Just kidding. Mostly. Lots of little fiddly text editing patches for Google Docs, which doesn’t surprise me. It’s, I would assume, the most-used application suite on the web, and there’s going to be weird edge cases that pop up around rich text editing that get magnified by the sheer number of users. Including probably inside Apple.
Users can still install Chrome on a Macintosh. Apple's larger concern is probably whether they'll lose hardware share if, say, Reddit doesn't load right on MacBooks (you'd be surprised how many people buy an expensive machine as basically an internet appliance) or, more importantly: iPhones.
Apple has had record Mac sales for the past two years, since the release of Apple Silicon.
There’s no way wether or not any one particular website renders as expected is going to meaningfully impact Mac or iPhone sales.
Sure, Apple would prefer that users stick with Safari but they’re not going to lose any sleep if customers use Chrome/Firefox/Edge or whatever else on a new $2499 MacBook Pro.
It’s certainly way more in Reddit’s or other big web property best interest to perform well for Safari users, especially on iPhones and iPads where all browsers use WebKit as their rendering engine.
It's not just about being the default browser, they're the only browser with no user choice to switch or manually upgrade or downgrade independent of the OS.
Clarification, not to disagree or to minimize, but in case this gives the wrong impression to anyone who doesn’t know: only on iDevices. macOS has no restrictions specific to browser engines.
Just kidding. Mostly. Lots of little fiddly text editing patches for Google Docs, which doesn’t surprise me. It’s, I would assume, the most-used application suite on the web, and there’s going to be weird edge cases that pop up around rich text editing that get magnified by the sheer number of users. Including probably inside Apple.