Safari 9.1

an even simpler answer would be because it is the default browser..

It's also well integrated – Preview, the keychain, reading list, twitter links make for an excellent ecosystem.

I'd love a Safari with a Chromium rendering engine, though. Except that Webkit is probably quite important to keep Chrome moving as fast as it does.

I am agreeing with this. The difference of using safari vs chrome can make the difference of a few hours more battery.

Here's an example: I just started chrome to read some articles here on HN and it already bypassed my email client in battery usage that was running for for a good bit longer.

Even worse is that a lot of apps nowadays decide to ship their own chromium in form of electron. Slack, Nylas, Atom - it's a battery disaster and makes these tools virtually unusable when I'm not plugged in.

Of course, if the laptop contained a proper fan then it wouldn't have been an issue in the first place.

Yeah plus the integration (on Apple devices only, but hey) is superb.

I quite often use the automatic feature on my iPhone "open what you are reading in safari on the Mac Pro on your phone".

Then I leave work, commute home reading that, and then my Mac at home senses what's open in my phone's Safari and it's one click to open it on the big screen.

Safari is actually a pretty great browser, too. Faster than any other for me, more stable, less battery drain on laptops.

I still use Chrome and Firefox all day long too, but mainly for specific development chores, or to stay logged into services with my work account, while Safari is logged into my personal account.

Safari is, IMO, pretty great!

With the caveat that it's basically only on iOS and OS X.

I disagree – Chrome is the new IE. Why? It's simple: your analogy focuses on being non-standard, but actually misses the most important bit which is control of the market. Chrome is just as much non-standard as Safari, but you wouldn't know because it controls the market. Since ostensibly everyone uses Chrome, it gets to effectively dictate the standards while everyone else plays catch up – Chrome is the de facto standard to which others are held.

I'm not saying Chrome is a bad piece of software – it may or may not be but that's beside the point. What I'm saying is that when you and many others complain about browsers not being standards compliant, I'm willing to bet you mean de facto standards compliant – i.e. whatever Chrome dictates. Just like IE used to.

IE came up with all sorts of features that became de facto standards and in many cases these days an actual standard – @font-face anyone? Microsoft strong armed everyone else into submission until Google decided enough was enough. But it's not like Google did it out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because their business depended on people having the ability to consume the web. They need the web to be great, because otherwise they couldn't have sold so many ads on: the web. So their products need features, and it just so happens that a lot of us got to benefit as well. Compatibility however, isn't really important. At least not while they control the market. What they say, goes. It'd be very difficult to create a site these days that won't work on Chrome, but it's not uncommon that you find disclaimers around the web say "optimized for Chrome" or worse: sites just not working at all on anything but Chrome.

Now they have done, and continue to do a lot to advance the state of the art. But so did IE back in the day. At least until the competition died out.

I for one am glad Safari is weird – I only wish there were more weirdos.

Or remain the only browser (at least rendering engine) on iOS…

I think it will remain relevant anyway as long as people keep using it.

Great. But as an end user I "utterly" hate the Chrome/Firefox model of endless updates.

Relevant for "on the ground web devs", which is a very small market.

Safari will remain relevant for a long time as long as it is the default browser on OS X and iOS.

I prefer Safari and don't care much for 6-week release cycle for Chrome and Firefox. If anything, they've gotten worse in stability since they switched to 6 weeks cycle for me.

Please no.

I really love Safari for being just a really good browser. No 'sneaky OS' like Chrome (I don't need Chromes User management, thank you, and I'd much rather have my OS's context menus and font aliasing), and speedier, if you will, 'snappier' than Firefox, with its custom animations for every button and overall not very 'native' look and feel.

No, I want a browser that does what a browser should do; let me easily and speedily browse the web. Safari is great at that.

Modals alerts acting 'app-wide' rather than 'tab-wide' is a truly horrible thing. If there was a subtle indication of a tab showing a modal then it would be acceptable but this is better than the current state-of-affairs.

It's probably so that people can close tabs that are spamming alerts.

> no longer activates the calling tab

Not much of an alert, is it.

Nope, but it's "In Development" [1]

[1] https://webkit.org/status/#specification-webrtc

Is this a common bug? Were you seeing it in some kind of developer release, perhaps? I've never had that happen to me, and I browse Youtube in Safari every single day.

Is this the same bug where things randomly stop rendering properly if lots of tabs are open?

I find that I'm having to close a whole bunch of tabs in order to get pages to properly render. It'll work for a while then stop working again. Really quite annoying.

I wonder if it will break sites that assume window.gestureStart => ios device

no it's a new standard. Chrome and IE already support it on Google Maps because a pinch to zoom is ctrl+mousekey for them. And now Safari has introduced a new standard. This is nuts. Why is there a W3C? Everybody is doing it differently.

It is in development:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142913

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=143211

only a few days after I discovered that a simple /etc/hosts entry fixes this problem...

But due to the nature of closed iOS, Chrome on iOS uses the same engine as Safari...