First stop blocking iOS pwas from simply installing to the home screen, and don't clear out data in 7 days. Then we'll talk about your browser being better.
Nearly every browser on the market and most desktop application are just Chrome in a ski mask. Safari and Firefox are the tiny holdouts that prevent web technology from being 100% controlled by Google.
This is a bit of a chicken and egg, but the number of iOS users who have saved a web app or PWA to their home screen is probably in the single-digits worldwide. Half-joking.
People are just not aware that this is a thing, and when they learn it's a thing, they don't want to do it.
It doesn't work because Apple prevented it from working because it threatened to shrink revenue from their app store. And that's why there are so few PWA apps and users -- who wants to develop something that they know will be broken? Yes, a lot of devs got burnt and now resent Apple for what they pulled.
> Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge.
I generally use Safari on my Apple devices (and YT works) and Firefox on any Linux machines. If something does not work on Safari I try Firefox on my Mac. In the past I've also sometimes used Chrome when no other option works.
So one option could be to use Firefox as a 'general use' browser, and switch to something else on an as-needed basis.
A bit of a hassle, but it may be the best compromise currently.
Interesting, YouTube runs fairly well on my system with Firefox. I do get the "Experiencing interruptions? Find out why" pop-up often. It's funny though, the only interruption I actually experience is the pop-up. If the pop-up went away, so would all interruptions.
I have the same in Safari when I have uBlock on, initial video load takes forever and i get an occasional interruptions pop up in the bottom left of the screen
4k? That might have something to do with it. Though given a big enough box that too shouldn't be an issue. But I'm using a decade+ old thinkpad driving a fairly high res dell and it works well enough.
I sometimes have difficulty with YouTube 4K on Firefox on my Mac Studio (M2 Max with 64GB). I don't really care though, because 1440p is always well and truly good enough. (And really 1080p is more than good enough except that the default bitrate is absolute dogshit. Most of the time I'm choosing 1440p is because it's bitrate is not dogshit.)
"Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge."
You must have a hardware problem, as I'm playing 4K videos on a 1st-gen Ryzen and GTX 1080 using Firefox and I've never had a single issue since I got the machine, around the 4th week the processor was available to purchase.
r7 1700 and GTX 1080 was my setup for a long time. still is, just relegated to an htpc (albeit not a very power friendly one). the 1080 in particular was (and remains) such a reliable card.
The 1080 was quite amazing when it came out. I still have one here that I use as a test card. Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes but still, the amount of horsepower in there was very impressive.
"Of course it can't do anything useful for the amount of power that it consumes"
Until about the top-end of the 3000 RTX series released, the GTX 1080 was still king of raster performance.
I'm playing modern games like Marvel Rivals at 1440p no problem. Risk of Rain 2 4k no problem. STALKER 2 1080p no problem. It even runs most of my VR games perfectly fine, with me only needing to switch to my RTX 5060 machine for Into the Radius 2.
Even today, it is a very capable card, despite the power draw.
Ah yes, my bad, for gaming it is still usable depending on the games but I don't play games. A lot is expensive, it needs power and you only have so much of them. Currently running 2x modded 4090 with 48G VRAM each, 2x 3090 and 4x RTX 4000. Adding a 1080 would be silly :)
I've used FF for the past 20 years (Linux and Windows). I have seen thousands of youtube videos in that time without a glitch. So have many hundreds of other FF users.
If FF is not working on youtube for, it's not working for you and you alone.
Firefox should just have a 'Chrome' mode where it just shamelessly looks exactly like Chrome. Apart from Chrome removing the flag to hide the close buttons on tabs, I think the UI is damn near perfect.
Ive used Firefox as my daily driver for around 12 years. I switched to Chrome a couple weeks ago to see what the fuss is about and I am shocked how glitchy it is in comparison. Firefox is a much more stable experience.
Came to say this. No way that I will use Safari. As a regular user, why not (even though UX choices are really weird). As a developer, never ever ever. Firefox dev tools are simply on another level entirely. As someone who has escaped two years ago the Apple ecosystem, Firefox too.
Given the state of affairs, anything and anyone pulling people away from Chrome is a good as long as they not more invasive than Chrome. 1 big bad actor is worse than multiple smaller bad actors imo.
If Safari worked in all major OSs like Chrome, Brave and Firefox, I could consider that. I own a Mac but didn't switch to Safari because I use multiple OSs for my work.
They likely discontinued because there was barely any interest. Likely the only reason Safari has any use is that it's the default on MacOS and monopolized on i*OS.
With what Google has been doing to Chrome, and given that I use iOS, I would definitely use Safari on Windows cause I trust Apple more with Privacy, plus the session/tabs/auth/bookmark/applepay etc integration between my phone and Windows laptop/desktop would be great!
I quite liked the old Safari for Windows. It felt like bringing over a slice of the Apple ecosystem to the common Windows XP or Vista desktop. You could run Safari and iTunes and have decent parity with (then) Mac OS X for the most common use cases.
I was probably the only household within the 200 km radius back in 2009 that was using Safari to browse the web and iTunes to listen to web radio from around the world, all on a Windows Vista machine
Apple forgot to mention Safari not being open source but rather tied to a proprietary platform not to mention Safari on mobile kept in a short leash to protect the AppStore.
There's a "Search" tab in the settings. Although it doesn't seem like you can add Startpage for example or whatever else search engine. it only has Google, Bing, Yahoo and DDG.
Safari has two types of PDF export: One is through "Export PDF" and should be a faithful copy of how the browser renders the HTML. The other i through the Print menu item and will be the text and images put onto paper sized sheets.
Safari's performance (both speed and power use) keep me on it vs. Chrome, but I do wish we could have some of the more power-user-friendly features. Chrome's omnibar history and bookmark suggestion algorithm is unparalleled, and I miss it.
No thanks. We have seen multiple times now how it all starts with "good" stuff, then it gets more and more and more locked-down... to the point where you cannot even install apps on your own device, from wherever you want to.
No thanks.. I'd rather switch to Firefox, or even any other shitty browser, but not the one from any other gatekeeping monopoly.
Apples to apples actually. All the walled gardens of Apple had started with open gardens at first. They walled them gradually as they gained more control over market. This is no different.
We can already see it on IOS where no one is allowed to use any other browser engine than safari's own.. of course, the reasoning is always "security".
I’ve been using Safari since 2003. I was previously using Konqueror, so the transition was pretty easy. It’s always been fast and reliable and Mac-like.
It’s nice to have a browser that is a browser and not something that’s attempting to be another operating system.
First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk.
Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.
Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way).
Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).
Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.
I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those.
But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.
And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware.
Because Apple controls the only browser engine that runs on iOS and iPadOS. There are no alternatives. Chrome, Firefox and other browsers are just the browser chrome on top of the Safari/WebKit engine. Apple will not allow anything else.
Fun fact, the Google Chrome team was very aware of “browser chrome” as a term when they named their browser. They make that clear in the introductory comic.
Apple isn't the most dominant business on earth, so maybe they can't do anything in violation of antitrust?
Not how it works. You define a relevant market, and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.
> and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.
Which legal framework does this perspective come from? Maybe Europe? Do you have a reference for this? It goes against case law [1]:
> Judge Rogers concluded that Apple was not a monopoly and mostly a duopoly alongside Google, with potential competition to come from Nintendo and Google Stadia, and while Apple "enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinary high profit margins", that type of success was not an illegal monopoly.
Would your definition also say that the Sony playstation store is a monopoly? Or that my local bakery, that only offers the bread they bake, is a monopoly?
This really is a grey area. You can't define "the market for electricians in my local town" and get any antitrust protections. Defining the market is a huge part of how politicians make this political and therefore something they can profit from.
I'm getting some serious "Microsoft has to protect Internet Explorer from evil competitors like Netscape" vibes from this comment.
Safari simply sucks. If WebKit was any good, then Apple wouldn't have to worry about allowing third-party engines onto iOS. The situation on Mac tells us everything we need to know.
>IMHO, that also should be addressed from the legal perspective very strongly
Then do that FIRST (or at the same time). Don't give us, yet AGAIN, the tired bs song and dance about how you'll make things worse first and then totally someday address the other part properly, and oops what a surprise that turns out to be too hard nevermind.
>But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.
Objectively it is a solution though. Because it's been done, and it's worked, while meanwhile nothing has happened from a legal or political angles. If a better solution can be done down the road great, but a hack dealing with a problem non-optimally can absolutely be better then just having the problem completely unaddressed. And count me skeptical that any government is going to have the will or capability to actually address what a lot of us already hate about not just the Chrome monopoly but the entire approach. I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their interests have happened not to align that way either. Until monopoly lock-in gets better addressed, one of the main ways to push back is via another monopoly lock-in that has different incentives.
That's ridiculous. You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system. The only solution is forced diversity, and to that end, I congratulate Apple for being the last guardian of the web as a truly open platform.
I'm not sure that's a great example. Even though Microsoft lost, it had no real consequences - the company was not forced to split, MSIE remained a core component of Windows, and Netscape was still forced out of the market because they couldn't compete with free MSIE. By 2003 or so, MSIE was up to ~95% of the market.
> You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system.
You absolutely can, and we absolutely have. You believe this because anti-trust action was derided as anti-growth in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing (see also: banking deregulation).
It's one of the major reasons we're stuck with such horrendous corporate and individual wealth inequality today.
Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick, ship a browser, or ship general-purpose client operating systems.
It wasn't really any better when Apple killed things off. For years afterwards I was running into devices that had embedded Java applets for configuration over the Web that no longer worked. Sometimes I'd run into an academic's personal web page that had examples that used Flash or Java and no longer ran for the same reason. There was a lot of useful legacy code that got broken overnight when Apple led and others followed in killing off these kinds of plugins.
For all the claims about security problems - and there were many and the complaints were valid - people seem a bit too willing to overlook the much greater attack surface of modern browsers that still incorporate similar flexibility and functionality but through other protocols and native Web standards now instead. For better or worse today's "evergreen" browsers roll out new functionality more quickly than before but their most important innovation was introducing frequent automatic security updates to a general non-technical audience at a time when that certainly wasn't the default for most desktop software. Take a look at how many significant security issues get fixed in any of the major browser on each update cycle and you can see that even today this is still far from a solved problem.
At the time the roles were reversed. The spin was "use Chrome to break the IE browser monopoly." And Chrome was a better browser, and much faster. It worked.
No. Chrome was so much better than Firefox it wasn't even a contest. Firefox, when it came out, was honestly pretty crap - I tried it and went back to IE in pretty short order because it was noticeably faster. Chrome was a huge leap over either IE or Firefox when it came out, and people switched for that reason.
That is a weird alternative history. Even by Firefox 1.0, it was a dramatically better browser than MSIE in every conceivable metric except for one, which was support for Microsoft's proprietary extensions like VBScript. (It also failed to replicate some of MSIE's most outrageously terrible bugs.)
When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side.
chrome started picking up on firefox when they released 4.0 and started doing some heavy UI updates which made it feel chonky, whereas chrome was this smooth looking browser that paid attention to webview realestate by putting the tabs in the topbar
If the one other competitor didn't allow it, then would we be allowed to complain in your mind?
This argument is terrible, we're lucky the one other competitor, for now, allows installing what you want or people like you would argue everything is fine.
I said it was a business opportunity. Not necessarily a business opportunity for you personally. But if a gap in the market did exist, it would be an opportunity for Microsoft, or Meta, or Dell, or...
> But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
Easy. Just legislate that the only browser allowed on iPhones is Firefox. That way, Chrome can't monopolize the web, and iPhone users get to have a decent browser.
>But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea? What kind of crack are you smoking? Oh, yeah, the apple fanboi crack.
>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Forbidding users to install the software that they want is not the way to save everyone from anything. It's abusive in its own way. And Apple is not going to save anyone from Google. People are still using Google services through Safari, because they are services Apple either sucks at or doesn't offer.
>Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
So you're fine giving over all control to Apple. Apple already has way too much control. Being on the W3C board, they use their power to block any browser API that could make web browsers more capable, which would cut into their native app mafia racket where they charge 30% of any purchase done through an app. They don't offer any alternatives, or any changes - they just squash anything they see as competitive to native apps. That's how fucked up they are. They are literally holding back progress for no good reason - not security, not for privacy, it's purely for their own greed.
> Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Then maybe Apple should invest a fraction of their fortune on making Safari better. Competition is good. Apple doesn't care about competing because they have a monopoly. If they were forced to actually improve WebKit and Safari, maybe people would choose to use it.
And instead they choose to keep the browser diversity alive by taking away your right to choose (your browser in iOS). A sad state of affairs that this is the only thing keeping us from complete Chrome monopoly.
They still have webkit builds for Windows and Linux etc, and you still don't need to buy anything special to run it. I think they also have a (mostly?) headless one, and a mini-browser which is intended to test the engine (so it doesn't have things like bookmarks or profiles or anything like that, a good fit). Similar options exist for FireFox and Chromium so it's not really a Safari/Webkit special. Usually gets used when you use a standard containerised browser testing CI step.
Either way, if someone is still manually testing their website instead of using a standard automated testing system you're probably not really in a league where this matters anyway.. and if they are, you probably have a device farm already.
Not sure where the "my thing is so important, I have to test it on a real device, but I can't pay for it" niche is.
If it's browser monopolies you're worried about, Apple beginning to allow other engines on iOS is going to instantly cement Chrome as the only browser in the game.
Apple's Safari enforcement is the only reason Chrome hasn't completely taken over.
But there's also not consumer choice now. If devs are so lazy as to only test on Safari because they absolutely have to, you can bet your bottom dollar they aren't testing Firefox or anything else if it comes along. Therefore, if Apple keeps the Safari monopoly on their platform, you have only the choice of Safari on iOS, and only the choice of Chrome everywhere else. So there's no consumer choice even if you get your preferred outcome here.
Diversity is not an intrinsic good. It only is good inasmuch as it enables other things which are good. If the browser diversity we have (limited though it is) isn't actually providing choice to consumers, I don't see how it provides any value even if we do preserve it.
I use that to test our website at work in Safari, though without a GPU (there is no virto-gpu driver for macOS and my PC's GPU doesn't support vGPU) the performance isn't great.
The difference is that Microsoft wanted to stall the web, while Google wants to accelerate it faster so that nobody else can keep up.
The commonality is the de-facto monoculture being sold to web developers. "Works best in Internet Explorer" was the problem twenty years ago. Now we've got lazy web developers who bemoan the absence of Chrome on their customer's phones. Right now Apple is the last thing standing between them and slapping a "Works best in Chrome" banner everywhere and abandoning support for Safari.
I've seen plenty of websites with a "Works best in Chrome" banner, usually because they use some non-standard web API. Though, I've seen plenty that clearly just didn't care to test outside of Chrome, so they just assume you're using that.
My gripe about "Safari being the new IE" was more about how broken some websites can be in Safari and having no good way of knowing or testing that. At work, my boss said out website didn't look quite right on his iPhone and it took more work than I'd thought to track down the piece of CSS that Safari rendered differently for some reason.
Personally, I don't use macOS or iOS and I also use Firefox. Generally, things seem to work the same between Firefox Chrome and Safari, with Safari needing the most amount of "tweaks".
When websites are broken in Safari it is, almost invariably, because the web developer was lazy and only ever attempted to make things work in Chrome. This has many risks, including an unintended (but still pathological) reliance on Chrome implementation quirks and undefined behaviours.
Chrome is the new IE because it is fostering the return of the lazy developer who thinks the web can be reduced to a single web browser.
Safari is not the new IE. It is highly standards compliant, it’s actively maintained, and it’s not making web developers lazy.
At least on iOS, if I am not mistaken, you can only run the Safari Engine. Even if you run Firefox or Chrome, it is running Safari under the hood. That is what I understand. Please, correctme if I am wrong.
When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...
... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.
The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice. As the only major platform that hasn’t been functionally taken over by Chrome/chromium, iOS represents the last real defensive line against Google owning the web.
Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.
The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
I reject your assertion because it promulgates the lie of "browser choice". The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
If web developers stop ensuring their sites work in Safari, consumers will be forced to install Chrome. That's not browser choice. An open platform means that CONSUMERS get to choose which browser they use, not web developers.
(And before you say it, consumers can choose Android, where 99.9% of people use Chrome, but apparently that's okay because they "chose" it.)
If web developers stop ensuring their sites work in Safari, their sites will still work in Safari because Google ratifies and publishes the web standards that Chrome follows so that Safari and other browsers can follow it too, something that Safari actually does less than Chrome.
Consumers choosing Android isn't a choice of which browser to use, it's choosing which operating system to use. That doesn't sound like you care that consumers get to choose which browser they use, that's letting Apple choose which browser that Apple consumers use then telling them they can choose a different operating system instead.
There is absolutely browser diversity on mobile. ~30% of people are using Safari. ~70% of people are using Chrome (and have the "choice" to use Firefox but don't).
Maybe folk mean that iOS only uses Safari rendering regardless of which wrapper is running? Meaning Apple users don't have a choice, one rendering engine only, not diverse.
You're delusional. Safari is forced on every browser on iOS, you install Firefox but the browser engine is Safari. You install Chrome but the browser engine is forced by Apple to be Safari.
This isn't browser diversity, iOS is a browser monoculture, it's all Safari under the hood. How can you not understand this??
>I reject your assertion because it promulgates the lie of "browser choice".
The only lie being told in all of this is the one Apple tells when you install Firefox on an iOS device. It's not Firefox you're installing, it's Safari. Every browser on iOS is Safari - you have no choice at all.
>The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
Then put your money where your mouth is. If Safari can compete then let other browser engines on iOS. If it can't then it deserves to die. Artificially inflating it by forcing on iOS isn't the utopia you think it is.
>A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
Apple iOS is a monocoulture - every browser is Safari whether you want it or not.
There's no argument you can make to escape the fact that Apple is helping nobody but Apple by forcing Safari on iOS.
That's not what diversity means. I agree there's no browser choice on iOS.
Choice is what the individual (supposedly) has. Diversity is what actually exists across an ecosystem. iOS is the last bastion of browser diversity, because despite all this supposed "choice", it's pretty much all Chrome everywhere else.
> The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
This is a wild statement. For an individual user, what is the point of browser diversity if you are locked into your browser by OS? A weird number of people here are okay with this particular example of anti-consumer behavior simply because it offsets the chrome monopoly.
One analogy I think of every time this comes up on HN is the kernel and linux. Why do we not speak of a similar lack of diversity?
To me, chromium is the kernel and the browsers are the distro. We do like that there is a shared kernel in linux, yes?
I acknowledge that this is reductionist, as there exists another lack of diversity for consumer operating systems, in there really only being Windows and Mac / iOS and Android.
The Linux kernel isn't a good comparison because kernel development is not led by a corporation with its own distinct commercial interests. Sure Linux a monoculture, but it's a uniquely healthy one.
And the Linux kernel isn't a good analogy because the web is a standard, not an implementation. In that sense it's more akin to UNIX, or IP-based networking.
I do share your thoughts and sentiments at other times (and peer commenter too). The contrarian in me likes to offer up this analogy, though I interpret it much more loosely than the HN critiques I earn each time. To me there is an argument I feel can made that a shared "browser" kernel has some advantage in, for example, security. More eyes, more contributors, which number more organizations than Google these days
Linux isn’t a good analogy to Chromium due to the differences in history, licensing, and project governance.
Linux is GPLv2, it has many outside contributors, it was built from scratch, and it has Linus as a neutral party as the final decider in terms of the direction of the project and what gets included.
Chromium is a mix of LGPL, BSD, and other licenses depending on the component. Chromium was originally forked from WebKit; it isn’t a from scratch project. Google decides what changes get merged to Chromium.
The user could have bought an Android phone instead.
However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.
>The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform
Maybe you don't understand that I have to spend several hundred dollars for the privilege to debug Safari's shitty bugs. That's FUCKED UP. It isn't "being lazy". I shouldn't have to spend money so I can cater to a shitty browser. And Apple does some weird-ass things with their browser that make it wonky, and you can't debug some things without an apple device. Touch events are one particular iffy thing Apple does differently, because "think different" apparently means "we do whatever the fuck we want so pay us to debug things that shouldn't need debugging".
>Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Give me $500 to buy an Apple device and I'll fix things so it works for the shitty browser iOS users are forced to use. It has not a single fucking thing to do with "being lazy", and you're a shitty person for suggesting that's how this works.
>Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, much like how many think standards groups (e.g. W3C) decide how the browsers works.
(Standards groups can invent the best feature ever for the Web ... and it won't matter in the slightest if browser makers don't adopt it. ALL STANDARDS ARE SET BY BROWSER MAKERS ... the standards bodies are just the mechanism they use to do it.)
Likewise, the browser a web developer user uses is already set for them. EVERY web dev (except those at companies big enough to care about the "long tail" of browsers) uses one browser: the most popular one.
It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
No, it doesn't. I'm not talking about web standards bodies. I'm talking about the practical reality of the web as a platform that is resilient against slight differences between browsers. This resilience can only come from developers who understand that their job is to target the web and not just Chrome.
It is you who misunderstands:
> It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
There you are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome platform for the convenience of web developers. This is the problem. What you're advocating for is the problem.
I'm not arguing anything, I'm telling you what reality is.
The reality is that 99% of web developers all use the exact same browser, and it isn't Chrome or IE or any one browser its "whatever is the most popular browser currently" (really it's "most popular for your customers but 99% of companies have customers who use the same browsers as everyone else).
You can bury your head in the sand and say "oh the mean web developers aren't using my pet browser" ... but it won't change the fact that no one wants to test on an unpopular browser, then test again on a popular one: EVERYONE is going to test their site with the browser most likely to use that site.
You are correct that many developers complain about Safari because they are lazy little shits who would much prefer the whole world be forced to change which browser they use in order to make their jobs a bit easier.
Nobody is saying anyone needs to test on an unpopular browser. Safari on iOS is, by the numbers, very popular.
Browser diversity is merely an after-effect of Apple having complete control over iOS, if it was profitable to let Google coup the entire web, they would do it in a heartbeat.
It's obvious Apple isn't doing this to "protect the open web" because if that was true, they wouldn't have stopped developing Safari for Windows.
> Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Wild how low the bar has gotten. The web would be so much better if there were ~10 browsers, each with around 10% market share. Web sites would have to suck it up and put some effort into browser testing and compatibility. And stop relying on features of a single browser. I remember writing software that had to work on over a dozen platforms. But developers today can’t manage to support more than one browser?
It's been a long time since I've encountered an issue with a particular browser. After IE was gone, unless you were using bleeding edge features everything that works in one browser works everywhere else.
If your website doesn't work on one browser, you probably need to raise a bug report for that browser rather than change your site.
Safari is rarely more than two years behind the bleeding edge. That might sound like a lot, but I contend that it's nothing. Nothing of great importance has been added to the web platform in five years let alone two.
Unless you're doing something very specific (e.g. video conferencing or browser gaming) you shouldn't need to even think about any remotely modern web features. And if you are doing something so specific, then you should be testing in multiple browsers anyway.
> The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
There's multiple issues with Safari and people complaining aren't "lazy". To start with it's a much buggier browser than Firefox or Chrome. Sure if you go on caniuse.com, almost everything is marked as supported but with Safari in reality it's always ""supported"" and you will deal with non-sense bugs, most of the features are sort of 95% there and they stopped development claiming it's good enough. They also have very poor QA and regressions happen often.
Next, Safari is the last non-evergreen browser, it's still tied to the OS and thus lags behind in updates.
And to finish, Safari is also only available on Apple devices (harder to test with) and tied to a specific OS version (how are you officially even supposed to test the bugs on version X without paying a third party company? I don't know).
I'm not against Safari but Apple really needs to put some money to make it more modern if they want to actually compete with Firefox or Chrome without their OS lock-in.
Ideally we want both, but diversity is more important, because it's a necessary prerequisite for choice. You can have diversity without choice, but you cannot have choice without diversity.
> Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).
Damn thats pretty evil, I just looked it up. For those curious, Apple forces you to release your EU app with a different browser engine specifically for European users as a completely separate app, meaning you would have Facebook World edition with WebKit, and Facebook EU Edition with whatever new engine they want. Basically not worth the hassle to maintain two separate apps.
It's even worse. Apple has taken malicious compliance to a new level with the Digital Markets Act and alternative browser engines. Apple requires a strict compliance regiment. Developers need special authorisation, and must meet extensive security, privacy, and vulnerability management requirements. All of those are opaque and up to the subjective determination of Apple's changing whims. Meaning they'll go out of their way to deny an engine (or update) for any or no reason at all.
And it gets worse. Developers have reported limitations on testing, restrictive contractual terms, and uncertainty surrounding updates when users travel outside the EU.
Not even Google has managed to navigate this gauntlet. Our EU leaders are asleep at the wheel.
> But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.
Try GNOME Web (Epiphany). It's webkit based, keeps up with Safari, doesn't disable access to the Safari devtools, and it sends the exact same user agent string. Should be essentially bug-for-bug compatible. It's otherwise an anemic browser, but you don't need much for testing.
This is a misunderstanding based on mistakenly equating Manifest V3 with the blocking webRequest API. Manifest V3 is so much more than that.
Safari's original extension API, introduced in 2010, which supported blocking webRequest and indeed uBlock Origin, was deprecated way back in Safari version 12, replaced by the Safari-specific app extension and content blocker APIs. Years later, Safari introduced the web extension API, which had broad compatibility with Chrome and Firefox extensions. However, Safari web extensions never supported blocking webRequest. Nonetheless, Safari web extensions continue to support Manifest V2 to this day.
The 3 major web browsers have 3 different approaches to blocking webRequest:
1. Chrome eliminated support for blocking webRequest with Manifest V3.
2. Safari never had support for blocking webRequest with Manifest V2 or V3.
3. Firefox (I believe) supports blocking webRequest with both Manifest V2 and V3.
Manifest V3 has a lot of restrictions on JavaScript code injection that are problematic for extension developers but not well understood by the public.
There's always Edge (increasingly favored by IT here). Our machines used to ship and favor Chrome, but Edge has been the new IT-gods blessed browser ever since we bumped to Windows 11. Apple seems to be the only tech-titan that is not interested in extending their browser onto other platforms. So be it.
On iPhone, for the longest time, every browser has been forced to be Safari's engine underneath. Firefox, Chrome, etc are all forced to run Safari underneath.
This has caused many issues because Apple controls what can run in a web browser and that web browser (safari) is in no way up to date, or worse, selectively implements standards. I'm writing this in the hopes that it will publicly improve.
Since Safari is forced at an OS level on all Apple's iOS and iPadOS users, that's a place to start when it comes to choice.
On MacOS, Safari is actually pretty interesting - it can be much more efficient with battery usage than other browsers and unsurprisingly well integrated. It's nice to use on MacOS because there is choice.
I understand there maybe concerns about security, but also will come out is likely that safari enjoys some OS level integrations that other browsers probably won't be welcome to, similar to the Internet Explorer/Edge days.
The switch to safari is likely tied to something else, given Apple's growing advertising revenue. Meaning, move away from one advertisement engine (Chrome), and move to another (Safari).
The UX of Safari is just... not as good as chrome. On my phone, on my desktop, I just feel too much friction in the daily cycle of opening a thousand tabs.
The UX of Pages and Keynote are, IMO, far superior to Word/Powerpoint and Google Docs/Slides, but they lag adoption from... ecosystem inertia? I mention this as evidence of my objectivity in reflecting on UX.
It may list it at the end, sometimes after a random delay, and sometimes fail to find something known to exist. Case in point: I just typed “autofill” into the address bar. Took about 1 second before anything showed up in the dropdown, and lo and behold, “Find ‘autofill’ — no matches”. Deleting “autofill” and typing it in again — “4 matches”, and dropdown entries appeared as I typed. What a shitshow.
This is very much my experience with Safari in general. Each one of these glitches in isolation isn't enough to push me away, but I had enough of them that it became unpleasant to use. The most annoying one was where I hit enter on the address bar and the page would just do nothing. Sometimes for 5, 10, 30 seconds. It was intermittent but annoying as fuck. If I clicked on the address bar and hit enter again it would work. Turns out it's been a bug for 15 years. Thousands of reports, still not fixed. Such a basic function for a web browser and they can't get that right.
For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.
442 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 46.1 ms ] threadFirst stop blocking iOS pwas from simply installing to the home screen, and don't clear out data in 7 days. Then we'll talk about your browser being better.
People are just not aware that this is a thing, and when they learn it's a thing, they don't want to do it.
Really well argued, congrats.
That's the only reason I am not switching to FF 100%. I do use it though but not as a main driver.
I generally use Safari on my Apple devices (and YT works) and Firefox on any Linux machines. If something does not work on Safari I try Firefox on my Mac. In the past I've also sometimes used Chrome when no other option works.
So one option could be to use Firefox as a 'general use' browser, and switch to something else on an as-needed basis.
A bit of a hassle, but it may be the best compromise currently.
I keep retrying Firefox over multiple years and it's still not quite equal to Chrome for Youtube 4k playback ...
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783904
2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42176450
2026 still talks about the problem: https://go.tabbit.ai/blog/firefox-youtube-4k-stuttering
You must have a hardware problem, as I'm playing 4K videos on a 1st-gen Ryzen and GTX 1080 using Firefox and I've never had a single issue since I got the machine, around the 4th week the processor was available to purchase.
Until about the top-end of the 3000 RTX series released, the GTX 1080 was still king of raster performance.
I'm playing modern games like Marvel Rivals at 1440p no problem. Risk of Rain 2 4k no problem. STALKER 2 1080p no problem. It even runs most of my VR games perfectly fine, with me only needing to switch to my RTX 5060 machine for Into the Radius 2.
Even today, it is a very capable card, despite the power draw.
If FF is not working on youtube for, it's not working for you and you alone.
Some of the related posts:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...
I stopped using Brave for no reason i don't remember. (no, not to do with the CEO)
I am perfectly happy with Chrome.
it's missing the element zapper and has some other limitations, but it works pretty well for the most part
combined with ublacklist and sponsorblock it's fairly good coverage for safari
Support for element zapper was added more than 18 months ago in version 2025.3.23.1241.[1]
---
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/releases/tag/uBOLi...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Apple_Safa...
And safari still behaves differently than my other browsers.
I usually try to give safari a chance whenever I’m working on Macs. I’m always forced to install chrome for some reason or another.
Until the random compatibility quirks stop I don’t see myself returning to safari.
No thanks.. I'd rather switch to Firefox, or even any other shitty browser, but not the one from any other gatekeeping monopoly.
They're promoting their browser as an alternative to Chrome or Firefox.
You're companing about walled gardens.
We can already see it on IOS where no one is allowed to use any other browser engine than safari's own.. of course, the reasoning is always "security".
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects.
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects and stoped using KDE
Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.
Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way).
Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).
Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.
I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those.
But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.
And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware.
How is the iOS engine requirement considered a monopoly?
Bad choice of term!
https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_24.html
Not how it works. You define a relevant market, and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.
Which legal framework does this perspective come from? Maybe Europe? Do you have a reference for this? It goes against case law [1]:
> Judge Rogers concluded that Apple was not a monopoly and mostly a duopoly alongside Google, with potential competition to come from Nintendo and Google Stadia, and while Apple "enjoys considerable market share of over 55% and extraordinary high profit margins", that type of success was not an illegal monopoly.
Would your definition also say that the Sony playstation store is a monopoly? Or that my local bakery, that only offers the bread they bake, is a monopoly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Apple
But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.
I can’t make it website owners problem that their site doesn’t work on non-Google browser. Apple can.
Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
Safari simply sucks. If WebKit was any good, then Apple wouldn't have to worry about allowing third-party engines onto iOS. The situation on Mac tells us everything we need to know.
Then do that FIRST (or at the same time). Don't give us, yet AGAIN, the tired bs song and dance about how you'll make things worse first and then totally someday address the other part properly, and oops what a surprise that turns out to be too hard nevermind.
>But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.
Objectively it is a solution though. Because it's been done, and it's worked, while meanwhile nothing has happened from a legal or political angles. If a better solution can be done down the road great, but a hack dealing with a problem non-optimally can absolutely be better then just having the problem completely unaddressed. And count me skeptical that any government is going to have the will or capability to actually address what a lot of us already hate about not just the Chrome monopoly but the entire approach. I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their interests have happened not to align that way either. Until monopoly lock-in gets better addressed, one of the main ways to push back is via another monopoly lock-in that has different incentives.
You absolutely can, and we absolutely have. You believe this because anti-trust action was derided as anti-growth in the latter quarter of the 20th century, by people who knew exactly what they were doing (see also: banking deregulation).
It's one of the major reasons we're stuck with such horrendous corporate and individual wealth inequality today.
Google should never have been allowed to buy DoubleClick, ship a browser, or ship general-purpose client operating systems.
For all the claims about security problems - and there were many and the complaints were valid - people seem a bit too willing to overlook the much greater attack surface of modern browsers that still incorporate similar flexibility and functionality but through other protocols and native Web standards now instead. For better or worse today's "evergreen" browsers roll out new functionality more quickly than before but their most important innovation was introducing frequent automatic security updates to a general non-technical audience at a time when that certainly wasn't the default for most desktop software. Take a look at how many significant security issues get fixed in any of the major browser on each update cycle and you can see that even today this is still far from a solved problem.
When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side.
It's my device. I should be able to whatever the hell I want with it.
This argument is terrible, we're lucky the one other competitor, for now, allows installing what you want or people like you would argue everything is fine.
Your argument ... isn't one.
Easy. Just legislate that the only browser allowed on iPhones is Firefox. That way, Chrome can't monopolize the web, and iPhone users get to have a decent browser.
And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea? What kind of crack are you smoking? Oh, yeah, the apple fanboi crack.
>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Forbidding users to install the software that they want is not the way to save everyone from anything. It's abusive in its own way. And Apple is not going to save anyone from Google. People are still using Google services through Safari, because they are services Apple either sucks at or doesn't offer.
>Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.
So you're fine giving over all control to Apple. Apple already has way too much control. Being on the W3C board, they use their power to block any browser API that could make web browsers more capable, which would cut into their native app mafia racket where they charge 30% of any purchase done through an app. They don't offer any alternatives, or any changes - they just squash anything they see as competitive to native apps. That's how fucked up they are. They are literally holding back progress for no good reason - not security, not for privacy, it's purely for their own greed.
Then maybe Apple should invest a fraction of their fortune on making Safari better. Competition is good. Apple doesn't care about competing because they have a monopoly. If they were forced to actually improve WebKit and Safari, maybe people would choose to use it.
I remember a long time ago they used to make a Windows version of Safari you could download and install, but at some point they stopped.
Either way, if someone is still manually testing their website instead of using a standard automated testing system you're probably not really in a league where this matters anyway.. and if they are, you probably have a device farm already.
Not sure where the "my thing is so important, I have to test it on a real device, but I can't pay for it" niche is.
Apple's Safari enforcement is the only reason Chrome hasn't completely taken over.
Once real Chromium is available on iPhones, there will be a monopoly.
I want to use Screen Studio, but it is a MacOS only app (and I'm on Windows). Is that Apple's fault?
Diversity is not an intrinsic good. It only is good inasmuch as it enables other things which are good. If the browser diversity we have (limited though it is) isn't actually providing choice to consumers, I don't see how it provides any value even if we do preserve it.
Also, you /can/ run macOS in a VM on Linux: https://github.com/Coopydood/ultimate-macOS-kvm
I use that to test our website at work in Safari, though without a GPU (there is no virto-gpu driver for macOS and my PC's GPU doesn't support vGPU) the performance isn't great.
The difference is that Microsoft wanted to stall the web, while Google wants to accelerate it faster so that nobody else can keep up.
The commonality is the de-facto monoculture being sold to web developers. "Works best in Internet Explorer" was the problem twenty years ago. Now we've got lazy web developers who bemoan the absence of Chrome on their customer's phones. Right now Apple is the last thing standing between them and slapping a "Works best in Chrome" banner everywhere and abandoning support for Safari.
My gripe about "Safari being the new IE" was more about how broken some websites can be in Safari and having no good way of knowing or testing that. At work, my boss said out website didn't look quite right on his iPhone and it took more work than I'd thought to track down the piece of CSS that Safari rendered differently for some reason.
Personally, I don't use macOS or iOS and I also use Firefox. Generally, things seem to work the same between Firefox Chrome and Safari, with Safari needing the most amount of "tweaks".
Chrome is the new IE because it is fostering the return of the lazy developer who thinks the web can be reduced to a single web browser.
Safari is not the new IE. It is highly standards compliant, it’s actively maintained, and it’s not making web developers lazy.
Just checked in the App Store, I can install Firefox, Opera, Brave, and many many other browsers on my iPhone.
... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.
Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.
The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
Says who? I certainly don't agree with that statement, the "web as an open platform" was unrecognizable when proprietary clients were the norm.
(And before you say it, consumers can choose Android, where 99.9% of people use Chrome, but apparently that's okay because they "chose" it.)
Consumers choosing Android isn't a choice of which browser to use, it's choosing which operating system to use. That doesn't sound like you care that consumers get to choose which browser they use, that's letting Apple choose which browser that Apple consumers use then telling them they can choose a different operating system instead.
This isn't browser diversity, iOS is a browser monoculture, it's all Safari under the hood. How can you not understand this??
The only lie being told in all of this is the one Apple tells when you install Firefox on an iOS device. It's not Firefox you're installing, it's Safari. Every browser on iOS is Safari - you have no choice at all.
>The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.
Then put your money where your mouth is. If Safari can compete then let other browser engines on iOS. If it can't then it deserves to die. Artificially inflating it by forcing on iOS isn't the utopia you think it is.
>A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
Apple iOS is a monocoulture - every browser is Safari whether you want it or not.
There's no argument you can make to escape the fact that Apple is helping nobody but Apple by forcing Safari on iOS.
Choice is what the individual (supposedly) has. Diversity is what actually exists across an ecosystem. iOS is the last bastion of browser diversity, because despite all this supposed "choice", it's pretty much all Chrome everywhere else.
https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
Real Gecko on iOS
Chromium on iOS can also be compiled with blink, using the ‘use_blink’ flag.
This is a wild statement. For an individual user, what is the point of browser diversity if you are locked into your browser by OS? A weird number of people here are okay with this particular example of anti-consumer behavior simply because it offsets the chrome monopoly.
To me, chromium is the kernel and the browsers are the distro. We do like that there is a shared kernel in linux, yes?
I acknowledge that this is reductionist, as there exists another lack of diversity for consumer operating systems, in there really only being Windows and Mac / iOS and Android.
And the Linux kernel isn't a good analogy because the web is a standard, not an implementation. In that sense it's more akin to UNIX, or IP-based networking.
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/chromium/contri...
Still, there is a difference between contribution and control, which I hope and dream can and will change.
https://www.learninternetgrow.com/who-controls-chromium/
I will add that I appreciate your response, generally, but especially the missing hyperbole. This civil discourse is very preferable.
Linux is GPLv2, it has many outside contributors, it was built from scratch, and it has Linus as a neutral party as the final decider in terms of the direction of the project and what gets included.
Chromium is a mix of LGPL, BSD, and other licenses depending on the component. Chromium was originally forked from WebKit; it isn’t a from scratch project. Google decides what changes get merged to Chromium.
However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.
Maybe you don't understand that I have to spend several hundred dollars for the privilege to debug Safari's shitty bugs. That's FUCKED UP. It isn't "being lazy". I shouldn't have to spend money so I can cater to a shitty browser. And Apple does some weird-ass things with their browser that make it wonky, and you can't debug some things without an apple device. Touch events are one particular iffy thing Apple does differently, because "think different" apparently means "we do whatever the fuck we want so pay us to debug things that shouldn't need debugging".
>Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.
Give me $500 to buy an Apple device and I'll fix things so it works for the shitty browser iOS users are forced to use. It has not a single fucking thing to do with "being lazy", and you're a shitty person for suggesting that's how this works.
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding, much like how many think standards groups (e.g. W3C) decide how the browsers works.
(Standards groups can invent the best feature ever for the Web ... and it won't matter in the slightest if browser makers don't adopt it. ALL STANDARDS ARE SET BY BROWSER MAKERS ... the standards bodies are just the mechanism they use to do it.)
Likewise, the browser a web developer user uses is already set for them. EVERY web dev (except those at companies big enough to care about the "long tail" of browsers) uses one browser: the most popular one.
It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
No, it doesn't. I'm not talking about web standards bodies. I'm talking about the practical reality of the web as a platform that is resilient against slight differences between browsers. This resilience can only come from developers who understand that their job is to target the web and not just Chrome.
It is you who misunderstands:
> It has nothing to do with politics or being complicit, and everything to do with "You have a job to do, why would you make it take twice as long by testing everything with an unpopular browser, when 99 out of 100 times that testing will find nothing and be a total waste of your time?"
There you are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome platform for the convenience of web developers. This is the problem. What you're advocating for is the problem.
The reality is that 99% of web developers all use the exact same browser, and it isn't Chrome or IE or any one browser its "whatever is the most popular browser currently" (really it's "most popular for your customers but 99% of companies have customers who use the same browsers as everyone else).
You can bury your head in the sand and say "oh the mean web developers aren't using my pet browser" ... but it won't change the fact that no one wants to test on an unpopular browser, then test again on a popular one: EVERYONE is going to test their site with the browser most likely to use that site.
You are correct that many developers complain about Safari because they are lazy little shits who would much prefer the whole world be forced to change which browser they use in order to make their jobs a bit easier.
Nobody is saying anyone needs to test on an unpopular browser. Safari on iOS is, by the numbers, very popular.
It's obvious Apple isn't doing this to "protect the open web" because if that was true, they wouldn't have stopped developing Safari for Windows.
Wild how low the bar has gotten. The web would be so much better if there were ~10 browsers, each with around 10% market share. Web sites would have to suck it up and put some effort into browser testing and compatibility. And stop relying on features of a single browser. I remember writing software that had to work on over a dozen platforms. But developers today can’t manage to support more than one browser?
If your website doesn't work on one browser, you probably need to raise a bug report for that browser rather than change your site.
Safari is rarely more than two years behind the bleeding edge. That might sound like a lot, but I contend that it's nothing. Nothing of great importance has been added to the web platform in five years let alone two.
Unless you're doing something very specific (e.g. video conferencing or browser gaming) you shouldn't need to even think about any remotely modern web features. And if you are doing something so specific, then you should be testing in multiple browsers anyway.
There's multiple issues with Safari and people complaining aren't "lazy". To start with it's a much buggier browser than Firefox or Chrome. Sure if you go on caniuse.com, almost everything is marked as supported but with Safari in reality it's always ""supported"" and you will deal with non-sense bugs, most of the features are sort of 95% there and they stopped development claiming it's good enough. They also have very poor QA and regressions happen often.
Next, Safari is the last non-evergreen browser, it's still tied to the OS and thus lags behind in updates.
And to finish, Safari is also only available on Apple devices (harder to test with) and tied to a specific OS version (how are you officially even supposed to test the bugs on version X without paying a third party company? I don't know).
I'm not against Safari but Apple really needs to put some money to make it more modern if they want to actually compete with Firefox or Chrome without their OS lock-in.
Lack of browser diversity is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of the only browser vendor.
Lack of browser choice is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of whatever browser vendor they use.
We need both for a healthy web.
Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.
Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.
My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.
Apple is all about control.
TLDR
Apple since mid 2024 was forced by EU and Japan to allow other engines.
There are hurdles but the path is open.
Both Chrome / Blink and Firefox / Gecko have made prototypes but haven’t moved past that.
It seems that there is no money or will to see it through.
So it’s not all “Apple bad doesn’t allow it”
- https://github.com/guacforlife/ReynardDefault
- https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
Damn thats pretty evil, I just looked it up. For those curious, Apple forces you to release your EU app with a different browser engine specifically for European users as a completely separate app, meaning you would have Facebook World edition with WebKit, and Facebook EU Edition with whatever new engine they want. Basically not worth the hassle to maintain two separate apps.
And it gets worse. Developers have reported limitations on testing, restrictive contractual terms, and uncertainty surrounding updates when users travel outside the EU.
Not even Google has managed to navigate this gauntlet. Our EU leaders are asleep at the wheel.
Your Linux download is right there.
Mosaic was a fair bit earlier, but yeah, I ran Netscape 4 until Mozilla M18. Never used IE as my main browser in many years of Windows use.
EDIT: I guess Netscape 4 and Mozilla M18 were both pre-IE6, too, but still Mozilla/Firefox for the IE6 era.
Try GNOME Web (Epiphany). It's webkit based, keeps up with Safari, doesn't disable access to the Safari devtools, and it sends the exact same user agent string. Should be essentially bug-for-bug compatible. It's otherwise an anemic browser, but you don't need much for testing.
Safari's original extension API, introduced in 2010, which supported blocking webRequest and indeed uBlock Origin, was deprecated way back in Safari version 12, replaced by the Safari-specific app extension and content blocker APIs. Years later, Safari introduced the web extension API, which had broad compatibility with Chrome and Firefox extensions. However, Safari web extensions never supported blocking webRequest. Nonetheless, Safari web extensions continue to support Manifest V2 to this day.
The 3 major web browsers have 3 different approaches to blocking webRequest:
1. Chrome eliminated support for blocking webRequest with Manifest V3.
2. Safari never had support for blocking webRequest with Manifest V2 or V3.
3. Firefox (I believe) supports blocking webRequest with both Manifest V2 and V3.
Manifest V3 has a lot of restrictions on JavaScript code injection that are problematic for extension developers but not well understood by the public.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safariservices/cre...
This has caused many issues because Apple controls what can run in a web browser and that web browser (safari) is in no way up to date, or worse, selectively implements standards. I'm writing this in the hopes that it will publicly improve.
Since Safari is forced at an OS level on all Apple's iOS and iPadOS users, that's a place to start when it comes to choice.
On MacOS, Safari is actually pretty interesting - it can be much more efficient with battery usage than other browsers and unsurprisingly well integrated. It's nice to use on MacOS because there is choice.
I understand there maybe concerns about security, but also will come out is likely that safari enjoys some OS level integrations that other browsers probably won't be welcome to, similar to the Internet Explorer/Edge days.
The switch to safari is likely tied to something else, given Apple's growing advertising revenue. Meaning, move away from one advertisement engine (Chrome), and move to another (Safari).
The UX of Pages and Keynote are, IMO, far superior to Word/Powerpoint and Google Docs/Slides, but they lag adoption from... ecosystem inertia? I mention this as evidence of my objectivity in reflecting on UX.
What do you love about safari?
Ultimately they’re two WebKit browsers one of which feels like a real Mac app.
For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.