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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.