These days Safari gets better indeed (through it's still a PITA in some areas), while Chrome is clearly "the new golden-days-IE" - which long-term is probably much worse than Safari could ever be.
In that case doesn’t it seem like Google took an ideological stance by choosing a non-patent-encumbered codec instead of supporting mp3? And they could do it because of their dominance? Or is that not accurate?
Choosing non-patent-encumbered codecs for open standards is as much ideological as practical.
In practice, MP3 has had support on every platform since the mid 90s. I could probably count the number of times I’ve come across an ogg file being distributed on one hand.
Pretty much everyone who implemented HTML5 audio for a few years, while MP3 support in the browser was initially barely heard of? Mozilla, Google, Opera, KHTML, WebKit... Safari and IE were the only outliers, and had tiny minority of market share for a while (not counting versions that didn't support HTML5 audio at all).
You couldn't use MP3 without Vorbis fallback on the Web for about a decade. Whenever you played audio in the browser without using Flash on anything else than iPhone since 2009, chances that it was Vorbis were very high for a good while. Even YouTube used it before switching to Opus.
In practice, although very popular, MP3 was nowhere near universally supported until just a few years ago. I know that pretty well - I have posted patches to some projects that enabled MP3 support once its patents expired myself.
This is for maintainability/security surface reasons as well as patent risks, as open/closed and standardized/bespoke axes have nothing to do with whether or not something is patent encumbered.
Most likely not for same reasons ad blockers were freaked about Chrome's Manifest v3 push - browsers are trying to optimize away the latency from a massive synchronous javascript-based list check on page load, and the privacy risk that comes from these extensions having exposure to every page (and injecting their code into every page). Conversely, the web extension authors don't see the set of limitations as feasible.
But it is odd that uBlock Origin doesn't seem to have even issued a public-facing statement of even evaluating the functionality that is there in Safari.
Apple lets plugins provide lists of elements/css/IPs/etc to block. Safari processes them and is able to block stuff based on that extremely fast and power efficiently.
There is flexibility lost. Plug-ins can’t see which rules are/aren’t hitting. You can’t filter based on the content of a request.
So there are ad blockers, and they work well. But uBlock, as it works elsewhere (I know it’s considered the best), isn’t possible due to the trade offs Apple chose.
The vitriolic hate it gets in many threads are completely misguided and likely the result of years-old opinions on it. In the last 3 years Safari dramatically accelerated development, leapfrogged Chrome in performance to a staggering degree, and basically became close to an ideal browser.
And nearly every so-called standard people point to to "prove" Safari is lagging behind is almost always just something Chrome pushed out without any consensus.
It's funny because I think the hate comes from Webkit being forced on iOS, but it often comes out as "Safari sucks it's the new IE" which is pretty much the opposite of true and undermines the point.