You’re talking as if the W3C or even Mozilla don’t exist. This isn’t an Apple vs Google thing. This is an Apple vs web standards thing. That’s why Safari is outdated for developers.
Don't get me wrong. I think WHATWG (Domenic et al, and Hixie before) worked very hard to bring HTML forward. And the idea to have a loose workshop of "browser vendors" agree on how to evolve browsers might've looked like a good one at the time. But is nevertheless not what standards are about, especially when it drives "browser vendors" out of business or out of producing browsers alltogether (such as Opera, Hixie's original employer, and even Microsoft).
Also, Mozilla lending credibility to such an effort hasn't helped Mozilla either when Firefox has fallen from its position as dominant and innovative browser to low 1-figure usage.
At a certain point years ago, work done on "web standards" has become a Google stealth ops to own the Web even more than they already do. As it stands, WHATWG will be remembered as the ones to have killed the Web, and oddly enough, Apple as the last ones standing in opposition to a web owned by Google. Certainly not webdevs caring about fscking PWAs and push notifications that absolutely nobody wants.
The article mentions explicitely: WebRTC, VP9, WebP, notifications, home screen icon shortcut, Local data storage, camera, microphone, USB port, and some more.
The only one in there that is not supported by w3c, as far as I know, is USB. All others are proper W3 standards yet unsupported by Apple WebKit/Safari.
Many of these complaints are about technologies that are fully standardized and supported by all other mayor browsers.
That doesn't contradict your point per se, but it basically feels to me like Google is dictating the standards right now. So I'm not sure Apple needs to play along.
It’s actually and Apple vs. APIs and technologies that allow fingerprinting on the web thing.
Nobody mentions that Mozilla has sided with Apple much of the time to not implement some of these same APIs and technologies.
Of course it isn’t. Apple had longstanding (years long) bugs with IndexedDB. Their PWA implementation has been buggy from day one. They don’t implement push because it threatens their native app ecosystem, not because of privacy concerns.
Yes, there are some APIs with privacy concerns. But that’s a small part of the story of Apple’s neglect.
It is not about privacy. It is about revenue.
If you follow some of the conversations on GitHub when a proposal comes up from Google, which I sometimes do, there’s no simple way to make some of these APIs private. And when Apple proposes ways to do so, Google balks at them because… their revenue is based on advertising that tracks users across the web. It’s not rocket science.
Remember, Google is the only company that ships a mainstream browser that doesn’t come with privacy settings by default. There’s no features in Chrome to block trackers or limit how 3rd party cookies are used unlike Safari, Firefox and Edge.
Apple’s market cap is around 2.5 trillion dollars; while they make revenue from apps, it’s a rounding error compared to their overall market cap or their iPhone revenue.
Not all of that $20B was profit, but based on what we know about the economics of running such stores, it was about $15B of profit. That is 25% of all of Apple's profit in 2020.
Apple will do anything to protect that income stream. If the way to protect it is to cripple the web, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
A sibling comment says:
> The article mentions explicitely: WebRTC, VP9, WebP, notifications, home screen icon shortcut, Local data storage, camera, microphone, USB port, and some more.
Some of these things enable (more) fingerprinting, but VP9 and WebP? Nah.
I have all kinds of Apple stuff--phones, laptops, accessories--but a lot of what they do is strategic in service of enlarging their profit margins (look at right to repair, for example). I don't necessarily blame them; capitalism is a race to the bottom here. But let's not cast Apple in this light of noble privacy defenders. They're doing that to make money too.
W3C nowadays only retifies standards that are in widespread use, and Firefox is no longer relevant in our browser matrix for deliveries, with a single digit usage.
The W3C doesn't exist, hasn't mattered for 15+ years, haven't you heard? It's not even the HTML WG that matters anymore (which took over from W3C in an ad-hoc way). It's basically Google, and that's that.
https://webapicontroversy.com/ and WebHID timeline: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1419436102373584905
There are countless other examples
And Apple are not obliged to have 100% feature parity with Chrome.
…hence why people complain about Apple’s neglect.
Even on desktop, Firefox is sliding towards irrelevancy, with just 7% market share.