[dagmx]

Depends how you slice it.

Chrome is today’s Internet Explorer both in terms of market share, and use of non standard features to push a companies dominance.

Safari is today’s Internet explorer in terms of being bundled with systems as a requirement.

Ultimately, these analogies trivialize the actual state of the browser ecosystem in the 90s and early 2000s, because the computing landscape was so different.

[godzillabrennus]

Chrome manifest v3 feels like Google bundled a browser with spyware. Safari feels like they bundled a browser with an operating system.

[talldayo]

Sure would be funny if those operating systems were spyware too. But definitely not. Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL And Apple all care about our privacy too much: https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/06/google-facebook-apple-deny...

[dagmx]

The claim there was never about the OS being spyware though so that link feels like a stretch even then.

It’s always been about server and infrastructure access. But beyond that, the Prism leaks mostly applied to telecoms.

A lot of conspiracy minded folks failed to see the forest for the trees because they failed to grok the entire infrastructure between the device in their homes and the greater world.

It’s much easier to think the device in your hand is betraying oneself than to think about the immense number of other components like telecoms, servers, MitM etc that comprise modern communication.

[talldayo]

Well duh. Apple admits as much in China, of course they do that in the US too: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111754

But those are parlor tricks. Yes, the United States forces Apple and Microsoft to turn over data on a regular basis; everyone from India to Brazil demands the same thing. It's non-unique. The United States and it's FIVE-EYES partners clearly have more capabilities on the table; they literally control these businesses, up to a certain point. If you're unwilling to acquit telecoms and server providers for installing backdoors, then it's a no-brainer to implicate Microsoft, Google and Apple for knowledgeably shipping compromised client software too.

[oceanstone]

Safari is today's Internet Explorer in terms of holding the web back.

[chrisandchris]

That's somewhat true, but the only other relevant browser is treating the internet like it owns it.

I'm sure it's wrong to "hold the web back", but I'm also afraid of when Google finally takes over the internet. Because those "don't be evil"-days are in the past.

[dagmx]

Safari today has very good support for ratified web standards though. Looking through caniuse, the browsers are roughly equivalent with variances between them.

[frizlab]

Most if not all the web feature that are not supported in Safari are things I resolutely do NOT want in a browser though. Stuffing things in a browser is not good for anybody…

[talldayo]

> Stuffing things in a browser is not good for anybody…

Food for thought:

Have you ever considered that the demand for this functionality in the browser only exists because it is forbidden natively? I've got no use for cross-platform 3D APIs, game streaming functionality or even WebRTC in my browser when it comes down to it; but it makes plain sense that people want to push this functionality to the browser because Apple resists it natively. That's just supply/demand at work.

[frizlab]

I doubt that’s actually true (though maybe it is, I don’t know). Anyway 3D APIs are implemented in Webkit, as well as WebRTC and co and many other APIs.

I’m talking specifically about having access to the bluetooth stack, having access to the device’s vibrations, etc.

[threeseed]

Apple making a conscious choice to be cautious about including privacy/security harming features is not holding the web back. It's putting users first.

Chrome's reckless and indifferent approach of including every API under the sun is being used by advertisers today to track users through comprehensive browser fingerprinting.

[iamkonstantin]

One can also say it’s a duopoly of two suboptimal browsers (factoring all Chromium based browsers together).

Even though other options exist “technically”, users on the two (3?) popular mobile and desktop OS experience a great deal of platform friction when opting to make their own choice (if at all possible like on iOS).

[dagmx]

Not that I disagree on the duopoly part, but truthfully there’s only one third browser engine in play and that’s Gecko/Firefox.

Which, imho isn’t any more optimal than WebKit or Blink.

Granted, perhaps if the duopoly didn’t exist, it could get more resources. After all they did once dethrone IE6, but I think that was as much Microsoft’s blunder as it was Mozilla’s success. I’m not sure Apple or Google are making the same blunders today.

[iamkonstantin]

It is possible that I'm missing a bigger picture where Mozilla is pushing the envelope with Firefox.

We've crystalized around a specific role for each browser (e.g. Chromium brings in whatever webstandards it needs to pretend to be an OS, Safari tries to keep up while also sneaking Apple ecosystem facilities, Firefox... keeping up?) and there is no real innovation. Of course, we have better ways to not-block-ads, scrape user telemetry, or ai-whatever-that's-good-for... but nothing substantial towards improvements for the people using browsers.

The browser space is stagnating.

[Zak]

What platform friction to users experience installing a different browser on Android? I'm aware few users actually choose to do it, but I don't recall any resistance from the OS to installing Firefox, making it the default, and keeping it that way.