[Reinmar]

Amazing read! Very insightful and open at the same time. I've literally highlighted every other sentence in it. Thank you, Ferdy!

I basically went through the same thinking process myself. I'm a moderate idealist and would like Firefox to succeed because it's important for the web that there's no monopoly. However, my realist soul tells me that Firefox is losing badly and it's hard to tell where it's going to end. It's a pity that Microsoft didn't choose Gecko – I wonder if they even seriously considered it.

With Microsoft joining Chromium, we're slowly entering a duopoly of WebKit and Chromium. It's still a much better situation than the dark IE6 times. However, it's hard to tell whether WebKit (AFAIU, supported mainly by Apple and Samsung) will keep up with Chromium (Google and Microsoft) in a long term. I'm afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the parties will invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not being able to afford that many developers). Such economical wars make developers happy, because the web progresses very fast, but I think it actually leads to a monopoly.

Anyway, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed for Gecko. They do a great job there and perhaps will be able to partner with a big enough company to keep its pace and market share.

[bergie]

> I'm afraid that it will look like a Cold War's arms race – one of the parties will invest so much that the other will just lose economically (not being able to afford that many developers).

Given all the "Safari is the new IE6" posts that have been here over the past few years, that seems to be already happening.

Apple is lagging behind quite a bit with implementing newer web standards, especially in areas where they have anticompetitive interest in doing so (PWAs cannibalising native apps). Of course, they're the only game in town on iOS, so that ensures them some captive market.

[Reinmar]

I'm not sure how long they can keep doing so. At what point it may affect iOS's reception in general?

From my own experience, making the app I'm working on (CKEditor 5 - a web based rich-text editor) compatible with mobile Safari is right now impossible. None of the RTEs work well in mobile Safari because of its quirks and bugs.

If Apple will overdo this (just like Microsoft did with IE6), that may affect iOS's usefulness. Sure, right now you can't build a business without your presence there, but there may be a breaking point. It's hard to imagine and I kinda doubt it will happen (I rather agree with the author of this article that Apple will invest enough to keep Safari alive), but it's a possibility. Microsoft screwed it up once, so can Apple.

[wvenable]

If you care about iOS, you don't build a web application you build a native one (perhaps using web technologies). This ultimately benefits users and Apple so there is no incentive to improve this.

[pxtail]

Probably they are doing it on purpose, cripling web-based apps/PWA experience forces user to install app from AppStore.