[gracenotes]

I have been a little mad at Safari while building a website recently (https://windmill.thefifthmatt.com), and the issues I ran into seemed like Safari's "fault"—it does not implement several web features such as requestPointerLock which Chrome and Firefox implement, so I had to jerry-rig worse experiences for Safari users. I had to neuter a Content-Security-Policy header because Safari refused to render a font no matter what font-src was... still have not figured that one out. Mobile browsers are similar here, although I have not tried out Safari remote debugging (only Chrome remote debugging).

Obviously both browsers are developed by highly talented software engineers (disclaimer: biased Google employee here, not in Chrome, speaking for self). But I think type of website and upfront ecosystem investment have some effect on where the most development pain comes from. My naive guess is that rich content consumption sites are easier to do in Safari, more app-like long-tail-of-features stuff easier in Chrome. If this is true, why? My guess is that Apple has its own idea of which general-purpose platform it'd prefer to most invest in.