If we're talking about the dwindling user base then yes, but if it's about falling behind technologically then it's Safari that is a distant third.
Safari is the new Internet Explorer. Everyone has to support it due to its user base (which is most likely why you don't see many sites breaking under it), but at least from my own experience it's the most feature incomplete, buggy browser out there, and it takes the most amount of work to support.
It's now a regular occurrence for me that I test something in Chromium and Firefox, and it works on both, but it's broken on Safari.
That's actually the only good reason I've seen for why Safari is the new IE.
Chrome however is the new IE. I'll explain:
- IE was technologically somewhat superior at its time, just like Chrome is now.
- Only that when the competition was truly crushed, Microsoft couldn't justify spending money on it anymore.
- The same will happen with Chrome as well only this time they will manage to find resources to kill adblocking first. ... for our safety, of course
- On the most popular consumer operating system in the United States by numbers (iOS), it is the default browser, which is..
- furthest behind in supporting web standards. It is easy to theorize that Apple has no incentive to improve Safari given how lucrative..
- the App Store is. Apple is under antitrust scrutiny (see Epic vs. Apple), similar how Microsoft was under antitrust scrutiny due to IE integration into Windows. iOS goes further than Windows did in that iOS forces all browsers to use the same underlying browser engine.
* https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-states...
And I am eternally grateful to Apple for this.
Somebody has to push back against the web-standard-of-the-week insanity. Like WebPartitionEditor, WebUSB, WebBootloader and WebSSH.
Google's not pushing back. Mozilla's not pushing back.
Thank you, Apple. Keep pushing. Push harder.
I agree not all standards are great. But they're *standards*. As in, you really should, because everyone else agreed it was a good idea. The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea.
It's not that Safari doesn't get these features - it gets them years later than the competition. The problem with these big companies (Google is bad as well) is that they're too big to fail. If they don't like something, then the standard isn't their standard.
But this isn't what happens. Safari is pretty good at standards (they do support BigInt and fetch). What actually happens is Google "proposes" a standard, pushes it to Chrome, then goads Mozilla and Apple into adopting it. Half of the time web developers cry about Safari not adopting Standards its because they want to adopt a experimental API that Google pushed
That is why I say "Safari gets them years later". For example:
Chrome 42, released April 2015, supported fetch. Safari 10, released March 2017, supported fetch. Nearly two years after Chrome and Firefox.
* https://webkit.org/blog/7477/new-web-features-in-safari-10-1... * https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API#b...
It's not.
> but if it's about falling behind technologically then it's Safari that is a distant third.
You mean, Safari and FF are very close to each other, and Chrome is running away with chrome-only non-standards: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
As an experiment, I downloaded Opera 12.16 from 2013 (the last Presto-based version), and it works better than you'd might expect. The biggest issue is that lots of https requests fail because it only supports outdated versions (it does support TLS 1.1 and 1.2 in the settings, disabled by default, but enabling that doesn't seem to have much effect).
There are a few things that don't render correct: cnn.com because of incomplete flexbox support, as well as some stuff their CSS minimizer does that Opera doesn't seem to like. GitHub doesn't really work correct mostly because CSS variables aren't recognized (it does render mostly okay, just without colours and such), and the JS doesn't work as Opera doesn't support const.
I couldn't test stuff like gmail, fastmail, slack, etc. due to the TLS issues, and various other sites I tested all run in to JS problems because of const, arrow functions, and similar small issues. It's certainly not usable, but overall, it's not bad for an 8 year old browser with a long-dead rendering engine.
Maybe I'll run a proxy to fix the TLS issues and filter out some of the basic JS issues and see what happens then.
I will say, it's slow. This is also an issue with fairly simple sites, like HN, old.reddit.com, lobste.rs, etc. Not sure what's up with that, I think it's related to network requests, as it significantly speeds up when stuff's cached.
Clearly it needs significant work to be useful, but from the look of things I expect that actually, it would be an entirely doable project by a not-too-large dev team to bring Presto up to at least Safari-level in a reasonable amount of time.
Is Rust bullshit? This organization beat Microsoft to create the modern open web, then developed Rust. That's pretty good so far.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-welcomes-the-rus...
You mean pushing HTML5 that after 15 years keeps being half implemented, catching up with native apps, and now literally basically turned into ChromeOS for all practical purposes, alongside SaaS applications?
The real test is if you START with the mission, will you get to the project? In this case no, there's no way to go from a mission to advance an open internet and web to developing a new systems level programming language. You can only get there with motivated thinking.
At least Rust has its own foundation, however just like ISO and other foundation based languages, lets see where the companies at the table take it.
For them Firefox is only an income stream to fund their distractions^H actual mission.
Maybe it's time to ditch the traditional donations system to a per-feature donation. You could even make a policy that, say, 10% of the money of every donation goes to the foundation to use as they please, but the other 90% goes to the development of the specific product/feature.
We need to fins other governance+funding ways for our IT non-profits, or we will keep having this same problem.
However, Mozilla's revenue is mostly from search engine deals, no? If it is true that the Mozilla foundation is under control of people with goals not aligned with the mission to drive forward open internet, I am not sure what can be done? (Not saying this is true, but there have been a lot of grumbling about it)
Perhaps Mozilla's lasting contribution to the world will be as an apocryphal story, warning others of the dangers of ignoring/neglecting core competencies.
It seems like Linux on desktop has never been more popular according to these sites:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
It's not surprising either, considering all of the ads and metrics collection Microsoft has added into windows recently.
The big green guy is the new Logitech software suite that I need to use to set the sidetone on my new headset, which asks you at install time whether you want to enable telemetry yet doesn't actually let you proceed until "yes" is checked, and which is completely redundant to yet distinct from the old suite (which new versions of the same headset model don't work with) and works less well. The other aliens are update pop-ups.
If you conclude that desktop is getting less relevant (as I think parent alluded to in the last paragraph), then its improvement within the segment doesn't need to be sufficient.
In what concerns Android and ChromeOS, it is as relevant as WSL on Windows for the regular consumer, specially on Android where it isn't part of public APIs.
At a prior organization, I was there when they dropped support for Firefox. Basically got one bug report too many that was Firefox only and at that point the few users were just told to switch to Chrome. The small market share is accelerating its demise.
Well... If you count WSL as Linux in the desktop, then I think it's doing quite well, but yeah.
It is sad that they have not managed to become the Linux of web browsers, though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox, getting less relevant by the year.
There was a window of several years during which you could almost believe free/open source software would really dominate the world, but instead it has been co-opted into providing the infrastructure layer while consumer facing software and devices have become more locked down, black boxes than ever before.