[chowells]

The article is about how Apple is underdelivering in browser features and compatibility while pretending they aren't. It's about Apple. Apple. The ones responsible for a great many features not being supported in all browsers.

What does a web dev have to do with Apple's choice? How do you improve Safari by not using features it doesn't support? What does your comment have to do with the argument the article is making?

[tgv]

> What does a web dev have to do with Apple's choice?

From the article:

> But how much relief should long-suffering web developers expect? ... Web developers wouldn't have cause ... influential developers like Jeremy ... That chasm is instrumental in trapping users and developers ... That's to say nothing of the heavily requested features no developer can use on iOS

> What does your comment have to do with the argument the article is making?

The article isn't very honest, IMO. There's no need for Safari to adopt all those changes. Almost none is an improvement for the user, and certainly not for users with older browsers (there are quite a few of those, and telling them to upgrade is basically telling them GTFO).

And the author is heavily involved in Blink/Chrome/Edge. There's a section devoted to it, where he blasts nonsense such as "Chromium and Blink are explicitly organised to make and defend space for leadership, but our ability to lead in new areas is tied to quality." No, they are explicity organized to allow Google to stay dominant. It is not in the interest of the user. It is actively working against the user. Complaining about Safari only serves Google's ad kingdom.

[chowells]

Yeah... I've got a whole lot of experience with "you can't do this thing the obvious easy way because iOS is too important." This isn't about fantasies of Apple being your savior. This is about HTML and CSS that Apple has decided not to support.

I don't believe it's possible to work in web dev and not run into this. It's a constant annoyance that semantic markup and declarative layout just have entire swaths of features unsupported on a garbage browser that you can't even say is unsupported because it's the only option on iphones. If it was up to me I'd just tell iPhone users that's what they chose. But businesses don't get to be as petty as I get to. And that's ultimately the point here. Apple is using their market dominance to force working around their poor support of standards on everyone else. They should be shamed for this shameful behavior.

[slightlyoff]

Article's author here. Arguments about "older browsers" are specious, particularly on iOS where Apple couples the browser engine to the OS, and forces all browsers to use Apple's binary.

If there is a legacy browser problem today, it is entirely within Cupertino's gift to address. Everyone else already moved to out-of-band, decoupled autoupdates. Even ChromeOS is dramatically more up-to-date fleet-wide.

[tgv]

There are quite a lot of people out there with older browsers. You probably never meet them. I work for a company that gets processes 700k well distributed surveys per year, and there's always a bunch of old Chrome versions. Probably because it's "SamsungBrowser". That doesn't upgrade so easily. There are also people using third party browsers for points: you do a task, you get points. It's totally unclear when those get updated. Last month, there is an entry for Chrome 103 running on some old version of CrOS. I also see the occasional PlayStation browser, and other uncommon devices. And then we're talking Western Europe. The situation in e.g. Slovenia and Chile, where we also occasionally collect data, is different, probably a money issue.

And I wish you wouldn't update Edge so aggressively. Only last month, it turned out that Edge on Android refuses to play a video if it's under 5 seconds.

BTW, Apple does update the browser on older OS versions.

[slightlyoff]

I'm well aware of the data on residual browsers; we have better metrics on the browser side than most public data sets. I also track the high/mid/low device mix, and we see that users on low-spec machines are generally less up-to-date:

https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-...

This makes intuitive sense because those users are more likely to be out of disk space or bandwidth limited by geography or metering.

Regardless, while this issue is pronounced in the Android and Windows ecosystems, it's in a dramatically better place than it was in, e.g., the late Naughts when we had to build exotic solutions like Chrome Frame to address stagnation and fragmentation. So I'm not ignoring the issue, but again, to the extent we're discussing platforms that Apple has influence over, the ball is squarely in Cupertino's court. Every iPhone running an unsupported OS could be getting an updated browser, but Apple chooses not to make one or allow anyone else to plug the gap.

[fmajid]

And since outside the EU, all alternative browsers on iOS/iPadOS are just rebadged Safari, this degrades the Web on those platforms. Not entirely coincidentally, Apple has a strong incentive to encourage native apps over web ones.

[qingcharles]

Exactly. It's fine that Apple don't fix Safari on Mac OS where you can run anything else, but on the mobile OSes you are cooked.