[atonse]

I agree on principle. Many of us still have emotional baggage from the days of 95% IE market share, where the web really, REALLY sucked.

But nowadays, I see it as, multiple companies have a vested financial interest (including MS with their new leadership) to ensure that browsers are very powerful.

Even Apple, with iOS 8 has enabled 3rd party devs to have a full speed browser now with a JIT'd JS engine. They are simply not doing this from a position of weakness. There are no market forces. There's nobody out there saying "I won't use iOS because it only has Safari." Yet they still did it.

Your mobile platform won't succeed today unless it has a powerful browser built in, apps or not.

[pornel]

> There's nobody out there saying "I won't use iOS because it only has Safari."

FWIW, I said it and did it.

I didn't like Safari, and I couldn't change the default browser to anything better. Even worse, most 3rd party apps used their own utter-crap in-app browsers instead.

So I switched to Android where I have freedom to set my preferred default browser, and 3rd party apps actually respect that.

I do agree with the rest of your comment — these days you can't have a platform without a great browser.

[wycats]

> FWIW, I said it and did it.

Same.