> I would really like to have a true Firefox on iOS but I'm also cognizant of the fact that iOS' browser restriction is basically the only reason why “web” is not a synonym for “whatever the Google Chrome team chooses to ship”.

I feel like Firefox might actually regain marketshare if it can ship on iOS. Firefox on Android has a decent claim to be being better than Chrome at this point (largely because you can't run extensions on Chrome).

Safari does support extensions on iOS: https://developer.apple.com/safari/extensions/

So you can't innovate on that, at least meaningfully. If you want the browser with best website support, then you'd go with Chrome. If you wanted your bookmarks from your desktop to be in sync with mobile bookmarks, then most likely you are going to install Chrome, because most likely you had Chrome on your desktop (as it is the most common desktop browser).

Also, an apple policy change to lifts the restrictions for non-apple apps to not be extendable, is a different beast entirely from allowing custom web rendering engines.

> If you wanted your bookmarks from your desktop to be in sync with mobile bookmarks, then most likely you are going to install Chrome

iOS+Chrome users already do this, it would just change iOS Chrome's backend rendering engine.

> Safari does support extensions on iOS

They have to come from the app store, which greatly reduces the number of plugins available compared to FF, and subjects them to the same strict policies as their apps.

> I feel like Firefox might actually regain marketshare if it can ship on iOS. Firefox on Android has a decent claim to be being better than Chrome at this point (largely because you can't run extensions on Chrome).

Firefox is better than Chrome on Android, but it doesn't have the market share to match.

I know this probably won't be a popular opinion, but I have to disagree with this. I use Firefox on all my "general purpose" computing devices, but I only use Firefox on Android for recalling the passwords I have saved on my Firefox/Mozilla account.

For any day-to-day browsing, I use Brave with the cryptocurrency bits turned off. I used the "Fennec" version of Firefox for Android for years, since my first smartphone in college, but by the time the GeckoView-based rewrite was released, I just got tired of the poor performance and reduced battery life compared to Chromium. Only one anecdote, but Firefox felt more jittery and made my phone much hotter than Chromium did.

After the UI overhaul, where (IMO) they tried to copy a Chromium-style interface, I ran out of any non-ideological reasons to use it over Chromium-with-an-ad-blocker-built-in.

Unfortunately I have a similar experience with FF on Android. A more jittery experience and a bigger batter drain than Chrome, even without any extensions installed.

I'll plug my main mobile browser which is now Samsung's internet. I gave it a hesitant try after being disappointed by FF and I'm positively surprised. The UI customization options are even better than Firefox.

Samsung's internet has a misguided "feature" where it will change some colors but not others when night/dark mode is active.

Do not use it if you rely on accurate color reproduction. Expect a decease in usability (dark text on dark backgrounds, light on light) on reading some sites.

Note that the Samsung Internet privacy policy is awful. They collect:

“The information we obtain in this manner may include, identifiers associated with your devices, types of devices, web browser characteristics, device and operating system type and characteristics, language preferences, clickstream data, your interactions with Samsung Internet (such as the web pages you visit, links you click and features you use), dates and times of your use of Samsung Internet, and other information about your use of Samsung Internet.”

https://developer.samsung.com/internet/privacy-policy-us.htm...

If you hadn't replied with this, I would have.

Thank you for spreading this.

Thanks for the heads-up, this is pretty bad indeed. There's truly no escaping the fight between convenience and privacy.

Sigh

The rewrite was pretty bad yes but it's good again now. I never use chrome anymore on my Android devices.

Only things that still bother me on FF is not having access to all extensions and not having pull to refresh.

"Pull to refresh" has been in Firefox for Android for years. See Settings > Customise > Gestures.

About not having the full extension catalog available out of the box: it's pitiful, but if you're determined to install non pre-allowed extensions, you can do so using Nightly and with a custom add-on collection. See https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio....

Huh, I don't have Pull to Refresh under Settings > Customise > Gestures. I wish I did.

I only have "Scroll to hide toolbar" and "Swipe toolbar sideways to switch tabs"

This is in Firefox 108.1.0 which is the latest.

I know you can mess with Nightly to allow other addons but I don't really like using nightly to be honest. This feature should really be in the mainline too.

I would advise against storing passwords in a browser vendor sync service. Bitwarden, 1Password, etc.. are the tools for that specific job and function across all major browsers and even some native GUI shells.

Why the caution?

How would you explain the benefits to the average person? This doubles the number of parties they need to trust and usually means adding a subscription service so it seems like a tough sell.

> I feel like Firefox might actually regain marketshare if it can ship on iOS.

Firefox is currently superior to Chrome on Android, yet the market share is abysmal and irrelevant. I don't see why swapping the browser engine would grow market share, other than wishful thinking.

You have to consider that Chrome is the default on most Android distributions. A more apt analog would be FF's similarly poor market share on Windows or macOS.

> I feel like Firefox might actually regain marketshare if it can ship on iOS. Firefox on Android has a decent claim to be being better than Chrome at this point (largely because you can't run extensions on Chrome).

Let's start with the facts. Firefox market share has been chronically flat with little to no change for years, as the global mobile browser market share [0] has shown even with Android having browser choice for the user.

Hence that, it also suggests that even if Apple did the same thing, it would just further cement Chrome's dominance on iOS. Firefox on mobile is shrinking into irrelevancy.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

Firefox has supported extensions on Android for several years now. The current state of support is a rather significant step down from where it used to be.

Surprisingly, that's not enough to be competitive with the browser that's already installed on people's phones.

I just tried installing an add-on on my android and the "Add to Firefox" button is still grayed out. Searching for "compatible" extensions yields only 15 results.

So no, Firefox still doesn't support extensions on android and hasn't since they disabled them years ago.

THIS is why people like me don't use firefox on android and use chromium-based browsers instead. At least, they let me install the add-ons I want.

To use more extensions on Android, install Firefox Beta and follow this tutorial: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio... (the title says Nightly but it works on Beta too now).

>Searching for "compatible" extensions yields only 15 results.

That's the complete list, yeah. It's utterly ridiculous and insulting.

You can get around it by making an online collection of extensions with a Mozilla/whatever account, but you can't install from files.

I largely agree, it doesn't meet my bar for "supports extensions" :/ hence at the very least "significant step down" - that much is at least not contentious.

The old version of Firefox on Android was awful. The UI was laggy, and the scrolling was so slow it could actually take over a minute to scroll up long pages.

The performance of Fenix (the new version) is at least as bad as Fennec (the old version) for me.

Never forget that concurrent with the decision to move to a native Android UI for the non-Web parts of the mobile Firefox app (whereas previously it was using Gecko for the browser interface itself, just like on desktop), the powers that be were announcing/hyping Firefox OS—an entire mobile operating system that would "boot to Gecko", and where all apps would be required to implement their UI with this strategy that Mozilla knew have substantial downsides since they were already abandoning it themselves for performance reasons.

Left hand, meet right hand.

B2G and Firefox OS did some legitimately cool things - they still have a better blended app+web experience than anything mainstream that I've touched. Android's crappy instant apps are laughable in comparison. There's plenty to learn from that experiment(?).

The rest of it, yeah. Absolutely agreed. Electron not having a Firefox equivalent in particular strikes me as a major, multi-year... not oversight, that's far too polite. Self-ostriching? I'm continually astounded beyond words. The market is massive, and nauseatingly ripe for competitors.

You can barely run extensions on Android Firefox. The stable version only allows "recommended" extensions, of which there are 18 and no guaranteed path to joining that club for a developer. My perception is that there was an almost-successful internal movement to kill extensions on Android entirely.

Safari doesn't help the web be diverse, it just cripples the webs ability to compete with apps.

When is the last time you said "I will choose to use safari" or seen apple pushing the bounds of what the web can do?

I choose it every single day. I have chrome, Firefox, edge and safari at my disposal. Safari is my day to day for most regular usage. For tech/dev work, Firefox and Chrome are usually in flight at the same time.

Why do you chose safari?

Battery life, keychain, PIN numbers from iMessage, integration between desktop/mobile, it's not supported by ads/Google...

Keychain is a big one for me. In the past, Chrome used to support Keychain for their passwords, which meant I could sync all my secrets on any browser on any of my devices.

Why did Chrome stop supporting it? Seeing that they support more obscure keychain apps like whatever ships with KDE and Gnome, I suspect that it was not due to a lack in resources.

> PIN numbers from iMessage

This isn't actually a Safari feature but an iOS feature AFAIK.

I'm like 99% sure this works on desktop, too, if you've got iMessage configured.

It does.

It's an OS-level keyboard feature on iOS, but on macOS I think it's only part of Safari.

I don't really use Safari (for the sole reason called uBlock Origin), but something really nice is that Look Up displays a scrollable preview of pages/links.

I really miss that since it greatly reduced the amount of tabs I opened.

It's fast, good with memory, and does everything I need from it.

Doesn't seriously harm performance of the rest of my system the way a many-tabs Chrome or Firefox tends to.

Fast, best battery life, better UI, the tab groups implementation is great. I like the approach to the extension store better.

mostly what others said already. for most day to day stuff, iCloud sync and whatnot is decent and works across devices. safari dev tools are... horrid imo, so chrome/ff for dev work, but general browsing, it's great.

I choose Safari because it's the default, and as a user I can no longer really tell the difference between the major browsers. Gone are the days when I'd even think about downloading a different browser when I set up a computer. On Macs I use Safari, on Windows I use Edge. I don't see the benefit of going out of my way to install a different browser.

I'm actually continually shocked at Chrome's market share. Is there any PC or laptop platform, besides Chromebooks, that ships Chrome as the default browser? Why is it that so many people took time out of their day to go download a different browser in 2022?

Google is promoting Chrome left and right, and most users use at least Google Search, so are constantly exposed to the marketing.

And most computer-savvy people who support less computer-savvy people “helpfully” install Chrome for them, because “everyone knows” it’s the best browser.

On Windows, it also doesn’t help that Edge has the negative image of being associated with Microsoft telemetry, while Google still benefits from its former “don’t be evil” image.

The "peeking" you can do with the trackpad on a Mac when navigating backwards and forwards between pages is a must have for me in a browser. It's so nice in Safari, I use it hundreds of times a day. It's painful for me when I use other browsers that don't have this feature.

I do this with my Magic Trackpad on Linux as well, it's very nice.

Wait, how are you getting that on Linux?

If you're running Firefox with native Wayland support, multitouch trackpad gestures are working now.

Edit: I also found a Chrome extension that adds it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/swipe-back/mkkcgaj...

Similarly, the "peeking" you can do with Look Up on URLs.

> When is the last time you said "I will choose to use safari"

The last time I opened a Mac with a battery (i.e., today).

Every day since it was first released. I left FF for it and never looked back.

FF has massively improved since then, but Safari is my habit and I’m very happy with it.

I exclusively use Safari for better battery life and I trust their security more and anticipate I will be using Keychain for a long time.

You should probably read the security section of any iOS release notes sometime. Great at security isn’t the first thing that comes to mind for me.

Here’s the latest one for example: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT213530

So fixing security issues is ... bad?

FFS… nobody said that. Nobody even implied that.

If Chrome can update itself in the App Store without a reboot like it does on Android, and Safari continues to require an OS update, Safari security will continue to be worse.

Rapid Security Response should fix that.

iOS release notes combine the OS, apps, and dependent libraries. If you compare to Chrome or Firefox on Windows or Android it's pretty hard to say that anyone has this solved other than to the extent that they're migrating to memory-safe languages. I think Chrome is a ahead on proactive mitigations but from a user's perspective it's basically a never-ending race to install updates since they all have high CVEs on a regular basis.

Many Mac users choose to use Safari because it is by far the most efficient browser.

Yes. I have used every way to consume the web since text-only was preferred in early lynx days and finding gopher resources was the norm. NSCA Mosaic, Netscape Navigator, all IE versions, Firefox, Chrome when it first appeared. I want nothing more to only use Safari / OS WebKit on all my devices. If this winds up going through, I will actively delete all applications that switch off WebKit. To each their own...

I'm very skeptical this is due to safari and not Microsoft style monopolistic behavior by baking the browser into the OS so it's always loaded.

No it's simply due to priorities.

Apple has always placed privacy and efficiency over new features.

...but part of it is also that WebKit is baked-in to MacOS, and gets it's always-on processes reused by the browser when you launch it.

Which processes ? It's not like there is a webkitd and everything is done via RPC.

On iOS, Cocoa uses WebKit to render text, and everything UIKit-based on MacOS gets rendered with dynamically-linked WebKit as well. It's safe to say that if your Mac is on, WebKit is probably running.

There is a big difference between a dynamically-linked WebKit and a constantly running process.

I am on a Mac right now. What is the name of the WebKit process ?

Run this:

`lsof | grep webkit`

You'll need to run that as the user handling WebKit processes, so sudo might be required.

How does this prove that Safari gets an inherent performance advantage over Chrome? I guess on startup there could be a slight difference if the library is already loaded in memory.

No process there (Ventura, ran with sudo).

And like everyone has said that would only affect startup time. Safari does absolutely blow away Chrome at startup time, but it also is more performant in basically every other way: battery, memory, runtime, window resize, tab open/close/re-open, forward/back, paint, layout...

The UI also is more minimal making well built sites feel much more native than Chrome (on Mac and iOS) making sites feel much more native in practice, especially combined with all the performance.

Chrome feels like a dinosaur.

Safari feels like how Chrome felt 10 years ago :p

  > On iOS, Cocoa uses WebKit to render text, and everything UIKit-based on MacOS

you are saying that nstextview and friends are rendered with webkit?

They have no idea what they’re talking about, just move on.

Literally everything in this comment is wrong.

The speed with which it launches isn't what anyone here means when they claim Safari is more efficient. They mean it's far more power-efficient and doesn't harm responsiveness and performance consistency on the rest of your system (i.e. programs that aren't the browser) as much as Chrome or FF do.

Processes? No.

Various parts of MacOS use the WebKit libraries for rendering, but that's a library, not processes.

You're correct, but the assumption that MacOS reuses system resources to run Safari still stands. It's not necessarily bad, it's just what the earlier comment suggested.

No they aren't. There's no central webkitd or anything like that. WebKit is a framework, not a background daemon. If you quit all apps that use WebKit, then no associated processes will exist anymore. If you look in Activity Monitor all the web content processes are parented to launchd(1), but if you ask launchd about it, it'll tell you that the "responsible pid" for each web content process is the WebKit-enabled application that spawned it. And if you quit the application, all the associated web content processes shut down.

So, quit all of the WebKit apps and then check to see if WebKit libraries are still loaded. I posted instructions further down the thread, it's not hard to see for yourself.

If I quit all WebKit apps then by definition I've quit everything that loads the libraries.

You also seem to be very confused as to the difference between a library and a process, given what you've been saying. Having a bunch of apps using WebKit as a framework does not confer any kind of advantage on these apps. If I have an app using WebKit, and you have an app using WebKit, they don't affect each other in the slightest. The only way they would is if they were reusing shared web content processes and so didn't have to wait for those to launch, except a) I imagine launching a web content process is pretty quick, and b) they don't share web content processes so it doesn't matter.

So, do it. See what happens; WebKit is still loaded via MacOS because it's used to render UI elements that are considered part of the system. Unless you've modified the way default apps run on MacOS, WebKit should be loaded into memory from the moment you boot MacOS to the moment you shut it down.

The overhead of mapping the files on disk into memory is pretty minimal. The framework still has to be initialized anew for every application. About the only benefit I can think of is WebKit might be in the dyld shared cache (assuming that includes frameworks that can be updated independently of the system), and that just means it would bypass some of the dyld setup, but if so that would just have a minor effect on the launch time of the application.

Also if I actually do that right now I see a bunch of WebContent processes, the apps themselves and then there are a handful of daemons that have InfoPlist.strings open from WebKit (from the iOSSupport subsystem) but that's just a localization file and I don't know what it's doing there but it appears to be completely irrelevant (the daemons do not have anything else from WebKit loaded).

AFAIK macOS does not use WebKit to render UI. iOS has been known to use WebKit for text rendering in the past, but I'm not sure if it even still does that, and that was presumably in-process anyway. And even if it did that still wouldn't matter as far as applications' own use of web rendering engines is concerned.

> AFAIK macOS does not use WebKit to render UI

Sure it does: iCal, Mail.app, iTunes (Music app), App Store, etc.

Those aren't the OS, those are individual apps that have chosen to use a web rendering engine for various content, and it's not even correct. Calendar doesn't use WebKit at all and never has. Mail.app uses it to render external HTML input (i.e. email messages) rather than UI. I believe Music.app moved off WebKit some time ago as well, and it looks like App Store did too (Accessibility Inspector confirms that the Updates page, which used to be rendered with WebKit, is now a collection view). Both Music.app and App Store link against WebKit but that's likely because the Account Settings page is rendered with WebKit (this is likely content that is served remotely).

In any case, the OS itself does not rely on WebKit for UI, it just ships some apps that use WebKit.

> and gets it's always-on processes reused by the browser when you launch it

Which is a moot point on macOS, since you hardly ever close the browser application. You just close the windows and the application stays activated in the Dock.

macOS WebKit browsers that ship their own custom build of WebKit rather than using the system version (like Orion) are just as efficient as Safari is.

I found this held on a weak Chromebox I'd stuck Void on a while back, too. Dual-core Celeron, no hyperthreading, 2GB memory. Webkit-based browsers were the only ones that approached usability on that device.

macOS does very little to favor Safari. It provides identical resistance to changing defaults to Safari as it does changing defaults from Safari.

I literally don't have Chrome on my Mac. Safari is faster and has less Google shoving their random product initiatives to me. I never have to log into Safari to do anything.

At some point the battery usage on laptop was considerably better using safari. That’s a plus.

Battery life on my Macbook is better using Safari, so I choose to use it all the time. They've also been pulling ahead of Firefox on several occasions when implementing new CSS features.

precisely. and we see a lot of similar behavior from Chrome now as it helps them replace the good old search form with a url bar as the main driver of their ad dollars.

this unsolvable battle is exactly why I opted for the Brave [1] browser. all the better if they’re able to use alternate engine under the hood next.

[1] https://brave.com/

I choose safari every day. It uses less power and it's an overall smoother and better integrated experience. It's also not constantly hounding me to sign into Google accounts.

"Pushing the bounds of the web" specifically isn't a huge goal for me, I want to see the bounds of computing pushed. That doesn't have to be on the web. The web is Rube Golberg-esque enough as is. [edit] To be clear I'm not opposed to it, I'm neutral to it.

I choose Safari as my primary browser on my personal MacBook, it's great

Lifetime windows user, just got a MacBook. I heard safari was better for battery life (haven't tested so can't confirm) so I thought I'd try it. It works fine for all my needs so why change?

Side note, last pass on Mac is a pile of hot garbage. I wish I had never gotten my family onto it because switching is going to be a hassle.

Multiple implementations help the web be diverse, and there is a long history of features becoming easier to use, more capable, or secure based on feedback from one of the browser teams other than the first to propose something.

It’s also not the case that any current browser is so bad that the web is better off without it. Anyone with web development experience has run into problems or limitations with every browser and depending on what you do you will have different assessments of which one is best at a given time. For example, on the Interop 2022 effort all three browser teams have been coordinating currently Safari is in the lead and that will continue to shift over time.

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022

> When is the last time you said "I will choose to use safari" or seen apple pushing the bounds of what the web can do?

Firefox and Safari are both noticeably faster and use less memory. If you care about that, or work on battery that’s enough right there.

Firefox and Safari don’t have conflicts of interest preventing privacy improvements or ad blocking.

I haven’t used Chrome as my default browser since Firefox took the performance crown ~5 years ago but I’ve used all of them plenty as a web developer. The idea that Chrome is so far ahead that we should give up on the web having multiple implementations and just let Google run it is completely the opposite of my experience.

> It’s also not the case that any current browser is so bad that the web is better off without it.

But it is. Safari on IOS is either missing or badly implements every system that lets web apps compete with system apps.

It's totally impossible to use something other than safari on IOS as well, which basically means apple is able to force a very significant amount of web traffic into their browser and basically lock out any feature the choose.

That is bad for the web.

Additionally, I think you're mistaken on the performance crown. Firefox made big gains years ago but chrome has always managed to perform better at most tasks despite those gains.

Maybe if you were running really low on ram Firefox is the faster option? That's not your typical use case though.

I use Firefox regardless. I way value their not crippling AdBlock over chrome and would encourage everyone to use it despite speed issues.

Can you be specific about what exact features you think are so critical that the web would be better off without Safari? For example, if you've already retracted the claim down to “letting iOS users use PWAs which use more app-like features” it's clearly not true because most people do not use PWAs at all, even on Android, and there are many PWAs which work just fine.

> Additionally, I think you're mistaken on the performance crown. Firefox made big gains years ago but chrome has always managed to perform better at most tasks despite those gains.

This always comes down to which specific things you benchmark. All I can say is that I use Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari on macOS, iOS, and Windows and it's exceedingly uncommon for Chrome/Edge to feel faster but I do notice their memory impact on the rest of the system. For battery life, Safari is hands down the winner followed by Firefox and then, distantly, the Chromium browsers.

So which specific features are that critical — for example, do you think most app developers can't work without the battery status API (or that users don't have a vested privacy concern)? I ask because when you drill into things like that there are a lot of numbers which look big until you realize that there are something like 57 tests for a non-standard API which is not broadly used even on the browsers which do support it.

Every feature has the potential to jump out and be critical, even ones that don't appear to be.

Every time I try to use Safari to create something that goes beyond "display text" it's a new adventure in bugs and unsupported features that work in the other browsers.

It's not one of those things you can sit and name, it's a 90/10 issue, and the margins are critical even though they appear small.

Bugs surrounding drag and drop is what lead me to abandon all hope of supporting the browser some months ago.

> Every time I try to use Safari to create something that goes beyond "display text" it's a new adventure in bugs and unsupported features that work in the other browsers.

Do you have any examples which aren't so vague? The only times I've encountered this problem with other developers has been when they were using lots of Chrome-only features and put off testing in other browsers; when starting development in Firefox or Safari the most common case since around the early 2000s has been that everything works in the other two browsers with minimal effort.

> Every time I try to use Safari to create something that goes beyond "display text" it's a new adventure in bugs and unsupported features that work in the other browsers.

Being hyperbolic doesn't help your case; it just looks like you're bashing WebKit because it's from Apple. And while you may have had a bad experience back in the day or don't like that Apple chooses not to implement esoteric or Chrome-only features, that doesn't mean that Safari sucks now.

As I pointed out earlier in the thread [1], Apple has done a great job lately implementing features that they, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft have agreed should be implemented and interoperable and have W3C/WHATWG specifications.

Every browser has bugs; the bug trackers for WebKit, Mozilla and Google are public, so we can actually see what they are.

Like the other browser makers, Apple publishes its bug fixes when a new version of WebKit is released.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991256

I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm being quite literal. I tried two or three times to support Safari. I gave up on it and I'm never going back.

Not bashing web kit because it's from Apple, I'm bashing web kit because I had a website, I wanted to make that website support safari, and it was an absolute pain to the degree that I gave up on it.

The only other browser I've had experiences like this in has been Firefox mobile. I have similar feelings about Firefox mobile.

On the desktop, technically maybe Safari is fine on the desktop because I don't own a Mac so I can't test it, but chrome and Firefox are perfectly easy to make work together on the web with no issues. I do it everyday, safari is not normal in this.

The reason you’re getting negative reactions is because you made these huge sweeping generalizations which are untrue for most web developers but despite being so vehement they’re also entirely unverifiable. It’s certainly possible there’s some feature you hit which was buggy but despite hundreds of words we still have no idea where the alleged problem was – JavaScript, DOM, CSS, audio/video, Unicode support or text rendering, who knows?

> I'm not being hyperbolic, I'm being quite literal. I tried two or three times to support Safari. I gave up on it and I'm never going back.

There's nothing special that has to be done to "support Safari" other than writing normal CSS, HTML and JavaScript just like for any other browser.

Even if you used something experimental or Chrome-only, there are polyfills [2] for most features. This only makes sense for a public facing website (e-commerce, for example), since Safari is on over a billion devices and some of those potential customers might want to use your site.

> maybe Safari is fine on the desktop because I don't own a Mac so I can't test it

Other than some minor differences, the latest version of WebKit is essentially the same on iOS, macOS and iPadOS.

It's pretty common to use something like CodePen [1] to demonstrate CSS and HTML features publicly.

[1]: https://codepen.io/

iOS Safari locking out features is not inherently good or bad.

Yes, it holds back further adoption of cutting edge features that some developers would like but that the average person doesn't care about.

However, it also holds back features that would increase the scope of what the web is, including more features that allow bad faith operators to track and monetize our data.

I use Safari and another WebKit-based browser (Orion) on macOS and iOS/iPadOS all the time, because neither Chrome or Firefox compares when it comes to battery consumption or feeling like a proper citizen of the OS it's running on.

It's seriously frustrating how little regard is given to efficiency in both Blink and Gecko. It don't care if the engine supports WebBanana 2.0 if it's destroying battery life.

But you are running WebKit in all four on iOS :) Because right now Apple doesn't allow other engines. So whatever it is that consumes batter, it's not blink or gecko.

My points of comparison are the macOS versions, where the difference is staggering. Architecturally macOS and iOS are very similar and it’s traditionally been quite rare for either engine’s team to focus squarely on improving efficiency (it’s always speed or features instead, with efficiency as a trailing afterthought), so there’s no reason to think that Blink and Gecko for iOS will be any more efficient than their macOS counterparts.

Is "pushing the bounds of what the web can do" something we should value? Given the current direction of the web, a preference for Safari's relatively slow feature rollouts seems reasonable.

> Is "pushing the bounds of what the web can do" something we should value?

Given that the alternative are app stores controlled by the device vendor, yes. Either we free our devices so that custom software is acceptable and common again or we make sure the web is the go to platform for everything.

Okay, so why should we value the web as the "go to" platform instead of applications? We can do this until the cows go home.

You are making claims about values here, and not everyone shares your values.

You can "do this until the cows go home", but that's about as valuable as repeating "why" every time someone answers a question.

People generally value being able to do more stuff. Putting control into the hands of large central parties generally does not go well.

Because you’re not answering the questions.

You’re providing tautological responses.

You’ve been asked specific things about what features are missing from Safari / WebKit. You’ve replied with vague generalizations that don’t hold to be true outside of the echo chamber of the Chrome Reality Distortion Field.

> Putting control into the hands of large central parties generally does not go well.

Then why are you are in favor of a Chrome monopoly (the obvious externality here)?

I don’t want to ever give websites access to USB, MIDI, or anything else like that.

I’m unhappy that Apple implemented web notifications, personally. So much easier to never have to think about that garbage.

Let's do the former.

> When is the last time you said "I will choose to use safari"

Every single time I need a browser. On iPhone, iPad and MacBook.

All reasons have been mentioned already, so will not repeat them here.

> or seen apple pushing the bounds of what the web can do?

I get that it's easy to attack Apple these days but anyone paying attention can objectively see that Safari has been kicking ass this year. It's easy to do the "whataboutism" thing and they're late on a few things… but if this is a sign of things to come for Safari (style queries and masonry grids are in the works, for example), this is a Good Thing for the web and should be treated as such.

* first to implement (March) the most anticipated CSS feature that was thought to be impossible to implement for most of the past 20 years, the :has() parent selector [1]. It took Chrome until the end of August and it's still not enabled by default in Firefox because bugs

* first to implement wide-gamut color support [1a](2020)

* first to implement oklch and oklab (and a bunch more) color spaces [2]

* first to implement the open Webauthn standard Passkeys a few months ago; Chrome 108 just announced support

* support for all of the "hot" CSS features like Container Queries, Subgrid, new viewport units, AVIF image format and (as they say) "more" [3]

* Mozilla, Google, Apple and Microsoft agreed to focus on the interoperability of 15 web features; WebKit currently passes 98.5% of the tests the companies have agreed to, leading the other companies [4].

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/

[1a]: https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...

[2]: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rg...

[3]: https://webkit.org/blog/13152/webkit-features-in-safari-16-0...

[4]: https://webkit.org/blog/13591/webkit-features-in-safari-16-2...

Safari is pretty much the worst browser in existence. Basic technology like webrtc is absolutely riddled with bugs. It's so bad that most video chat services don't even support it.

I was just on Teams and Webex video calls using Safari.

Google Meet works fine in Safari too. Better even, since there it uses hardware accelerated video encoding unlike in Chrome.

> It's [Safari] so bad that most video chat services don't even support it.

Which ones? I've used Zoom, Meet, Teams, and Whereby in Safari with no problems. I've never encountered a video service _not_ work in it.

On Mac, Safari is the only browser to respect battery drain and preserve power in any real meaningful way. I'll take some bugs for that win. I use Chrome or Firefox and my battery noticeably dies faster.

> It's so bad that most video chat services don't even support it.

All of the major services support it and the only one which I’ve ever had problems with is Google’s, which shockingly had issues with every browser other than Chrome. Do you have links to bug reports?

I switched to Safari primarily a while back because it used the least battery and memory (Safari & Firefox were close, Chrome is a distant gluttonous third place). I’ve noticed very, very few cases where a compatibility issue forced me to switch browsers. As a web developer I use all three, of course, and using Chrome doesn’t feel notably better so halving my energy usage is an easy trade.

I find Chrome indispensable on OS X. Whenever I begin to wonder if my Macbook Air has fans or not, I start up Chrome and whoosh, it’s like a Hawker Harrier performing a vertical take-off.

At one point I was doing a lot of coding in a coffee shop. When testing my work in Safari, I could sit down and run on my Mac’s batteries until I got tired of the coffee shop and headed home.

With Chrome, I had to plug in immediately. I believe people who tell me Chrome has better bling and is faster, but Safari is fast enough for my purposes, and battery life is a far bigger factor for my browser choice than raw performance.

Yeah you can find all the bugs here

https://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&cont...

Which specific ones have you personally verified as preventing use? That's a public tracker where anyone on the internet can report something — in many cases issues are duplicates, unreproducible, or specific to certain edge cases.

I ask because that returns 351 issues but if you do the same search for Chrome you'll find 414. I would assume that you would agree that the correct interpretation of that is not that Chrome doesn't support WebRTC?

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list?q=component...

Since all of the major services work without issue in all mainstream browsers, I would argue that to a first approximation this is not an effective proxy metric.

So you think poor support for an optional technology is sufficient to call Safari the worst browser "in existence"?

Let's work on that argument a bit more before posting hyperbole.

Sorry, trying to insinuate that WebRTC is basic technology just disqualifies your opinion. It has an enormous specification describing a privacy and security snakepit and definitely is not basic technology.

Well, two wrongs didn't make this a right. If Chrome does use this as a power grab, then we should expect EU injunction again.

> Well, two wrongs didn't make this a right.

That was basically my point?

> If Chrome does use this as a power grab, then we should expect EU injunction again.

Since this is behaviour Google is already doing and has been doing for a decade, it seems like the EU could just skip to the part of actually doing something.

> Since this is behaviour Google is already doing

How so? There are a number of features Apple dragged their feet on (WebRTC, push notifications, WebM support, AV1, the list goes on), it could be argued that Apple was intentionally stifling the capabilities of the browser to enforce the profitability of the App Store. I understand your concern, but Apple's failure to compete with Google is not Google's fault. Apple had a chance to make a browser that Chrome users switched to, but they didn't. Chrome's market share destroys every Webkit-based browser combined.

Regulators can't see into the future. Thus-far, Chrome's behavior might be frustrating but totally fair game relative to the way Apple plays. Once Safari is competing on it's own merits, we'll see how things go and respond accordingly. If it's anything like the App Store, it'll take us ~8 years to observe the abuse and respond effectively.

> > Since this is behaviour Google is already doing

> How so?

Using a different browser on google.com or youtube.com has many times shown me ads claiming that the web is better using Chrome.

Google Cloud's console frequently breaks for non-Chrome users.

YouTube for many years used a non-standard API which only Chrome optimized instead of the standard one which all three implemented, which meant that video playback used far more CPU on other browsers.

YouTube for many years favored WebM format at the expense of video quality and performance.

Google Meet for years would drop sessions for Firefox or Safari. No other WebRTC service had problems with those browsers.

> Chrome's market share destroys every Webkit-based browser combined.

Yes, that's the point. Chrome would not have gotten so far ahead of Firefox and WebKit without both a huge financial push and heavy promotion on Google's most popular web properties.

So, Google builds around Chrome. That's fine. Apple has every right to implement those non-standard APIs that Google uses (Microsoft fought Oracle for that right), and they could feasibly hack in workarounds for all of these problems if they cared or had to compete with Chrome in the first place.

We'll have to see where things go after Apple starts playing nice. I support legislation that restricts Chrome only if Apple doesn't stand to directly profit from it.

It's not that Google builds around Chrome as much as they use their control of things which are unrelated to Chrome to promote Chrome. Right now, Apple favors their browser on iOS and Google favors theirs everywhere. I fully support consumer choice so I think the right answer would be iOS supporting other browsers and Google not being allowed to promote their browser in unrelated apps. If Chrome is actually so much better, they don't need to interrupt a YouTube or Gmail user's session to tell them.

Then we're at something of an impasse. Apple also promotes their own browser on MacOS, so it's not like they're innocent of this too. Having more options is simply a greater priority than stopping $COMPANY from cross-promoting a browser.

You have to think about what happens next. Google pushing Chrome on users of their web apps has successfully put Firefox into what appears to be a fatal downward spiral, and has lead to more developers only supporting Chrome. Microsoft stopped trying to fight that and created Edge-on-Chromium. Safari on iOS has been the primary thing keeping web development from being Chrome development and if you care about the web or open standards you want to think about what happens if that changes.

Open Standards had their shot, Apple turned their back on them. It doesn't matter at this point what happens, because both companies have proven that they need government intervention to do the right thing.

If Apple doesn't want to build a Chrome competitor, then that's not Google's fault. Both companies are refusing to give up their strangleholds, and should be prosecuted accordingly.

First and foremost though, Apple needs to be litigated. The rights of the user should supercede the petty combat between browser developers.

It seems a bit strong to suggest the "rights of the user" are in question here, when no one is being forced to use an Apple phone. It's happening everywhere in this thread, and I'm a bit surprised why more people don't recognize that consumers already have rights and a choice. It's called Android.

It is untrue that Apple turned their back on open standards. What is true is that Google has hijacked the standards body and has pushed things as "standards" that nobody except Google wants (WebUSB anyone?) and have significant downsides for user security and privacy. WebKit has flat-out refused to implement standards that impose risks greater than their benefit. So has Firefox.

It would help if you argued on the facts, not on your emotion.

> I support legislation that restricts Chrome only if Apple doesn't stand to directly profit from it.

Why would you connect how these two different companies should be treated? Sculpting regulation to attempt to engineer an outcome institutionalizing the current market balance between two oligarchs is just about the opposite of what I want any regulator doing.

You don't litigate Carnegie Steel before preventing Rockefeller from directly profiting off it. Monopoly-busting 101.

Incidentally, many of these "features" came about from Google trying to create moats or cut out competitors. Further, Chrome is a dog on Apple Macs, cuts battery life to a fraction, plus brings a host of invasive and compromising behaviors.

In general Google has made no attempt for their browser to be competitive on feature dimensions that matter to many Apple hardware buyers; their share remains driven by residual tech influencer group-think still left over from the IE wars more than the value of, say, WebM over x265. (See also Duck Trumotion and Widevine for more of Google's motivation.)

The profitability motive is false, see Steam charging the same 30% despite e.g. Gog or Microsoft store. This is inconvenient for those making the argument Apple's fee is out of line.

> Chrome's market share destroys every Webkit-based browser combined.

Clearly they need more help with this. Glad EU is looking out for them.

Sounds like it sucks, then. If things are as bad as you say, then we have nothing to worry about because everyone will want to use Apple's browser. I'll let all the Linux guys know, and I'm certain they'll switch to WebKit right away.

> The profitability motive is false, see Steam charging the same 30% despite e.g. Gog or Microsoft store.

No, it's pretty substantial. The App Store made 80 billion USD last year, which was one of their only businesses that approached hardware profitability. Ensuring that nobody can eschew Apple's software control is completely their directive. If Apple did become more like Steam (eg. had other software stores to compete with) things would be pretty fair I'd argue.

> Clearly they need more help with this. Glad EU is looking out for them.

Apparently Chrome is borderline-unusable on Apple products anyways, so Apple has nothing to worry about.

Normal users install the browser Google advertises at them constantly on all Google's websites, then complain that Apple sucks because their laptop's battery went from a reliably 12 hours of life to 7 hours and also the fans kick on all the time now, but they have no idea why that's happening unless they happen to bring this up with some computer nerd in their life and the nerd explains what's going on.

If normal users install everything that's advertised to them, then they shouldn't be trusted with a computer full-stop. Unfortunately, operating a computer needs to be a conscious decision.

> If normal users install everything that's advertised to them

They 100% do. It's why software installation is as annoying as it is now. Did you do any tech support (even the unofficial kind) around the turn of the millennium, when computer ownership topped 50% (in the US) and Internet use was beginning to become widespread? It was a hellscape of unwanted shitware that users couldn't figure out how to get rid of, and viruses. More recently, I've seen normies install Chrome then wonder where their (Firefox, which they had because I'd installed it) bookmarks went and not know how to get them back (they didn't care at all whether they were using FF or Chrome, but ended up with Chrome anyway because "google said they needed it" on one of those ubiquitous "hey, this site works better in Chrome" ads they put everywhere whether it's true or not) and I've seen one end up paying for OneDrive, and have it totally fuck up their workflows, despite not knowing what OneDrive even does.

> then they shouldn't be trusted with a computer full-stop.

That is no longer an option and there's no chance at all we're going back to a time when it was. I wish we would! But we're not.

> it could be argued that Apple was intentionally stifling the capabilities of the browser to enforce the profitability of the App Store

Given the number of apps these days that are basically nothing more than thin shims around a mobile site, they're not doing a good job then, are they?

It's almost like there's a growing sense of adversity between app developers and Apple...

That doesn't make any sense as a response. You're claiming that Apple have been neutering Webkit to force people to make apps but people are making apps that are mobile sites using Webkit which belies your claim.

merits != features

Apple better start catching up then, the EU is mandating a clash.

It's not like the EU is turning a blind eye towards Google (e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62888137)

>If Chrome does use this as a power grab, then we should expect EU injunction again.

I'm not sure what the EU could do here; it's not like Chrome is coming pre-installed on iPhones or on Windows. Can the EU breakup Google?

> it's not like Chrome is coming pre-installed on iPhones or on Windows

It comes pre-installed on Android; isn't that enough?

It would almost be an exploitative situation, if they didn't let you freely choose which browser engine you run.

That already got in trouble them for requiring Android phone manufacturers to include it: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...

Nowadays I believe Samsung at least has their own Samsung Browser, so that's already a large chunk of Android phones that don't have Chrome default.

Safari and Chrome have the exact same goals as they are maternal twins. They are both designed to monopolize their ecosystem and suppress the competition. Firefox is the odd one out.

So it's okay for Apple to have a monopoly on their OS, but we need to knee cap anyone that tries to challenge them with competing apps.

I hope you aren't trying to say that's what I wrote? My position is that if we're doing consumer choice, we should do it all the way: iOS is required to allow other browser engines (with any security requirements applied evenly); Google is not allowed to use unrelated business units to advertise Chrome in ways which Apple, Microsoft, or Mozilla cannot; and Google is required to test their applications in other browsers and promptly fix compatibility issues which are not due to a browser not implementing an approved W3C/WHATWG standard[1].

1. I mention “approved” because of things like the way YouTube used to be faster in Chrome because they shipped a draft of the Shadow DOM API and then took a long time updating to use the standard version which other browsers implemented, during which time those other browsers were served a slow polyfill instead. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027

I think if Firefox had been allowed onto the iOS store much earlier (they had ports done and working at multiple points in history) it might have helped them fight off Chrome and slow the growth of the Chromium monopoly, but at this point it's not clear to me how you fix it. I'd still be happy to be able to use Firefox on an iPhone but Firefox's days as a usable browser are numbered in general, so at some point I'd be stuck going back to Safari on that device.

I increasingly have to open up Edge to do basic stuff because people have stopped testing on anything other than Chrome and the set of Chrome-only APIs out there to use is constantly expanding.

I agree that iOS Safari's popularity is the only thing currently keeping the web an open market. But I'm not too concerned that this move will break that situation. Most iPhone users just use the stock browser and don't know or care what rendering engine it is. Maybe Chrome for iOS gets a bit better due to this change, attracting a few more users, but I can't see it changing the numbers much.

How'd that work for Microsoft Edge? Firefox usage tanked when Google started heavily promoting Chrome on search, Gmail, Youtube, Docs, etc. and I would be shocked if this went through and every Google app didn't start telling people that they should install Chrome or certain features were being held back for Chrome users.

I'm confused, how does this move affect Google's ability to promote their own iOS Chrome app to Safari iOS users? They already have that ability.

Chrome on iOS uses the same WebKit engine as Safari. Right now, if someone at Google wants to ship a web API they need to work with Apple and, to a lesser extent, Mozilla to implement it. If they could tell people to use Blink on iOS, they'd have the ability to ship the update and blow off attempts to change the code in the standardization process or even standardize at all because 95% of their users would be running code which they can arbitrarily update.

Iirc on macOS Safari is still the most popular, with over 50% using it. It's no where near as dominant as Safari is on iOS but significantly more than Edge is on Windows.

I like Safari too, so even with this change I'll keep using it on my Apple devices.

Safari is just a Webkit skin like Chrome is. The only independent browser is Firefox.

why the downvotes? Both Safari and Chrome are based on KHTML. There's literally no difference between them.

They might have diverged technically but they're still both not really FOSS software.

Literally no difference is a wildly wrong and simplistic statement to make. There are vast differences.

They're both LGPL so they're not truly Free.

That’s a religious debate. Most open source developers do not agree so if you want to be provocative about it, accept the downvotes with grace.

It's really a stretch to call something that's literally the only option "popular". But I agree, rendering engine is not enough to move any real needle. New browsers need to be able to integrate features that ios doesn't support currently that require hooking into the operating system like PWAs.

Missing from this conversation:

- other browsers exist for iOS, and users seem not to care that much for the alternatives, but…

- if other engines are permitted, then user-facing differentiators like extensions will make their way to competing browsers on iOS.

Outside of PWAs, I can’t think of many other features other than maybe arbitrary file upload that requires more hooks into the OS (as opposed to greater control of the browser engine). Genuinely interested in hearing/thinking of more, if you have any.

Other browsers exist but those are apps using the same WebKit rendering engine, which means web developers have to support that. If Blink could run natively, you’d see more promotion on Google properties to change that.

> It's really a stretch to call something that's literally the only option "popular".

It’s not a stretch; it’s silly to say otherwise. Regardless of the rendering engine and the ability to make a 3rd-party browser the default on iOS which has been a thing for a few years now, Safari is the most popular browser on iOS and iOS runs on something like 1.5+ billion devices worldwide.

Normies don’t know and don’t care about the rendering engine when they use Firefox, Brave, Chrome, etc. on iOS and yet those browsers probably have single digit installed base on iOS.

And nothing would meaningfully change even if Firefox and Chrome ran natively on iOS.

I agree that rendering engine alone won't move the needle. Users may care about features though: PWAs and extensions that don't need to go through the app store review process are the big ones.

Example: "Firefox has an extension that allows you to download videos from youtube -- it's way better than Safari."

Sure, but these alternate browsers are already innovating on UI/UX on iOS.

I use Brave on iOS often because it makes doing certain things easier than Safari and it’s UI is quite good.

So you agree that browsers can increase marketshare by adding features?

> Most iPhone users just use the stock browser and don't know or care what rendering engine it is.

Google will likely turn on the popups with "BETTER ON CHROME! TRY CHROME NOW!" for ios users once it's possible

Couldn't Apple just have had a "no Chrome" policy. No one cares about that browser but I'd really like to have Firefox.

> I'm also cognizant of the fact that iOS' browser restriction is basically the only reason why “web” is not a synonym for “whatever the Google Chrome team chooses to ship”.

May you explain this, because Google can't even ship their browser engine (Blink) on iOS and have to use WebKit. Why hasn't the world coalesced around WebKit?

> Why hasn't the world coalesced around WebKit?

iOS is not the entire ecosystem. Blink dominates everywhere else.

So iOS' webkit-only restriction is not the reason why Chrome is dominant, right? I was trying to follow gp's logic and failing

Look everywhere else: heavy promotion on some of the most popular web properties in the world (Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.) has put Firefox into a death-spiral and Microsoft gave up on their own engine in favor of a Chrome derivative. There is little reason to believe that the same would not be true on iOS were it possible for Google to get users to switch.

I think that matters because while Chrome has a number of great engineers, it's a single team at one company and the web should be bigger than that. We've seen many examples of a Google-proposed spec which became better with feedback from Mozilla or Apple engineers, and that makes the web healthier overall. One really interesting example here has been with tracking where every browser which Google does not control has a better privacy stance because none of those companies make their money by tracking people.

I have mixed feelings too, but for slightly different reasons: AFAICT Chrome is a power grab in the literal sense that (on macOS) it drains my battery a lot faster than Safari does, for equivalent use. Not great, but bearable on a laptop; on a phone, however, that's a critical issue. So at least in that respect it has been in the users' best interests to oblige developers to use the most power-efficient browser engine.

Chrome is basically a keylogger for Google. There is an argument to be made that AV/Malware software should fingerprint it as such.

No. They’re slow to shut down ad tracking but that’s a very different thing and there’s no evidence even remotely supporting your claim.

Chrome records everything you type in the address bar, everything you type in a textbox/form, every website you visit, everything you downloaded, button clicks, which ads you interact with, etc, etc. If any other software did that, it would be called a keylogger and malware. I wouldn't defend Google on privacy matters, but okay its your choice.