Nope, Apple is taking care of it's customers and protecting them from Google's ad exploitation.
"I feel it may be a similar fate for Apple, and for similar reasons, unless they change their attitude towards the web"
On the contrary, if Apple allowed this web Wild West that Google is advocating, then the users would have incentive to switch. This move from Apple actually ensures that things run smoothly on Apple devices.
It is not about "power for web developers", it is web developers being lazy to self-educate and learn other stacks.
There is skill called "desktop development" and it does not entail Electron.
Luckily Apple is not gonna let that happen with the mobile apps and the PWA.
You have the likes of Tiktok on there, collecting way more data than a PWA ever could. Do Apple not care about that?
Feels like a bit of a double standard on privacy, explicitly aimed at stifling the web.
Apple is "protecting" its customers by restricting and patronising them like little children. Privacy by default is good, but many of their restrictions are clearly aimed at rent seeking.
Where customers really need protection, Apple is stabbing them in the back by aiding and abetting human rights abuses with their pointless side-loading ban and their willingness to let dictators run their own iCloud service.
Right. Because Google, who dominates the entire web standards spectrum, is known for creating well thought-out, well-designed APIs that take into consideration concerns and criticism, and thinking long-term of the web as a whole.
Oh wait, they don't. Up to and including the point where both Mozilla and Safari are saying they won't implement certain functionality because of glaring holes in the design, and Chrome not only shipping the features, but making them GA.
Oh, and yes. Most of the "Safari is holding back web developers" talk is bullshit, of course. It actually should read "Chrome releases APIs at neck breaking speed with zero concerns for the future of the web." See web API counts in major browsers: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
I feel this is being dismissed by many people, but there's a lot of truth in this statement. Here's an example of this at play:
https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114
Chrome devrels and cheerleaders pile on Safari and Firefox all the time for not adhering to Chrome's agenda and frame it as "holding the web back." But the true thing that holds the web back is a browser monoculture.
Also, why was Safari's IndexedDB feature released nearly 4 years after the other major browsers? And when released it, why was it full of bugs that simple test cases would have caught?
I don't want to fuel conspiracies, but the pattern is fairly obvious. Apple appears to resist progress in Web APIs.
Priorities. Safari's team isn't as big as Chrome's.
> but the pattern is fairly obvious.
The only obvious pattern is the link I provided. And things like this:
- Chrome releasing APIs even when other vendors are against: https://twitter.com/Rich_Harris/status/1220412711768666114
- Chrome sabotaging competitors with shady practices: http://archive.is/tgIH9
and there are many many many more examples of this behaviour.
Looking at this page: https://webkit.org/team/ and comparing it to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Team/whois would suggest otherwise.
Do you have numbers from elsewhere to back up that claim?
Btw, I'm not saying Google are right to power through with poorly designed APIs either, but when there is a standard in place, why Safari takes sooo long to implement it is perplexing (or perhaps just a rather obvious strategy).
Unknown
> but when there is a standard in place, why Safari takes sooo long to implement it is perplexing
Some standards are so bad, even Chrome ends up deprecating them (see Custom Elements v0).
Or they just go out of favor (see HTML Imports).
Or they are so poorly specified that even years after "becoming a standard" they have things like "this section is not specified yet" in their texts. And the status of these "standards" is often not above "Candidate Recommendation" (that is it is gathering implementation experience, and yes, that refers to Service Workers).
BTW Service Workers were moved to Candidate Recommendation about half a year ago: https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/1460 ("Double check everyone is happy with v1 going to CR.")
So yeah, I don't know what to say. Safari isn't chasing every API under the sun? Good for them. Web Devs assuming that whatever's in Chrome is the be all end all standards on the web? Bad for the web and for the devs. Apple possibly not prioritising Safari? Bad for the web as well.
The android ecosystem demonstrates that freedom isn’t necessarily creating a materially better ecosystem.
Blackberry was a different problem — they saw themselves as a messaging platform that did some other stuff.
I'm not saying Google is incredible (my opinion is quite the contrary actually). However, I am saying Apple is holding the web back, in a fairly annoying way, for developers.
The fact that they are a rich corporate does not mean they always will be, or that they're conducting their business in the best way possible. There are plenty of examples of rich tech businesses that lost their market share very quickly. We don't even need to look that far into the past for an example: BlackBerry sticks out in my mind. I believe their stubbornness and resistance to change caused their downfall. I feel it may be a similar fate for Apple, and for similar reasons, unless they change their attitude towards the web.