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Comment by _joel | Hacker News Reader

I'm not aware of any links that force open in Safari?

Go to the Finder and choose "See What's New in macOS" from the help menu. Always opens in Safari regardless of what the default browser is.

Confirmed. On my mac it opens https://help.apple.com/macos/big-sur/whats-new/ in Safari.

a recent macos installation fresh configuration does try to steer you towards using safari several times with popups and reminders.

Steering and forcing are two different things

On iOS, all links open in Safari because Apple doesn't allow any other browser. The "alternatives" are just wrappers.

So Apple is actually worse than Microsoft.

Third party browsers on iOS use the same web engine as Safari (WebKit) but critically, do not wrap Safari itself. In principle third party iOS browsers are no more wrappers of Safari than fully independent desktop Linux browsers built with WebKit like Epiphany/GNOME Web and Midori.

The various Chromium based browsers are much closer to being Chrome wrappers than, say, Firefox for iOS is a Safari wrapper because the latter has totally unique code for UI, interactions, password management, etc whereas the former is literally just Chromium with a few surface level changes.

Apple could stand to allow third party web engines either way (perhaps with strict performance requirements, to not destroy user batteries), but I think the distinction matters.

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