Apple is just as likely to test new features in the wild, or introduce new features without going through the standards process. prefers-color-scheme sure came out of nowhere. And I'm sure you remember their original proposal with WebGPU.

Meanwhile Apple are strangling PWAs to hold onto their app store monopoly, and extremely slow to implement features that other vendors adopted long ago. jQueryUI had its life artificially extended by years simply because Apple refused to add a date picker input type. IndexedDB has been nigh-useless without wrappers because of Safari. They've earned their moniker of the new IE.

> Apple are strangling PWAs

Strangling is a funny word to use. They never implemented PWA features in the first place. They're under no obligation to do so, either. You can argue whether PWAs are good or not, but I don't think such an argument can be made objectively.

I.E., there's a prevailing view in this thread that web browsers are evolving in one direction, and Safari is slower than everyone else at getting there. IMO this is wrong. A better way to look at it is that web standards are a big blob of shit, and each browser is implementing the subset of that blob that they think is useful. This is how it's always been.

Mozilla has been neutering PWA recently too. Maybe it's just not a good set of technologies?

It seems more than a decision not to implement. Apple have every incentive to prop up their own ecosystem where they make a cut on every purchase. They specifically wrote a data retention policy for localStorage which was to the direct detriment of PWAs.

Mozilla isn't pursing SSBs at this time, but the core APIs of PWAs are still being supported. Their position stems more from a lack of manpower than any strategic decision.

> Their position stems more from a lack of manpower than any strategic decision.

That doesn't seem to be what Mozilla thinks, which is that it was never reliable and no one used it:

> “The SSB feature has only ever been available through a hidden [preference] and has multiple known bugs,” Mozilla’s Dave Townsend explains in a Bugzilla issue tracker. “Additionally, user research found little to no perceived user benefit to the feature and so there is no intent to continue development on it at this time. As the feature is costing us time in terms of bug triage and keeping it around is sending the wrong signal that this is a supported feature, we are going to remove the feature from Firefox.”

https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/mozilla-firefox/...

> jQueryUI had its life artificially extended by years simply because Apple refused to add a date picker input type

The weirdest thing about this is that MobileSafari has supported <input type="date"> for years. Desktop Safari only got support in May.

How do you explain feature parities? like lack of webworkers on Safari. Its been there for years but they have some lame reason like "It's too complicated to implement".