[1] https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/ashleys-blog-2/safari-rel...

Firstly, you complain of a third-party dependency being broken in a preview build of Safari, and that you had went on holiday the week the stable version was published, meaning you couldn’t guarantee the problem was fixed in the stable release. Plainly, that’s an organisational problem on your end—the Safari team fixed the problem on their end. I’ll come back to your complaints re. release schedules.

Your second complaint is, in your own words, “we accidentally relied on a Chrome bug that meant our Service Worker was broken in Safari 16.4.” You go on to rehash your initial complaint, which is that Apple doesn’t publish a release schedule for Safari. I don’t inherently disagree with this complaint at face value.

Finally you move on to your third complaint, but to me it seems like yet another problem on your end. You made the observation that a given feature was supported and made the assumption that it was supported fully, with no other logic in place to test functionality or fallback to another rendering method. By your own admission again: “We detected OffscreenCanvas merely by seeing if it was defined. I never expected a browser to ship it with some contexts but not others - I assumed it would have parity with the standard canvas element.” I can understand the frustration and panic of being caught out here, but the pitfall is in your application logic. Your arguments afterwards with regard to supporting existing content are well said, but don’t generalise in this case. Just because something broke for you doesn’t mean everyone made the same flawed assumptions you did.

You then go on to list a random assortment of historic instances of Safari having flaws, as if that isn’t true of all browsers across the board.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/baton-roue

All other browsers have enough communication and transparency to avoid this. Towards the end of the blog post I outline what Apple need to do - which all other browser makers already do - to make it at least vaguely tolerable to develop for Safari.

However, if your goal is to prevent Google from having complete and total unilateral control of the web standards, simply the existence of WebKit as a prominent browser engine is enough. Its quality pretty much doesn't matter in this regard. This is pretty much my perspective.

You do not fix a tech monopoly issue by imposing a duopoly, especially not with each one in their own little garden with no cross over.

And you don't fix the issue of one way too big tech company having full control over the web through their browser by giving it or some of it to another way too big tech company, especially if that other company has already shown its propension to use its control of the stack to protect its own interest.

The solution here is to do what we did in the early 2000s, and educate people about firefox + ublock. On desktop after a large growth notably in europe, Firefox stagnated in speed and that's how Chrome take its headstart, but on mobile with google insistence on no extensions the game is still open.

I agree that nothing about the current situation is ideal. These changes won't take us from a good situation to a bad one, it will just take us from a bad situation to another situation that's slightly differently bad.

I hope you're right that uBlock Origin can get people to switch from Chrome to Firefox on mobile... but proper Firefox has been on Android forever, yet Firefox's market share on mobile is pretty much non-existent. Why hasn't the "educate people about firefox + ublock" strategy worked there? Why do we think it would work better on iOS?

While this is a good question, It is not relevant to the point because Edge is still Chromium. So this still gives Google the dominant place it wants to take and monopoly on web standards.

You don't fix it by cementing a monopoly either.

> The solution here is to do what we did in the early 2000s, and educate people about firefox + ublock.

This was a much smaller tech-enabled population, and even that was moving mountains. I'm not saying it can't be done but it's important to recognize it's a very uphill battle since Chrome is not a bad browser and IE was.

This isn't even remotely the same game here.

Arguably they're already doing that. There's a shockingly high number of times that I click on something in Windows and it opens up Edge instead of Firefox, my default browser. Even Apple manages to respect my default browser on macOS.

Whatever one might think about Chrome on desktop, fact are that 1 - people install it on purpose, because they want to, not because they're forced, and 2 - it's supremely easy to replace, which is why google tries hard to tie itself into more (password manager obviously, but chrome apps at one point).

Chrome is open to competition, it's just that this competition is as much marketing and mind share as it is tech merit. What Edge and Safari are doing or trying to do is not open to competition.

(this does not mean chrome should not be reigned it, I believe it should)

But regarding ios, at this point this is just speculation. Safari has the "default browser" advantage and people are used to it.

How much of an effect it will have remains to be seen. But Google has shown themselves quite good at overcoming the default browser advantage by making other browsers not work well on Google websites and by pushing pop-ups into people's faces telling them to "upgrade" their browser to Chrome.

Yes. Both the real browser engines in Chromium and Firefox are starting from absolute zero on iOS, and Chrome will certainly be much higher than Firefox.

I want to get a native Firefox iOS version if it means that I can get uBlock Origin on it. If I could get it on Mobile Safari, then I'd have basically no reason to download Firefox. But no, they'd rather not have me use it on desktop or mobile, since no version of Safari supports proper adblocking.

It's also a good time to remind people that the reason why you can't get a proper version of Firefox from the walled garden is because Apple explicitly doesn't allow Firefox to release it there. The walled garden very much prevents you from leaving it, and unwanted developers like Mozilla from entering it.

It has laughably low market share.

Browser market share has very little to do with the quality of the browser after a certain point. Safari is a pretty good browser, but it has a decent market share due to Apple's policies. Google Chrome is a pretty good browser, but it has crazy market share because everyone uses Google services for everything and Google pushes Chrome incredibly hard, to the point of intentionally breaking their websites and/or arbitrarily disabling certain features in non-Chrome browsers.

Browsers don't really compete on their merits.

FWIW, I'm also looking forward to having proper Firefox on my phone.

But there are significant factors outside of merit which influence popularity.

But there are significant factors outside of merit which influence popularity.