I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing. It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember back then to artisnaly get IE to behave like a moderately modern (for then) browser.
Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.
Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.
Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.
> "Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place."
You wouldn't be worried about vulnerabilities that the vibe coded browser could produce? I use plenty of LLM generated code, but a browser wouldn't be something I'd try on the Web.
So long as you don't distribute it and it doesn't become popular, don't underestimate security through obscurity. Malicious actors won't know about this homebrew browser's (presumably many) hypothetical flaws.
> Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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. That's not a healthy web, that's competing layers of dysfunction.
For an individual user, what is the point of browser choice when developers stop testing in Safari and instead say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome". That's not giving the consumer a choice.
Unironically and emphatically yes. Choice is predicated on diversity. You can have diversity without choice, but you cannot have choice without diversity.
If diversity fails to occur naturally, some amount of forced diversity helps to keep the ecosystem healthy.
Nobody called the current situation healthy. But it could get a lot worse.
Though an interesting consequence is that allowing iOS users to install firefox but not chrome would be a strict improvement over the current situation.
Yes, except the Safari experience is only sub-par because the developer chose to use some bleeding edge feature that doesn't fall back gracefully, or is relying on a Chrome bug, or a lax feature implementation in Chrome.
There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
> There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
How about a browser with a captive userbase that has less incentive to stay up to date with web standards?
Your argument is that we should expect developers to target/test their app on many different browsers where any random CSS property behaves differently. They will have to buy a device just for this purpose. Because it is obviously developers who should have to pick up the slack here, not Apple.
Developers should develop for the web, not one particular browser. There are desktop and native mobile applications that manage to work across multiple operating systems and cpu architectures, and you’re telling me web developers can’t test their shit on a handful of browsers and configurations?
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.
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 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.
I've had to pay thousands of dollars on Android devices I don't want in order to test my website and fix shitty Chrome bugs. I sucked it up. You can too.
If the cost really is an issue for you, I'm sure you know that you aren't forced to pay $500 to Apple. You can easily find hand-me-down Apple devices that still runs a current operating system for a pittance -- or free if you have a network of friends or family. No need to pay Apple anything.
Well that's some nonsense. You can install the Android emulator on MacOS, or whatever OS you use for developing - you can't do that with iOS. You have to purchase a mac to do it.
And I can't even buy only an iOS device, because the iOS device has to connect to a laptop/desktop version of Safari to use its debugger - so I need to purchase two Apple devices!, just to debug the mobile device.
I wouldn't be complaining if I could install the iOS simulator on any other platform - but even on iOS the iOS simulator sucks badly, and it only works on MacOS. It doesn't "simulate" touch events correctly, as they function differently on a real iOS device.
Tell me you're not a web developer without telling me. Many of the Chrome/Android bugs I've had to deal with are touch/swipe/drag interactivity issues which cannot be reliably tested in simulators, especially because the fix often involves experiencing the affordances with your own finger tips. Real testing requires real access to real devices used by real end-users. This is as true for Android and Windows as it is for iOS and macOS.
Nobody says you need to pay Apple anything. Apple devices can be incredibly cheap on the second-hand market -- potentially free if you have friends or family. An older Mac and an iPhone 11 are all you really need. If that is still too much for you, then what can I say? I don't see Microsoft giving you a Windows PC or Google giving you an Android device for free.
I suppose you can quit your job and become a chef, but you'll still have to buy your own set of knives and an apron.
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.
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.
>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.
There is absolutely browser diversity on mobile. ~30% of people are using Safari on iOS. ~70% of people are using Chrome on Android (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??
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.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. How can you get web developers to test their websites in Safari, when the majority of Mac devs haven't opened Safari in ages? We have the answer already. Safari doesn't compete on it's own merit.
WebKit is a second-class citizen on the web, and we can argue about why that is, but nobody can sincerely deny it. Apple's strategy has been dead in the water for over a decade. iOS lost.
Safari is still relevant and iOS hasn't lost; the very existence of this thread serves as a clear rejection of that framing. If Safari wasn't competing, or if iOS had lost, nobody would care.
Meanwhile we have people bitching and moaning and meanwhile, as a Firefox user, I go to Safari when I encounter a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari, and that is a Good Thing. No developer is forced to test in Firefox.
>the very existence of this thread serves as a clear rejection of that framing.
The existence of the "Switch to Safari" campaign is a clear rejection that Safari is competing - it's not, it's the laughing stock of web browsers in 2026, it holds the same place that IE6 did in the early 2000s.
>Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari,
I'm not forced to test in Safari, because I don't have money for an iOS device. So Apple users can continue to suffer with whatever browser they use on their i-device. I really don't care, and Apple has done this - not me, because they offer no way but purchasing their hardware to test their wonky browser engine.
And yes, you can emulate an android device on MacOS, so don't bother trying that again. You don't need to purchase an android device to test on android.
This incredibly lame campaign is only referring to macOS, not iOS. The grandparent asserted that "iOS lost."
On macOS, Google plays with a lot of dark patterns to get people to install Chrome. I can't count the number of times I've visited my sister or parents and seen Chrome on their Mac, and their explanation is "because Google told me I needed it."
Sure it's choice. I use Firefox on Linux; I have to forego a handful of websites, but nothing is a dealbreaker. YouTube works, Gmail works, my life isn't interrupted without Chrome installed.
It sounds like your family is using Chrome because it's more convenient. It's 2026, we can't blame anyone given what Safari spent the past decade doing. Apple does not provide convenient Safari sync for Windows and Android devices, which comprise the majority of smart devices sold. They don't support the normie extensions that people use on Firefox and Chrome. Safari lags behind Chrome in features, WebKit lags behind Blink in cross-platform support, and Apple doesn't allow Safari forks to boost their market share. Apple draws very clear and arbitrary lines in the sand, and then redrafts them once they finally change their mind about PWAs or notification support. By the time it reaches Safari, your parents have been using the feature in Chrome for 8 months.
We may have to agree to disagree. Apple's incessant marketing for their own inferior, ad-ridden packin software is part of why I left macOS to begin with. It's infantilizing to be told that I can't be trusted to make a smart decision, when Apple's own suggestion is a half baked, self-serving alternative. I empathize with Mac users that ignore Safari because that's exactly what I did on my Mac, too. I'd have been using Chrome if Firefox wasn't an option. And I still would, because WebKit is a dog's dinner on my OS.
I do use safari in my playwright tests, and it led to me doing a note on my known limitations page - that those tests take longer than Firefox and Chrome, my daily drivers. But, that could be due to using it on Linux maybe. I do hate having to dig out ios devices for app testing.
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.
>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 wasn't 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. Such 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?"
You are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome Platform for the convenience of web developers. Sure we can have other browsers, so long as they're perfectly compatible with Chrome's quirks. This is precisely what it means for the web to be the Chrome Platform, not the open web. We've already reached the point where it's assumed that Chrome is perfect and anything that deviates from Chrome is someone else's bug. It's sad.
Allowing Google to use their control of the web to kill the most effective method of blocking ads is the solution?
No.
People need to stop using Chrome and Chromium based browsers and use browsers based on implementations of the web standards that are out of Google's control.
Firefox on Android supports the full version of uBlock Origin.
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 still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)
> 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.
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.
>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 been more effective than nothing, 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 that entire approach (I don't in fact want my web browser to be a full lowest common denominator operating system with low level hardware access thanks). I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their selfish 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.
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.
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.
>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?
>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Basically not possible to do JIT (needed for decent JS perf) on iOS for 3p apps (since that requires pages that are both writable and executable) and then on top of that Apple bans 3p browsers specifically in markets where they're allowed to.
When submitting apps to Apple, all browser apps are required to and are basically glorified WKWebViews. Apple doesn't allow any other browser engines when submitting apps to app
Store.
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.
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.
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.
Android’s global marketshare is 70% of mobile so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work
There is plenty of competition and choice to iOS, you just won’t find that on Apple hardware for reasons that have held for three decades
On a lot of Android devices you can't install ANY other custom OS because of locked down bootloaders. If you want GrapheneOS specifically that list is even narrower due to 1. official support 2. hardware security features just missing from the devices.
It's absolutely how they work. If there's only a single grocery store in town (and for whatever reason others can't be opened), is that somehow not a monopoly even though there are several pharmacies and hardware stores?
That's not a good analogy for the situation. A better grocery-based analogy would be if there's only a single Bob's Grocery in town (and for whatever reason more Bob's Groceries can't be opened) but there is a Sally's Groceries in town. Then Bob's Groceries isn't a monopoly. The only thing Bob's Groceries is a monopoly of is Bob's Groceries, which is a useless tautological argument.
Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.
Why would I use the global market share to determine if someone has a monopoly, though? It seems like a flawed way to determine how much choice consumers have.
For example, there's a monopoly on garbage service where I live, but he company with the monopoly has basically 0% of the world market.
How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't? I can see the duopoly argument, but no idea how apple could be a monopoly by itself
I'm not defending anybody. I'm just saying, if I live in a market where one company has 99% of the market, somebody coming in and saying "There's not a monopoly. They only have 30% of the global market! " isn't going to make me feel any better, because I don't live everywhere in the world. I live where I live, and that company has 99% of the market there.
I just don't think the 30% of the global market number is relevant to anything in terms of arguing if somebody has a monopoly. Are there even any countries who use a definition of "monopoly" that uses global marketshare to determine if there's a monopoly? Surely those definitions all look at marketshare within some specific region?
There are entire countries where one company has 93%+ marketshare. Yes, maybe people can go to another country where the marketshare is different, but do we all seriously think that the global marketshare not resembling a monopoly definitely means that there's no one market where a monopoly exists?
I imagine trying to effectively use (or market) a competing product in a region with 93%+ marketshare is a painful experience, regardless of whether the global marketshare is more balanced.
Using global marketshare hides details like that. Apple could have 100% of the market in China and India, and Android could have 100% of the marketshare in the rest of the world. This would put, worldwide, Apple at about 35% and Android at about 65%. I would argue there are clearly monopolies in that case, though, even if the worldwide numbers are 65 and 35.
> How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't?
One allows you to install different browsers, the other does not.
Being a monopoly isn't illegal (in the US). It's what they do that matters.
Now, that doesn't mean Apple is a monopoly with iOS, because the Sherman act doens't dictate it only looks at US only markets. It look at what makes sense in the context. Of course, a court could decide that regardless of what the numbers are internationall, what matters in this case is just the US market.
Trying to predict that is useless at the moment though because the US courts are all over the place.
Being a monopoly isn't illegal. So many discussions gloss over this fact, and people get at each other's throat over hypothetical abuses and ad-hominem scenarios.
Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Alphabet and Apple are both unquestionably monopoly businesses, and make incredible year-over-year revenue through market-damaging services like AdSense and the App Store. If they are allowed to continue, then other Fortune 500 businesses will copy their decisions, thereby destroying genuine market value that they provide in exchange for safer, more exploitative revenue streams.
In the case of AdSense and Apple's App Store both, I think that any fair FTC investigation would conclude they are shakedown services that harm the greater economy.
You couldn't have, though. Market share was a part of that Microsoft decision. At the time, they had 90-95% of the global market share — there were very few competitors. Apple has a higher though still in the 50s percentage-wise market share in the US, but a 20-30% share globally. Alternatives are much more viable in Apple's case, and often cheaper. You have to want an Apple device to get one, and it's very easy to get an Android instead and not lose out on any important software or functional ability.
In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.
I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
> I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
Apple is responsible for market damages inflicted onto software distribution by picking-and-choosing who gets to ship, and where their money goes. It is reflected in Apple's astronomical service margins, which unfairly reward them with even higher ROI than the iPhone hardware itself (!!!), somehow. It is seen in Apple's back-room negotiations with Amazon, Netflix, Google, Epic and X, where they use their de-facto power to force unfavorable distribution terms and draw up protection fees. It's present in their entitlement system, which gives Apple the option to artificially hamstring competing services that want to integrate with iOS. It's inherent to Apple's developer program, which has been used to revoke software signing certificates when Apple simply disagrees with a competitor.
Do we really think they deserve that money and power? It's not encouraging them to make smart choices.
In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option. A factory-new iPhone could use all of Apple's offered services with a hardware-attested eFuse that says the device was never jailbroken. If a user wants to do foolish things like play Fallout: New Vegas with Proton, give Dropbox system-level integration a-la iCloud, use an updated RCS client instead of iMessage, install Fortnite or use a third-party app store, then Apple can give them that choice without endangering other people. It isn't impossible, they already do this with macOS, running the same XNU kernel, and with an architecturally indistinct ARM chip.
That would alleviate the market damages that Apple is responsible for, and create a positive pressure on iOS development to improve software-wise. Right now, Apple is being rewarded for extorting their competitors, pettily attacking consumers, blocking software features, stuffing ads[0] into first-party apps, and visually degrading iOS. They are clearly being protected from software alternatives that offer a less-invasive alternative to Apple's disgraceful OEM packins. Which is a shame, since Apple was historically not opposed to taking advantage of free software and making high-quality packin software that legitimately did compete against alternatives, like QuickTime and iTunes.
> In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option
But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?
I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.
iOS does not allow third party browser engines. Every browser you download from the iOS App Store is using 'Safari Lite' under the hood. It's ostensibly for security, but it's more about control.
I guess that might have something to do with the fact that Chrome is vastly more popular than Safari, and also available on many more operating systems.
No, it's definitely about control. Allowing an arbitrary browser means allowing access to platform stuff from portable (gasp!) APIs. And Apple doesn't want that. They want an iOS app to be the primary face of everything important, and the other stuff to be an expensive port.
And the problem isn't abstract. Safari lacks a ton of very useful API implementations. Like, try programming a QMK keyboard on an iPhone: it's literally the only platform in the whole world unable to run the Via web app.
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.
Kinda bugs me when people who are against Safari/Apple are also the same people pushing Chrome/Google. Sometimes it feels like web developers these days are basically Chrome developers.
I do get it. Chrome has the majority of users, so it’s easier to just develop and test on Chrome and know you’ve covered most of your users.
But isn’t that just pushing us towards a Chrome monopoly? Safari holding back some web features is annoying, sure, but having Chrome decide what the web should support and everyone else having to follow doesn’t sound much better to me.
I agree, and it amuses me that the Chrome advocates call Safari the new IE! My mortgage website and DoD website and VA.gov, etc all don’t tell me I have to use Safari or they won’t work. No, they say I must use Chrome (or sometimes Edge).
As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me. If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use. Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari? And Apple's on the device they build and sell? Not to mention all the security flaws that would entail...
Maybe a bit of an edge use case, but I use the translate page feature a lot in browsers. In Chrome you can switch back and forth between languages seamlessly, but in Safari translating a page requires reloading the page - which can cause issues on forms that use POST. Even worse, I've found that switching back to the original language just doesn't work on pages loaded with POST - the page gets stuck on the translated version (which can sometimes cause issues with some poorly designed javascript components like calendar widgets) even after reloading the page. This causes issues frequently enough to prevent me switching to Safari.
On the plus side, though, Safari will also translate text in images.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
"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.
Chrome is the new internet explorer. Lots of people coming up with all sorts of arguments why they have to use it and can't switch. Internet Explorer used to be like that. MS really abused users and they still wouldn't switch. It's a form of Stockholm syndrome.
The history of Chrome is that it first displaced Firefox as a reasonable alternative (while funding that via a nice ad deal). And then they just steam rolled Internet Explorer to the point where MS gave up and rebuilt their browser around Chromium. It was that good. Fifteen years ago.
But these days you have to put up with a lot of crap from Google. Ad blocking works better on other browsers. Even some Chromium browsers (like Brave). But the thing with Chromium is that all Chromium derived browsers outsource most of the browser internals to Google. Google decides what features to implement, what PRs to merge, what features not to implement, etc. They set the standards. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.
Google has always aggressively promoted Chrome, too. The promotion is just invisible to most people since most people run Chrome.
If you visit a Google property using a Gecko or WebKit-based browser you'll get hit with banners nudging you to switch to Chrome and Google's iOS apps ignore the long-available default browser setting when linked are tapped, prompting you to choose between your default browser and Chrome even if you don't have Chrome installed.
And then there's the whole thing with how Chrome for Android conveniently never gained the ability to run even pared-back MV3 blocker extensions. Massive conflict of interest there.
I wish Google were called out for this stuff way more, but more often than not they're given a free pass.
Most people who say this didnt go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA. IE held back web development by years because either they refused to add features or they added features that only worked with Microsoft approved.
Chrome came along and accelerated web platform development since their products relied on a thriving web ecosystem. They did it using open source software, and built out consensus using web platforms.
Chrome is the new IE will only be true if other browsers are out innovating Chrome (not true), or Chrome has abandoned web platform (not true).
There's only one browser that drags their feat adding features, and that's ironically Safari. Firefox too to an extend, but that's mostly mismanagement and lack of resources. Apple has no excuses.
Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture. Remember those little "Best viewed in IE" badges that used to litter the web because devs stopped testing their sites in Netscape? That's where we're headed now with Chromium/Blink and it's just as bad of a thing now as it was then.
Also worth noting that some of the discrepancies in capability are in features that Google decided to push despite opposition from other members of the consortium (like WebUSB).
I remember the "Best view in Chrome" notices that I get today browsing Japanese web sites. It is already a problem and I have to spoof the browser agent for some web sites to get around Javascript blocks that only allow Chrome through.
> Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture
That's a strange argument. I dont see HN saying this year all of us are going to buy Android, because iOS has become too popular. That sentiment is only valid is iOS is dragging their feat and if they stop innovating, effectively holding the market back.
I still havent seen an example where Chrome is holding everyone back. If anything, the complaint is the other way - they are doing way too much and we want them to stop.
And for HN crowd to be against that is very silly.
The web is an open standard (nominally, at least), but ceases to be so if a single company controls it. At that point the company’s vision is instead the standard in which nobody else gets meaningful say.
It’s not just Apple. Mozilla has pushed back against Google’s proposals plenty of times too. Google doesn’t always know best and often acts more in their self-interest than in that of the web.
So the issue isn’t that Google is moving too fast or doing too much, but that they’re unilaterally deciding the future of the web, which is not something any single party should be capable of.
> but ceases to be so if a single company controls it.
How does Google or any company control the web? I can launch a website fuckgoogle.com today and Google can do nothing with it. However, I cannot publish fuckapple on Mac Store or App Store.
It's the direction of the web they control, with the various specs involved becoming ever more complex and more difficult to implement in new web engines (complexity as a moat) and with many of the APIs getting added being better suited for surveillance capitalism or as a project for somebody's promotion within Google than for building high quality software.
> Most people who say this didn't go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA.
I did and "Chrome is the new internet explorer" is more accurate than what has been uttered since Chrome split from WebKit, "Safari is the new internet explorer".
IEs problem wasn't that it was behind in features, it was that it used IE-specific plugins and was heavily integrated with Windows Explorer. Safari is and has not been either of those.
I use safari regularly and it has not really kept up. All kinds of stuff that is partly broken for rendering. Especially on heavily dynamic sites. Chrome at least works for any web standard which IE did not.
Yup, just like during the bad old days of Internet Explorer's dominance. I remember encountering websites that only worked on the Windows version of Internet Explorer as late as 2006. We had a nice time in the late 2000s and early 2010s when web developers coded against standards instead of against the market-leading web browser. There was competition between Firefox, Opera, Safari, and a revitalized Internet Explorer. I don't remember IE 7 and later being that bad, though by then I had switched to Firefox on Linux/Windows and Safari on Macs.
Then came an upstart web browser from Google named Chrome....and now we're back to the bad old days of web developers coding to the dominant web browser again.
I have never cursed at a website for a rendering issue.
I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.
Where do you run in to this? I switched from Chrome to Safari about 5 years ago and can count the number of websites I’ve had issues with on one hand, I think.
Interestingly gmail suddenly started loading dog slow in Safari for me. I'm on an older version of Safari so that could be a factor - so bizarre though. I wouldn't put it past them to be doing that deliberately.
It is packaged with the OS. I can't get an older version of Safari without an older version is macOS. From a testing standpoint, this means we have a bunch of hardware or images we never update so we can test against.
That was the IE thing, it was baked into the OS. Also, trash dev tools. Crashes pretty easily with the console open for more than 30s.
I notice no difference using AdGuard (in basic mode, with only the content blocking rules and no page read access) in Safari or uBOL in basic mode on Chrome vs. using UBO on Firefox. And in uBOL’s case you can always increase the filtering level if you’re willing to grant the extension read access to pages to basically match uBO. You can even hide/delete elements or add your own custom rules.
I feel like most people who make MV3 complaints didn’t bother actually trying it, they just repeat the default anti-MV3 talking points.
Google serves ads and videos from the same servers. Adblock can't use DNS to drop the ads without dropping videos too. Ublock in firefox sees the actual content in my browser and can distinguish youtube videos from ads.
Google doesnt turn on MV3 and have it break ads day one that would highlight a negative change for users. Google wants people to move to MV3 and notice no difference and then they can start chipping away later.
It doesnt require sophistication. Just implement MV3 and then when the conversation about adblockers comes up make a note that its probably not wise to cut it as extensions have switched to MV3 and its a controversial topic. Its easy to see how different teams would come to this without collaborating, its the MV3 team doing what they do and the ad block team reading the room.
The MV3 API isn't enough to block YouTube ads on their own, but Safari ad blockers which also include web extension API blocking can see enough traffic to block YT ads. 1Blocker does this, and even StopTheMadness Pro's blocking have enough flexibility to do it.
It's because with the way that the most capable adblockers are built, they can't function without injecting code into every page and intercepting traffic. The privacy implications for someone installing an adblocker extension with malicious intent (or more commonly, a formerly legit blocker gets bought and gets turned malicious in an update) are dire.
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.
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.
I suspect that was a legacy from when they planned for iOS not supporting any third-party apps. If they want to force devs to target mobile Safari, the least they can do was to provide the desktop version on Windows.
Once apps dominate (which requires devs to have a Mac anyway to compile and debug) and turns out nobody use the Windows port, it's just a money sink.
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.
How many people in this thread would dump their Android for an iPhone if they:
- allowed real 3rd party browser engines
- let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps
The issue is that software vendors, esp the size and scale that produce browsers, have shown repeatedly that they are terrible for the consumer. All of a sudden, you get the largest attack surface, large instability, and giving them access to the same hardware/OS access is just downright dangerous.
It is so tiring to keep hearing of this whole sideloading/let us run other engines nonsense for a decade+ now. It's like watching all the nastiness that tech companies do and then asking for all that trash on iOS. This is tantamount to wanting Adobe Flash on iOS, and quite honestly, that's exactly what allowing 3rd party browser engines is going to do. First it maybe some extension, and then all of a sudden you find that the extension has full access to photos, location, and contacts because you granted 1 website access to those things.
TrollStore isn't supported on iOS versions past 17, so if you want to use an OS released in the past three years (and still receiving security updates) it isn't an option.
Due to App Store $99 per year compared to PlayStore one-time $25 and iPhone being unaffordable for most people in my country, there's too many niche and/or local apps I'm using in Android where they won't port to iOS.
I would. I wish I had true choice in phone manufacturers. With the EU ruling and the Epic games court cases, I had hope that apple would be forced to open up in the US as well. I was planning my next device purchase decision around this.
I am not interested in jailbreaking or rooting my device to run my apps. I am not interested in the testflight process. I am an adult and can pick and choose what apps I want. And I would like to exercise the whole "voting with my wallet" thing when a company makes an anti-consumer decision.
Judging by outcomes, the EU legislation -- the DMA -- is intended to make life harder for successful US companies rather than to make life better for consumers. They need to scrap it and start over. It can't be used as a model elsewhere -- it just gets in the way.
Even if they did all of that and also allowed unrestricted sideloading, iOS is still awful overall, and iPhones themselves are terrible value. Even 16e and 17e start at €600/800. I can get a better android phone for €300, and I can't imagine spending more than €500 on a phone, let alone €1000 to get a basic feature like 120Hz refresh rate.
I looked up RCS, thanks! Correct me if I’m wrong but does it mean that if my kid turns it on, her texts will appear green, not blue, to her iMessage’d friends?
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.
I like Safari. I certainly trust Apple more than Google with my data. It's faster and doesn't mine my email and web data to train models (yet).
If it gets particularly bad, I'm sure some impartial team will make another browser engine with Opus 5.5 but for now I can tolerate the minor inconveniences in Safari.
I use all three browsers on a daily basis. Chrome for accessing google owned properties and things I click on from Google search, Safari for reddit and hacker news, and Firefox for everything else.
Safari is always the best on my Mac, but my complaint has always been the lack of plugins.
But just now I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. I told it I already have it installed in Chrome so it can get the source code there, and then told it to port it and install it.
After 20 minutes and few bucks in tokens (estimated, I actually used my 6% of my $20/mo plan), I have Session Buddy in Safari.
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.
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.
If you work at Apple/Safari then my free suggestion is to have a "Chrome mode" where all the buttons and doohickeys that Chrome has are all in the same location for Safari. If I'm far to used to where the buttons are for things like "reload" so trying to switch to Safari is enough friction to make me stay with Chrome.
Maybe have an Edge mode as well to convince the Edge users to come over.
For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.
On iOS platform, it's only limited to apple's browser engine, with chrome I get long time of various bookmarks saved/synced and send page to various devices(not limited to apple ecosystem), those benefits still not give strong reason to let me switch to safari
One thing I do not like is no native dark mode on chrome, but that's okay, I just do not use phone when I preparing to sleep
For the adblock/tracker issue, recently just added builtin DNS-based adblock (backed by several public block list) to my VPN app, it seems works well, given same engine and same network filtered by the same VPN, i guess they are same to me
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.
I had to quit using desktop Safari because it essentially quit working. The problem had something to do with icloud. Apple assumes everyone is using icloud I imagine and does not handle corner cases for folks with full icloud disks or improper setups. I have an paid icloud subscription now, but I haven't looked back.
Anecdotally I see significant out of memory issues with chrome on a regular basis. I use chrome for work but safari for personal and rarely see the same issue with safari if almost never.
Apple screwed the pooch too, they were the first one to prevent blocking content before downloading it if I recall. Then Chrome did the same thing. I'm not sure what their reasoning was publicly, but it was surely lying.
A browser should allow you to not download content by URL masks, and not silently load it and hide it. This is advertising/tracker shenanigans and frankly horrid tech.
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.
I've always liked and preferred Safari. The only reason I moved away was that as a Mac gets older, there comes a point where you can't update the OS, and that means Safari falls behind. Even that's not a problem for me, but web standards were always changing and after a while certain things won't work.
> I would consider Safari, if Apple open sourced it and it ran on Linux.
Yes, absolutely. But then they wouldn't be able to lock the flock in the barn, which is so contrary to Apple's DNA that you can't event talk about it in a 1 mile radius of 1, Infinite loop.
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.
Yeah. I'm typing this on my safari which shows both vertical tabs and the horizontal tabs - looks so weird. And I always end up clicking a tab and then typing away, and Safari starts switching me to tabs starting with whatever letter I type - very annoying.
Here are some reasons I don't use Safari in place of Chrome for certain things:
- it doesn't like to serialize the state of tabs. Chrome is pretty good at somehow snapshotting the entire state of tabs to the point where it can be reconstructed after relaunch, even offline.
- webpage loading is sort of janky. Chrome will show the webpage streaming in live, but Safari will simply freeze in place until it's done. Maybe this is due to an Apple philosophy decision, but I don't prefer it.
- similarly to how Safari doesn't seem to serialize tab states, navigating forward or back usually needs to load the page from scratch, including resubmitting forms or whatever.
- speaking of forward and back navigation, I'm kinda annoyed that each time I use the trackpad to navigate history, I have to wait for the swipe animation to finish before I can interact with the webpage. I try to always use cmd+brackets instead now, because it's much faster.
- IIRC, it seems the newer macOS 27 betas caused Safari to develop an issue where after it's been open for long enough, certain types of videos will stop being able to play at all until the browser is quit and restarted. kind of annoying, combined with the lack of tab snapshotting, because I have to manually visit each tab to load it on each launch.
I still daily drive Safari and use it as my main browser. But I keep an instance of Chrome open for tabs that I never really close. And then I have an instance of Orion for spreadsheets. (I use spreadsheets to keep track of medication usage, sleep times and finances)
> Apple is kicking off a new campaign today to promote Safari’s benefits over Chrome. With a new “Switch to Safari” page on its website and a pair of new YouTube videos.
The irony of using a Google platform to promote ditching another Google platform lol.
I switched to Vivaldi for privacy, but the amount of control and customization was an unexpected surprise! Long has it been since such user choice has been made so easy
I setup two of them for my Google account but I made them both in Safari. Only one of them worked. What if both of them failed? I would have been fucked.
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.
I recently downgraded one of my macs so i could use some 32 bit audio peripherals. You can’t update safari separately from the os i found out, and most websites now just won’t render with that os and if they do, barely work. I installed firefox and that was fine.
OTH, i use safari on my other mac, it’s fine most of the time, but i also have have chrome installed as some websites are so buggy otherwise, linkedin is a particular culprit, it barely works on chrome too.
> You can’t update safari separately from the os i found out
I was on Sequoia all throughout Tahoe and still updated Safari to the 26.x versions. There might be a limit to how far back they let you do that, though.
I had an M1 MBP that I needed to re-pave with Monterey. Yes, it's end-of-support, but it's also only 4 years old. And runs on that Mac.
So, first step, I make a USB installer, and run it. Great. Reboots, and says "FYI, this is an unsupported OS. You can install a newer OS instead, or run Monterey in "Reduced Security" mode." That was fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security mode failed." Nothing else. Eventually my understanding of this was because the machine had been upgraded previously all the way to Tahoe, that somewhere along the line some firmware or something in the EFI had been upgraded and was too new for Monterey. No thanks to Apple. No info, debug logs, anything, just "Installation failed. Reboot?"
So what then?
Hmm, more research. "Do an IPSW image restore via DFU", i.e. pave it with a largely installed image. Could work, might have the same issue, but since I'm stuck right now, with a Mac I can't install anything on, a four year old $3,000 brick, why not?
Alright, I have a Mac Studio. I get the IPSW image, and Apple Configurator. Connect the two as per Apple's instructions and the MBP does indeed show up in Configurator as being "not booted, DFU mode".
Apple's instructions, "Drag the IPSW image onto the DFU 'box' for the target Mac". No. It doesn't light up like it's accepting a drag and drop, and indeed it doesn't. Nor does it accept a "restore..." or similar from the Configurator menu options. There's nothing in Configurator that seems to allow you to image the MBP. Again: no error, no instructions, just the error "bonk" noise.
So... off to ChatGPT, Reddit, etc., I go.
Much repeating of the same. However, ChatGPT pokes a little button. Near the very end of its answer, it says "Newer versions of macOS may have limitations on the age of the image they might restore. You may need a slightly older macOS to do this. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura could work."
As fortune has it, my fiance happens to still have her old i5 MBP with touchbar, and the latest version of Ventura... let's plug it in, let it catch a little charge and boot...
Alright, I need Configurator on this laptop.
No soup for you, says the App Store, "You need macOS Sequoia to install Configurator".
Back off to Reddit, where I find someone who has helpfully zipped up an older version of Configurator that runs on Ventura, and in the end, I'm able to re-pave via IPSW.
But Apple's docs absolutely are incorrect/incomplete about Configurator, and DFU restores.
"You can use Restore... in the Configurator menu to select the software image". No, you can't, even leaving aside the "old/unsupported". It actually means restoring from a "backup" (presumably Time Machine, though it doesn't specify) and you can't select any file or image.
"Drag the image onto DFU". Doesn't work in that situation, no error, no "hey, you're doing the right thing but I can't do this", just acting like a fool trying to drag the image onto DFU only to have it bounce off.
Like I said, I didn't have DFU port issues, but Apple's docs on how to make this happen were either non-existent, or incorrect about the process, or flat out told me I couldn't do it. But mostly non-existent and overly simplistic covering the most basic scenarios only - which I get for general support, but by the time you are "connect to a second mac in DFU mode and run Configurator" in their own words, we're way beyond simplistic "you can just install a newer macOS" type "instructions".
These kind of campaigns are just – find suckers who are willing to be our suckers. That too after they shtudown Safari for Windows and were never on Linux to begin with. And no, it's not fucking snappiest on the Mac either – even with all the special treatment it gets from the macOS (on iOS – there's literally no other option anyway, every browser essentially have to be Safari with none of the privileges Safari has). I think this company has become most the pathetic it can be. Utilised its full potential.
Though what stuck with me from that page is why the fuck they would have default browser setting inside something like "Desktop & Dock" (that combo!). That is just intellectually challenged UX/UI design.
And it seems they have fired everyone from their propaganda (or marketing?) dept.
tl;dr: Is Safari better than Chrome? Yes. How? Because this webpage is live.
too much stuff works better in chrome than in safari ... it's just ie6 but far, far better. is it great? am i being tracked on every keystroke? probably, but i want the stuff i do on teh web to work idc really.
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.
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.
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.
List of reasons to ditch chrome is very, very, very long, first among which it is becoming the prime enshitification tool for the internet.
But Safari is not the solution until they make it fully (FULLY) open-source, because all Apple trying to do is replace the king of enshitification hill by their own.
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).
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.
Safari is faster, uses less RAM and is more power-efficient. But people love leaving 2000 tabs open, and I guess Chrome's UX is better for that. I don't think people realize that you can go back to a website after you've visited. It's not strictly necessary to leave the tab open for the rest of your life.
People benchmark it from time to time [0]. It makes sense though—Apple has poured resources into making the Safari engine battery efficient on their phones, and the macOS version is a beneficiary.
Can you give me a concrete example? I close windows and tabs with ruthless abandon.
Unless you have a web app which is entirely local and doesn't save its state to local storage, what could you possibly be doing that requires a tab to remain in residence?
Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.
Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.
Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.
The problem is I use safari on iOS. Generally not a bad browser. Equivalent and superior to Chrome is certain aspects. I don't really need to run Chrome on my phone. Safari is good enough. However... for a local build only I use maybe it's possible.
steady on, youngster
You wouldn't be worried about vulnerabilities that the vibe coded browser could produce? I use plenty of LLM generated code, but a browser wouldn't be something I'd try on the Web.
It's pretty much the exact opposite of security through obscurity.
I mean, helium exists. https://github.com/imputnet/helium
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.
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.
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?
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. That's not a healthy web, that's competing layers of dysfunction.
If diversity fails to occur naturally, some amount of forced diversity helps to keep the ecosystem healthy.
Though an interesting consequence is that allowing iOS users to install firefox but not chrome would be a strict improvement over the current situation.
There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
How about a browser with a captive userbase that has less incentive to stay up to date with web standards?
Your argument is that we should expect developers to target/test their app on many different browsers where any random CSS property behaves differently. They will have to buy a device just for this purpose. Because it is obviously developers who should have to pick up the slack here, not Apple.
However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.
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.
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.
If the cost really is an issue for you, I'm sure you know that you aren't forced to pay $500 to Apple. You can easily find hand-me-down Apple devices that still runs a current operating system for a pittance -- or free if you have a network of friends or family. No need to pay Apple anything.
And I can't even buy only an iOS device, because the iOS device has to connect to a laptop/desktop version of Safari to use its debugger - so I need to purchase two Apple devices!, just to debug the mobile device.
I wouldn't be complaining if I could install the iOS simulator on any other platform - but even on iOS the iOS simulator sucks badly, and it only works on MacOS. It doesn't "simulate" touch events correctly, as they function differently on a real iOS device.
Nobody says you need to pay Apple anything. Apple devices can be incredibly cheap on the second-hand market -- potentially free if you have friends or family. An older Mac and an iPhone 11 are all you really need. If that is still too much for you, then what can I say? I don't see Microsoft giving you a Windows PC or Google giving you an Android device for free.
I suppose you can quit your job and become a chef, but you'll still have to buy your own set of knives and an apron.
A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.
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 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.
This isn't browser diversity, iOS is a browser monoculture, it's all Safari under the hood. How can you not understand this??
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.
WebKit is a second-class citizen on the web, and we can argue about why that is, but nobody can sincerely deny it. Apple's strategy has been dead in the water for over a decade. iOS lost.
Meanwhile we have people bitching and moaning and meanwhile, as a Firefox user, I go to Safari when I encounter a website that doesn't work in Firefox. Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari, and that is a Good Thing. No developer is forced to test in Firefox.
The existence of the "Switch to Safari" campaign is a clear rejection that Safari is competing - it's not, it's the laughing stock of web browsers in 2026, it holds the same place that IE6 did in the early 2000s.
>Because at the end of the day, developers are forced to test in Safari,
I'm not forced to test in Safari, because I don't have money for an iOS device. So Apple users can continue to suffer with whatever browser they use on their i-device. I really don't care, and Apple has done this - not me, because they offer no way but purchasing their hardware to test their wonky browser engine.
And yes, you can emulate an android device on MacOS, so don't bother trying that again. You don't need to purchase an android device to test on android.
On macOS, Google plays with a lot of dark patterns to get people to install Chrome. I can't count the number of times I've visited my sister or parents and seen Chrome on their Mac, and their explanation is "because Google told me I needed it."
That's not choice either.
It sounds like your family is using Chrome because it's more convenient. It's 2026, we can't blame anyone given what Safari spent the past decade doing. Apple does not provide convenient Safari sync for Windows and Android devices, which comprise the majority of smart devices sold. They don't support the normie extensions that people use on Firefox and Chrome. Safari lags behind Chrome in features, WebKit lags behind Blink in cross-platform support, and Apple doesn't allow Safari forks to boost their market share. Apple draws very clear and arbitrary lines in the sand, and then redrafts them once they finally change their mind about PWAs or notification support. By the time it reaches Safari, your parents have been using the feature in Chrome for 8 months.
We may have to agree to disagree. Apple's incessant marketing for their own inferior, ad-ridden packin software is part of why I left macOS to begin with. It's infantilizing to be told that I can't be trusted to make a smart decision, when Apple's own suggestion is a half baked, self-serving alternative. I empathize with Mac users that ignore Safari because that's exactly what I did on my Mac, too. I'd have been using Chrome if Firefox wasn't an option. And I still would, because WebKit is a dog's dinner on my OS.
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.
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 wasn't 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. Such 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?"
You are literally arguing for the web to become the Chrome Platform for the convenience of web developers. Sure we can have other browsers, so long as they're perfectly compatible with Chrome's quirks. This is precisely what it means for the web to be the Chrome Platform, not the open web. We've already reached the point where it's assumed that Chrome is perfect and anything that deviates from Chrome is someone else's bug. It's sad.
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.
No.
People need to stop using Chrome and Chromium based browsers and use browsers based on implementations of the web standards that are out of Google's control.
Firefox on Android supports the full version of uBlock Origin.
Chrome on Android doesn't support it.
(I still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)
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.
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 been more effective than nothing, 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 that entire approach (I don't in fact want my web browser to be a full lowest common denominator operating system with low level hardware access thanks). I dislike much of what Apple does now but I'm glad their selfish 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.
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.
When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side.
And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea?
>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.
Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
- https://github.com/guacforlife/ReynardDefault
- https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser
Your Linux download is right there.
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.
... 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.
Just checked in the App Store, I can install Firefox, Opera, Brave, and many many other browsers on my iPhone.
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”
No, mate. You need to provide details. The onus is on you to support your claim.
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.
Android’s global marketshare is 70% of mobile so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work
There is plenty of competition and choice to iOS, you just won’t find that on Apple hardware for reasons that have held for three decades
Yes, that's pretty much it. A similar concern applies to Google and Android.
https://grapheneos.org/
Painting Apple and Android devices with the same brush in this particular regard doesn't make a lot of sense.
When Ford sells me an F150 I don’t cry about them having a monopoly on their Sync platform. That’s not now monopolies work
Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.
Are you just being pedantic about the definition of monopoly or did you fail to understand the problem as it was explained.
Do you use ios? If so do you like using broken websites? Do you have no desire for things to function as intended?
Id imagine its very annoying as a developer to have your things broken for no reason other than pure corporate greed.
If you do use ios then you probably enjoy paying more for an inferior product so ig this is more of a feature than a bug.
...test on more than one browser platform? Seriously? Is this how lazy the industry has become? Is this how far we've fallen?
Having websites say "if it doesn't work, install Chrome" is not choice.
For example, there's a monopoly on garbage service where I live, but he company with the monopoly has basically 0% of the world market.
I just don't think the 30% of the global market number is relevant to anything in terms of arguing if somebody has a monopoly. Are there even any countries who use a definition of "monopoly" that uses global marketshare to determine if there's a monopoly? Surely those definitions all look at marketshare within some specific region?
I imagine trying to effectively use (or market) a competing product in a region with 93%+ marketshare is a painful experience, regardless of whether the global marketshare is more balanced.
Using global marketshare hides details like that. Apple could have 100% of the market in China and India, and Android could have 100% of the marketshare in the rest of the world. This would put, worldwide, Apple at about 35% and Android at about 65%. I would argue there are clearly monopolies in that case, though, even if the worldwide numbers are 65 and 35.
One allows you to install different browsers, the other does not.
Being a monopoly isn't illegal (in the US). It's what they do that matters.
Now, that doesn't mean Apple is a monopoly with iOS, because the Sherman act doens't dictate it only looks at US only markets. It look at what makes sense in the context. Of course, a court could decide that regardless of what the numbers are internationall, what matters in this case is just the US market.
Trying to predict that is useless at the moment though because the US courts are all over the place.
Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Alphabet and Apple are both unquestionably monopoly businesses, and make incredible year-over-year revenue through market-damaging services like AdSense and the App Store. If they are allowed to continue, then other Fortune 500 businesses will copy their decisions, thereby destroying genuine market value that they provide in exchange for safer, more exploitative revenue streams.
In the case of AdSense and Apple's App Store both, I think that any fair FTC investigation would conclude they are shakedown services that harm the greater economy.
Fat lot of good that logic would do Microsoft when they were deliberately gimping competitors.
In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.
I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.
Apple is responsible for market damages inflicted onto software distribution by picking-and-choosing who gets to ship, and where their money goes. It is reflected in Apple's astronomical service margins, which unfairly reward them with even higher ROI than the iPhone hardware itself (!!!), somehow. It is seen in Apple's back-room negotiations with Amazon, Netflix, Google, Epic and X, where they use their de-facto power to force unfavorable distribution terms and draw up protection fees. It's present in their entitlement system, which gives Apple the option to artificially hamstring competing services that want to integrate with iOS. It's inherent to Apple's developer program, which has been used to revoke software signing certificates when Apple simply disagrees with a competitor.
Do we really think they deserve that money and power? It's not encouraging them to make smart choices.
In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option. A factory-new iPhone could use all of Apple's offered services with a hardware-attested eFuse that says the device was never jailbroken. If a user wants to do foolish things like play Fallout: New Vegas with Proton, give Dropbox system-level integration a-la iCloud, use an updated RCS client instead of iMessage, install Fortnite or use a third-party app store, then Apple can give them that choice without endangering other people. It isn't impossible, they already do this with macOS, running the same XNU kernel, and with an architecturally indistinct ARM chip.
That would alleviate the market damages that Apple is responsible for, and create a positive pressure on iOS development to improve software-wise. Right now, Apple is being rewarded for extorting their competitors, pettily attacking consumers, blocking software features, stuffing ads[0] into first-party apps, and visually degrading iOS. They are clearly being protected from software alternatives that offer a less-invasive alternative to Apple's disgraceful OEM packins. Which is a shame, since Apple was historically not opposed to taking advantage of free software and making high-quality packin software that legitimately did compete against alternatives, like QuickTime and iTunes.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-to-ditch-unsolicited-f1-ads-n...
But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?
I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.
Numbers say otherwise.
The security angle is easy to understand.
Not sure why Apple cares about control.
But it easier just to want to make Apple seem bad, so there's that.
I would bet Google's track record would easily allow them to defend this in court. More an issue with Google though.
And the problem isn't abstract. Safari lacks a ton of very useful API implementations. Like, try programming a QMK keyboard on an iPhone: it's literally the only platform in the whole world unable to run the Via web app.
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.
I do get it. Chrome has the majority of users, so it’s easier to just develop and test on Chrome and know you’ve covered most of your users.
But isn’t that just pushing us towards a Chrome monopoly? Safari holding back some web features is annoying, sure, but having Chrome decide what the web should support and everyone else having to follow doesn’t sound much better to me.
As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me. If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use. Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari? And Apple's on the device they build and sell? Not to mention all the security flaws that would entail...
On the plus side, though, Safari will also translate text in images.
That's the only reason I am not switching to FF 100%. I do use it though but not as a main driver.
Some of the related posts:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/youtube-is-slowing-video-loads...
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
And a recent Youtube comment (2026-September) notices that Firefox doesn't run as well as Chrome on his modern high-end laptop with 64GB RAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIE_PkuFeng&lc=UgxfGeBL6sopr...
If FF is not working on youtube for, it's not working for you and you alone.
I stopped using Brave for no reason i don't remember. (no, not to do with the CEO)
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.
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.
I am perfectly happy with Chrome.
Really well argued, congrats.
The history of Chrome is that it first displaced Firefox as a reasonable alternative (while funding that via a nice ad deal). And then they just steam rolled Internet Explorer to the point where MS gave up and rebuilt their browser around Chromium. It was that good. Fifteen years ago.
But these days you have to put up with a lot of crap from Google. Ad blocking works better on other browsers. Even some Chromium browsers (like Brave). But the thing with Chromium is that all Chromium derived browsers outsource most of the browser internals to Google. Google decides what features to implement, what PRs to merge, what features not to implement, etc. They set the standards. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.
If you visit a Google property using a Gecko or WebKit-based browser you'll get hit with banners nudging you to switch to Chrome and Google's iOS apps ignore the long-available default browser setting when linked are tapped, prompting you to choose between your default browser and Chrome even if you don't have Chrome installed.
And then there's the whole thing with how Chrome for Android conveniently never gained the ability to run even pared-back MV3 blocker extensions. Massive conflict of interest there.
I wish Google were called out for this stuff way more, but more often than not they're given a free pass.
Most people who say this didnt go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA. IE held back web development by years because either they refused to add features or they added features that only worked with Microsoft approved.
Chrome came along and accelerated web platform development since their products relied on a thriving web ecosystem. They did it using open source software, and built out consensus using web platforms.
Chrome is the new IE will only be true if other browsers are out innovating Chrome (not true), or Chrome has abandoned web platform (not true).
There's only one browser that drags their feat adding features, and that's ironically Safari. Firefox too to an extend, but that's mostly mismanagement and lack of resources. Apple has no excuses.
Also worth noting that some of the discrepancies in capability are in features that Google decided to push despite opposition from other members of the consortium (like WebUSB).
That's a strange argument. I dont see HN saying this year all of us are going to buy Android, because iOS has become too popular. That sentiment is only valid is iOS is dragging their feat and if they stop innovating, effectively holding the market back.
I still havent seen an example where Chrome is holding everyone back. If anything, the complaint is the other way - they are doing way too much and we want them to stop.
And for HN crowd to be against that is very silly.
It’s not just Apple. Mozilla has pushed back against Google’s proposals plenty of times too. Google doesn’t always know best and often acts more in their self-interest than in that of the web.
So the issue isn’t that Google is moving too fast or doing too much, but that they’re unilaterally deciding the future of the web, which is not something any single party should be capable of.
How does Google or any company control the web? I can launch a website fuckgoogle.com today and Google can do nothing with it. However, I cannot publish fuckapple on Mac Store or App Store.
I did and "Chrome is the new internet explorer" is more accurate than what has been uttered since Chrome split from WebKit, "Safari is the new internet explorer".
IEs problem wasn't that it was behind in features, it was that it used IE-specific plugins and was heavily integrated with Windows Explorer. Safari is and has not been either of those.
Then came an upstart web browser from Google named Chrome....and now we're back to the bad old days of web developers coding to the dominant web browser again.
I have cursed too many websites to count because of their broken form designs (like assuming a particular postcode format) or reliance on cookies from ad vendors for basic functionality. If your website needs to generate “a new google recaptcha cookie” (whatever that means) before I can enter payment info, then sorry, no es bueno.
My take is Safari is the new IE.
It is packaged with the OS. I can't get an older version of Safari without an older version is macOS. From a testing standpoint, this means we have a bunch of hardware or images we never update so we can test against.
That was the IE thing, it was baked into the OS. Also, trash dev tools. Crashes pretty easily with the console open for more than 30s.
I feel like most people who make MV3 complaints didn’t bother actually trying it, they just repeat the default anti-MV3 talking points.
AdGuard just blocks much less.
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects and stoped using KDE
I liked Konqueror but abandoned in favor of Chrome browsers and variants especially after working on frontend projects.
Once apps dominate (which requires devs to have a Mac anyway to compile and debug) and turns out nobody use the Windows port, it's just a money sink.
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 is so tiring to keep hearing of this whole sideloading/let us run other engines nonsense for a decade+ now. It's like watching all the nastiness that tech companies do and then asking for all that trash on iOS. This is tantamount to wanting Adobe Flash on iOS, and quite honestly, that's exactly what allowing 3rd party browser engines is going to do. First it maybe some extension, and then all of a sudden you find that the extension has full access to photos, location, and contacts because you granted 1 website access to those things.
No thanks.
https://ios.cfw.guide/installing-trollstore/
I am not interested in jailbreaking or rooting my device to run my apps. I am not interested in the testflight process. I am an adult and can pick and choose what apps I want. And I would like to exercise the whole "voting with my wallet" thing when a company makes an anti-consumer decision.
Even if they did all of that and also allowed unrestricted sideloading, iOS is still awful overall, and iPhones themselves are terrible value. Even 16e and 17e start at €600/800. I can get a better android phone for €300, and I can't imagine spending more than €500 on a phone, let alone €1000 to get a basic feature like 120Hz refresh rate.
Which apps can't be uninstalled on the latest iOS?
- iMessage works so I can participate in the family group chat
Which Apple apps can't be removed?
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.
Also trash video playback.
If it gets particularly bad, I'm sure some impartial team will make another browser engine with Opus 5.5 but for now I can tolerate the minor inconveniences in Safari.
Safari is always the best on my Mac, but my complaint has always been the lack of plugins.
But just now I ported one of my favorite plugins from Chrome to Safari using ChatGPT. I told it I already have it installed in Chrome so it can get the source code there, and then told it to port it and install it.
After 20 minutes and few bucks in tokens (estimated, I actually used my 6% of my $20/mo plan), I have Session Buddy in Safari.
So maybe the plugins aren't a problem anymore...
Why use ChatGPT? Safari has a built-in plugin builder now.
2. I have an M1 chip and I'm not sure it's supported.
3. ChatGPT can open both browers, not sure if Safari plugin builder can
But if it does all those things, great. My point was more that plugins won't be a problem anymore because AI can build them.
Maybe have an Edge mode as well to convince the Edge users to come over.
For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.
One thing I do not like is no native dark mode on chrome, but that's okay, I just do not use phone when I preparing to sleep
For the adblock/tracker issue, recently just added builtin DNS-based adblock (backed by several public block list) to my VPN app, it seems works well, given same engine and same network filtered by the same VPN, i guess they are same to me
No thanks.. I'd rather switch to Firefox, or even any other shitty browser, but not the one from any other gatekeeping monopoly.
A browser should allow you to not download content by URL masks, and not silently load it and hide it. This is advertising/tracker shenanigans and frankly horrid tech.
Yes, absolutely. But then they wouldn't be able to lock the flock in the barn, which is so contrary to Apple's DNA that you can't event talk about it in a 1 mile radius of 1, Infinite loop.
Add a 1000ms delay to your website when the user agent is Safari.
Show popup to install Firefox.
Etc.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Apple_Safa...
- it doesn't like to serialize the state of tabs. Chrome is pretty good at somehow snapshotting the entire state of tabs to the point where it can be reconstructed after relaunch, even offline.
- webpage loading is sort of janky. Chrome will show the webpage streaming in live, but Safari will simply freeze in place until it's done. Maybe this is due to an Apple philosophy decision, but I don't prefer it.
- similarly to how Safari doesn't seem to serialize tab states, navigating forward or back usually needs to load the page from scratch, including resubmitting forms or whatever.
- speaking of forward and back navigation, I'm kinda annoyed that each time I use the trackpad to navigate history, I have to wait for the swipe animation to finish before I can interact with the webpage. I try to always use cmd+brackets instead now, because it's much faster.
- IIRC, it seems the newer macOS 27 betas caused Safari to develop an issue where after it's been open for long enough, certain types of videos will stop being able to play at all until the browser is quit and restarted. kind of annoying, combined with the lack of tab snapshotting, because I have to manually visit each tab to load it on each launch.
I still daily drive Safari and use it as my main browser. But I keep an instance of Chrome open for tabs that I never really close. And then I have an instance of Orion for spreadsheets. (I use spreadsheets to keep track of medication usage, sleep times and finances)
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...
The irony of using a Google platform to promote ditching another Google platform lol.
I setup two of them for my Google account but I made them both in Safari. Only one of them worked. What if both of them failed? I would have been fucked.
I re-made them on Chrome and they both worked.
The absurdity of every week another AI feature, another way for data to leak to their services, another crash report.
They are exhausting and abusing their positions of power.
They just announced something which might be relevant to you.
https://www.firefox.com/enterprise/
source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-dodged-a-20-billion-hit...
Also... not sure all of those ads would still hold up today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYErwT-zRRI
OTH, i use safari on my other mac, it’s fine most of the time, but i also have have chrome installed as some websites are so buggy otherwise, linkedin is a particular culprit, it barely works on chrome too.
I was on Sequoia all throughout Tahoe and still updated Safari to the 26.x versions. There might be a limit to how far back they let you do that, though.
I had an M1 MBP that I needed to re-pave with Monterey. Yes, it's end-of-support, but it's also only 4 years old. And runs on that Mac.
So, first step, I make a USB installer, and run it. Great. Reboots, and says "FYI, this is an unsupported OS. You can install a newer OS instead, or run Monterey in "Reduced Security" mode." That was fine for me.
"Installation of Reduced Security mode failed." Nothing else. Eventually my understanding of this was because the machine had been upgraded previously all the way to Tahoe, that somewhere along the line some firmware or something in the EFI had been upgraded and was too new for Monterey. No thanks to Apple. No info, debug logs, anything, just "Installation failed. Reboot?"
So what then?
Hmm, more research. "Do an IPSW image restore via DFU", i.e. pave it with a largely installed image. Could work, might have the same issue, but since I'm stuck right now, with a Mac I can't install anything on, a four year old $3,000 brick, why not?
Alright, I have a Mac Studio. I get the IPSW image, and Apple Configurator. Connect the two as per Apple's instructions and the MBP does indeed show up in Configurator as being "not booted, DFU mode".
Apple's instructions, "Drag the IPSW image onto the DFU 'box' for the target Mac". No. It doesn't light up like it's accepting a drag and drop, and indeed it doesn't. Nor does it accept a "restore..." or similar from the Configurator menu options. There's nothing in Configurator that seems to allow you to image the MBP. Again: no error, no instructions, just the error "bonk" noise.
So... off to ChatGPT, Reddit, etc., I go.
Much repeating of the same. However, ChatGPT pokes a little button. Near the very end of its answer, it says "Newer versions of macOS may have limitations on the age of the image they might restore. You may need a slightly older macOS to do this. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura could work."
As fortune has it, my fiance happens to still have her old i5 MBP with touchbar, and the latest version of Ventura... let's plug it in, let it catch a little charge and boot...
Alright, I need Configurator on this laptop.
No soup for you, says the App Store, "You need macOS Sequoia to install Configurator".
Back off to Reddit, where I find someone who has helpfully zipped up an older version of Configurator that runs on Ventura, and in the end, I'm able to re-pave via IPSW.
But Apple's docs absolutely are incorrect/incomplete about Configurator, and DFU restores.
"You can use Restore... in the Configurator menu to select the software image". No, you can't, even leaving aside the "old/unsupported". It actually means restoring from a "backup" (presumably Time Machine, though it doesn't specify) and you can't select any file or image.
"Drag the image onto DFU". Doesn't work in that situation, no error, no "hey, you're doing the right thing but I can't do this", just acting like a fool trying to drag the image onto DFU only to have it bounce off.
Like I said, I didn't have DFU port issues, but Apple's docs on how to make this happen were either non-existent, or incorrect about the process, or flat out told me I couldn't do it. But mostly non-existent and overly simplistic covering the most basic scenarios only - which I get for general support, but by the time you are "connect to a second mac in DFU mode and run Configurator" in their own words, we're way beyond simplistic "you can just install a newer macOS" type "instructions".
Though what stuck with me from that page is why the fuck they would have default browser setting inside something like "Desktop & Dock" (that combo!). That is just intellectually challenged UX/UI design.
And it seems they have fired everyone from their propaganda (or marketing?) dept.
tl;dr: Is Safari better than Chrome? Yes. How? Because this webpage is live.
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.
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.
But Safari is not the solution until they make it fully (FULLY) open-source, because all Apple trying to do is replace the king of enshitification hill by their own.
firefox ftw
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).
I am really curious about data proving these.
I am not aware of any benchmarks proving or disproving.
[0]: https://tech-insider.org/safari-vs-chrome-2026/
This is about as wrong as you can possibly get.
This would be true in a stateless world (assuming you can remember the site you want to visit).
Which the web hasn't been since a very long time.
Unless you have a web app which is entirely local and doesn't save its state to local storage, what could you possibly be doing that requires a tab to remain in residence?
I doubt people developing safari and mail app are actually using them outside of work.
Apple keeps holding a “hardware company” flag, despite some occasional wins.