remember internet explorer?
I remember reading an article in .net magazine (now apparently defunct) about IE6 and how it was holding back the web. This sort of thing has been going on for ages the problem isn’t crap browsers the problem is crap browsers being dominant. Equally dominant browsers aren’t a problem unless they’re also bad.
So I’m not really all that bothered about Chrome, it’s fairly feature complete and although there are other reasons to not like it, lack of support for the latest standards isn’t one of them. Safari however has been truly awful for a very very long time now. They’ve been memes about how bad it is for well over a decade.
chrome can use their dominant market position to kill all other competing browsers, then they can use their monopoly to kill addons and extensions they don’t like, slow down or break webpages which go against their interests, and so on.
google having a near-complete monopoly on the web scares me more than most issues in tech
You can’t datamine everyone and sell it off as completely as you can with an app running locally on the device. Browser apps are far less profitable across the board. It’s all about money.
They want you to use “apps” even if said “apps” don’t need to be more than a website
Been happily using Firefox and Firefox focus on Android for years. With unlock Origin on Firefox.
Libre wolf version is underway too!
Ironfox is the hardened FF/mobile librewolf
Recently moved to fennec, is ironfox better?
Yes, fennec is nowhere near as hardened/privacy/security focused
Thanks! I will swit h to ironfox.
Oh, I didn’t realize this was posted earlier. Thumbnail gave the wrong impression.
Only in that they are both particularly anti-competitive. Mobile Safari is, whatever all others may say, far better than chrome, and it’s a pretty awesome browser.
But it does have some limitations to it that a very vocal minority absolutely hates. And that’s fair, but let’s get real about what is “holding back” other browsers: market share in monopoly.
From a web developer’s standpoint, Safari is basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It’s not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it’s definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn’t care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
Literally, none of this is true. Just because you don’t like Safari doesn’t mean you need to lie about it.
Does it still do that thing where it claims to support a feature but then when you actually try and use it it turns out that it doesn’t work? I remember ut used to have a problem with masonry layouts, where it claimed to support them but if you actually used it, it just ignored you and used floats of all things for everything instead.
Safari definitely gets more hate than it deserves. I find it to be perfectly acceptable.
I would prefer more competition though, even though I know today it’ll be a ton of “cram some AI into it” slop.
Personally, I find Safari to be a goddamn amazing browser, especially considering a lot of its features. People here, the free and open source folk, absolutely hate it on the sole purpose that it is owned by a corporation. And, although it does share user data, anonymize’s that data to a great degree, and also prevents fingerprinting. Also, Apple does not sell it data that it collects, they only use it for internal purposes.
I find no problem with that. I think another huge issue is the difficulty in writing Safari extensions – – especially, that you have to pay for access to the developer store (although they may have changed that for Safari ext devs).
I’m a user experience, designer, so whenever gives the best experience to the end user is, obviously, the correct choice. There’s only so much the “experts” get to have a say in how any random individual uses the tools at the disposal.
That said, I absolutely love Safari as a web browser, but I definitely understand how a lot of people do not.
I hate Safari not because it’s owned by Apple, but because it makes my life more difficult when doing web development. It’s basically the modern Internet Explorer, though admittedly less extreme. It’s not rare for it to be the last of the major browsers to implement new standards/features, and it’s definitely the most common one to have an incomplete and/or buggy implementation. This sometimes goes on for years when Apple just doesn’t care about a feature. There are some fairly widely-used standards today that it still has a buggy/incomplete implementation of.
Literally, none of that is true. Your heat has made you unreasonable. I don’t have time for unreasonable people.
Regarding extensions, my understanding is that Apple makes it hard to prevent a bunch of trash extensions showing up that don’t do anything worthwhile.
Orion browser, created by the folks at Kagi, allows both Chrome and Firefox extensions. It’s way better than it was a few years ago, but still has some rough edges. Better than normal safari at least!
I have no idea exactly what that means.
But Apple provides extensions for most functionalities, but, as you mentioned, they’re more limited because Apple used to require that extension developers register a $100 per year account in order to develop extensions.
They don’t do this anymore, but it was a big reason why Safari got held back, especially in the beginning of the browser wars.
I get your point that it’s not specifically Chrome or specifically Safari that are holding other browsers back, but Apple and Google own the vast majority of market share in mobile devices and by extension, browsers used in mobile devices. I think that’s the crux of what the investigation is getting at
Although I may not have been as effective as seeing it, that’s pretty much what I was trying to say. Thank you, I suppose, for putting it into more understandable and relatable terms.
