learn some facts about how the CMA operates before discounting it.
The CMA is independent from the government - it does not have a minister calling the shots.
The encryption stuff is coming from the Home Office, which is directly government controlled.
The CMA and the Home Office aren’t working together at all - they don’t even share an office.
This is not “the government” saying this. It’s the independent competition and markets regulator known as the CMA which, whilst publicly funded, isn’t run by the government.
IDK if Firefox is better or worse to use, I just know I don’t want to use a Google browser. So I use Firefox, like on my desktop.
Firefox, which has most of the desktop extensions also working on mobile.
That is on Apple, unfortunately. Every browser on the App Store is a safari engine with whatever browsers skin on top, essentially.
I believe that apple restricted other browser makers to using safari mobile as a base. Not sure if that’s true/changed, but I’m too lazy to look it up. So maybe take that with a helping of salt.
Been happily using Firefox and Firefox focus on Android for years. With unlock Origin on Firefox.
