[alpacaillama]

Interesting to note that the author never mentions one of the biggest criticisms of the Chromium project. That they keep adding so many APIs that other browser vendors are forced to follow them instead of what they want to work on. This has been less apparent on mobile because Safari has a large share but not on desktop. The chromium team is known to build things that the standards body doesn't agree on, ship it, and every other vendor is forced to support it because of Chrome's huge marketshare on desktop otherwise their browser will appear "broken". They're angry that they can't do this on mobile.

[rsj_hn]

It's not just about safari not adding support for new APIs, but intentionally breaking old APIs. A lot of websites that used to work on safari no longer work, due to their war on tracking and advertising.

Say you are in myCity.gov and you have a website that loads dashboards. These dashboards are iframes that come from anotherDomain.gov, thirdDomain.gov. Well, in Safari they're not going to load because iframes no longer send cookies back to their parent origin unless the iframes are a subdomain of the parent domain. They just broke a thirty year old web standard. That's a massive breaking change introduced by Safari, that makes many corporate intranets and cloud-based delivery sites not load properly in safari. And has nothing to do with not supporting a new vibration API. This is basic old school web semantics that Safari has been breaking right and left because they can't conceive of the internet as anything other than a content-marketing platform.

The web is now used for pretty much everything, and large swathes of it don't load properly on Safari. They don't care, because people mostly use Chrome on the desktop and Safari on their phones, and people have come to expect apps for the content delivery on phones. But this drives the bifurcation further, and solidifies the chrome-only nature of many websites because they are not going to remap their domains to something Safari will approve of in order to get iframes to load properly.

[HenrikJoreteg]

Then by all means, don't use it.

The point is that Apple's policies don't allow other browsers to actually compete on their platform. So users don't get to make the choice. All browsers on iOS have to be WebKit based by explicit policy that's the issue at hand.

It sounds like you like the default choice, and that's great for you. But if it's truly better, they shouldn't be scared to allow users to make a difference choice for themselves, no?

[chrisandchris]

I think it‘s less about being truly better and more about who defines the standard.

If Chrom(ium) is going to win on Mobile, Google will basically dictate the W3C and that will end very badly. Id already ended very bad once, when IE was „The Standard“.

[K0nserv]

I agree with this analysis. I just wrote a comment in an a different thread(which links to a Twitter thread I wrote in response to the OP)[0] about it. Chromium becoming even more dominant on the web cannot be a good thing. It means handing over too much power over the web to a company, Google, that is not aligned with the interest of the open web.

Apple's tight control over browser engines on iOS seems like the lesser of two evils to me. My impression is also that Apple and Mozilla have been actings as checks on Google in W3C and other standardisation bodies e.g. John Wilander[1] from Apple/Webkit.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27024457

1: https://twitter.com/johnwilander