So there is a good chance that even if competition where allowed on iOS, Safari, which currently has more than 90% market share, would at the very least not fall down below 60%, preventing Chrome from becoming dominant. It is even more likely because most users on iOS actually believe they can install the real Chrome, so nothing will change in their eyes.
I disagree. There are already plenty of sites that are broken on macOS Safari because it's a niche platform. The only saving grace is that websites still have to support iOS Safari. If vendors were able to say "we only support Chrome" on iOS as well, I think that 60% macOS Safari marketshare would drop rapidly due to necessity.
I support an Open web, I test my websites on Firefox and Chrome, I even occasionally do Edge testing, and I develop my websites often primarily in Firefox. But I'm not buying an iPhone or a laptop just to test websites, so I don't test in Safari.
Every other browser has a way to emulate in Linux, I can even download free VMs from Microsoft to test IE11 in Windows (and Edge now runs in Linux). If Apple isn't willing to make its operating system available to me to test on then I don't see why I should feel obligated to test on it.
And given that there is some Mac-specific behavior for Safari/Firefox that I've run into (differences in how blur works), and I generally can't assume that all of my stuff is going to work perfectly, I'm either going to fall back on progressive enhancement or (in the case of a complicated webapp) I'm going to tell users that Safari is unsupported and they're continuing at their own risk.
I'd love to support Safari. All Apple has to do is give me a way to.
Unfortunately that's not enough, for two reasons:
1. Safari is the only browser that is still tied to OS release versions, the WebKit version used by Epiphany is rarely the same, so results will likely differ
2. Epiphany has no mobile emulation mode. (E.g., I had to work around around an annoying input zoom bug in Safari/iOS by blindly applying the least stupid solution I found searching the net)
However in the IE era, even though Netscape/Firefox was free for everyone to test on, many large companies made their sites for "IE Only" because it's easier and cheaper. What I worry about is that, even if Safari kept up with web standards and was mostly compatible in terms of the basics, sites would start requiring APIs that only Chrome wants to support (e.g. FLoC). This would give Google a lot of leverage to push its own technologies on users (Amp also comes to mind).
I would actually expect the most likely outcome is Apple would fight hard to build a better browser to stem any losses to other browsers. They'll have at least 2 years to do it, so they can catch up in that time with enough investment.
It's the same problem that developers were talking about with Chrome's Manifest V3 -- to the point where popular adblockers for Safari like Adguard actually run outside of the browser so that they're not quite as limited as they otherwise would be by Safari's apis.
And none of them work as well as uBlock Origin on Chrome.
Trust me, I tried. I even paid money to try a few extensions out on Safari in the hopes I would get a better experience, but even that doesn't work.
Also been trying out this webkit based browser for macos: https://browser.kagi.com (supports ublock origin)
Partial source: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158
Edge is literally built off a relatively recent version of Chromium. It’s not a separate engine.
I would hope mobile browser share numbers already take this into account, though I don’t know.
Numbers I found say on desktop Chrome is at 70%. Include the 7.75% for Edge (because it’s basically Chrome) and that’s almost 80%. FF at least exists and is similar to Safari.
On mobile it’s at 65%. Safari is the only other browser above 5%.
Chrome is dangerously close to total monopoly.