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by mrtksn 1460 days ago
Resisting web standards is alright, if people make standards compliant websites it will simply mean that Safari users will miss out some stuff.

The problem starts when you implement alternative standards and you have a market share to make people code for your standard. In this situation, your users don't suffer but everyone else suffer, that's what I call villain.

Check Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Exterminate strategy. This is the evil thing, making browser that doesn't adopt some web standards is not evil.

1 comments

The market forces work the other way. If Safari can't do something, like say if it can't work with webgl 2.0 until four and a half years after every other major browser adds support, devs will avoid using it and middleware will have to maintain support for webgl 1.0 longer. This slows down adoption of web standards and affects everyone.

The only property that benefits from dragging your heels on webgl 2.0 adoption is the App Store, which could see its influence and revenue easily be cannibalized by progressive web apps using modern gpu rendering. And would you look at that, those are exactly the two web standards Safari has dragged its heels on.

Sure, it will have an effect but Apple's market share is tiny. If there was something great to be done with the stuff that Apple is dragging their feet to implement, we would have it on other platforms and Apple will actually be forced to act on it.
There's many ways to measure market share and when you look at monetizable users, Apple platforms have an outsized amount of big spenders compares to Android or web platforms. As I already said, this gives them considerable influence in what does and doesn't get adopted by developers. This is the opposite of how you claim it works.

We're going to have to agree to disagree because your argument you've made twice now without adaptation is a bit absurd. If Safari doesn't implement it it must not be important? I am now conscious of my original comment being inexplicably downvoted and I'm worried I might be banging my head against Apple fanboys instead of having a discussion about corporate influence over web standards. There is considerable evidence for this and I've given it in this thread.