[jabbany]

There's nothing wrong with the browser being the next generation cross-platform execution environment. All the older options for this (Java, Flash etc.) sucked...

I would like to see a strong competitor to Chrome someday though... - Firefox still has weird issues occasionally (most recently scroll position randomly jumping sometimes). I still keep it around though because its sane when it comes to standards and will remain sane even if things like HW acceleration are not available. - Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform (might as well be IE6) - Chromium and derivatives aren't distinct enough from Chrome and a lot of the new ones have weird cryptocurrency integrations that just don't feel right. - Is Opera still alive?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform (might as well be IE6)

It's a bit funny, and a bit sad, that this wasn't always so; I rather liked the Windows version of Safari, and IE for UNIX was apparently pretty good.

[jabbany]

Yeah.

I don't miss doing web dev in the Win XP days when one had to test everything on IE, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, etc. but at least there were options back then and things legit ran with different HTML and JS engines.

Now it's just Chrome/Chromium and Firefox representing cross-platform browsers, and most other things are platform specific WebKit mods or Chromium reskins...

[Turing_Machine]

> Safari is out of the question as it is not even cross-platform

At the moment. Apple has a fairly long history of keeping cross-platform ports alive even if they aren't publicly available (that's why the transitions from 68K->PowerPC->Intel->Apple Silicon have been relatively smooth).

I would bet that Apple could roll out a cross-platform Safari in fairly short order, should the powers that be decide that it makes business sense.

[jabbany]

But they have not, so "Apple has a fairly long history of keeping cross-platform ports alive even if they aren't publicly available" means a load of nothing at the moment.

I get that Apple are not trying to make a Chrome/Chromium competitor because it is not worth it for them and in that they have succeeded --- Safari is indeed not a competitor to Chrome/Chromium... So... good job?

[pndy]

I doubt there's any Windows version developed at Apple even in secrecy; they definitely abandon that operating system and decided focusing on their own macOS and features it comes with and their cloud services is the only way. While they do support iCloud on Windows to some extent, there's no support on Linux nor under Android. At least no official one that's done in super-easy way.

[Someone]

> Apple has a fairly long history of keeping cross-platform ports alive even if they aren't publicly available (that's why the transitions from 68K->PowerPC->Intel->Apple Silicon have been relatively smooth)

I don’t fully follow that logic. There never was a cross-platform Mac OS until PowerPC. The 68k to PowerPC transition had the first PowerPC version running most of the OS in emulation, and an incredible hack (in the good sense) to allow 68k code call PowerPC code and vice versa for all the different calling conventions that the 68k version of the OS used.

I think the later transitions only worked because they had moved to the Unix-based Mac OS X before that, ditching lots of assembly code. It’s Unix that’s portable.

For both PowerPC to Intel and Intel to Apple Silicon I guess it also helped that they already had code for lots of time-critical parts of the OS. For the first, they had Intel code in QuickTime for Windows, for the second, ARM code in iOS.