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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

If Firefox dies, the open web dies. It's that simple. For the open web to remain open, there needs to be at least one more truly independent source of authority regarding how a rendering engine should work. Everyone else has thrown in the towel and abdicated that authority to Google by embedding Blink.

Google is either actively malicious to the open web, or doesn't care about it other than as something they can strip-mine as a revenue source. They sufficiently diversified into mobile and Android that the death of the open web would be but a blip to them.

IMO, Firefox should consciously be that alternate source of authority. How they accomplish that organisationally is irrelevant, what is relevant that their browser as a whole is competitive and focused enough that it stops haemorrhaging market share, and can start to slowly rebuild it as people look for a way out of Google's ecosystem.

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That is a reason why the world should want it to exist, but it isn't a reason why anyone individual would consider it better than Chrome.

Firefox used to at least directly target segments of the population with its more comprehensive developer platform, but they have slowly been tearing that out for many years and now Chrome is converging to the same place.

At best I would say "the reason for Firefox to exist is because we need it to exist" argues we would have to prop it up using some kind of government intervention--to deal with the "it is at least slightly worse for every given user"--but the problem is we need people to actually use it, not for it to merely continue to be developed, and "require some random percentage of people to draw lots and be forced to use Firefox" is probably a dystopia for other reasons.

Why does everyone always forget about Safari in these discussions? Safari has a respectable marketshare on mobile / tablets. Not as good on desktop but it’s not a lost cause.

Probably because you can only use Safari on Apple products.

"Apple" and "open" don't belong in the same sentence.

It's not a relevant browser. The last time I have seen Safari installed on a Windows machine was likely 2013-14, if not earlier. It doesn't have an Android version (which makes it less relevant on smartphones). It doesn't support Linux, which lots of the power user/tech trailblazer crowd is using. It's not open source, unlike Firefox or Chromium. It lags in features (which to be fair, isn't bad when they impact privacy).

I don't think there's a good case to be made for Safari outside of Apple devices.

I think the other thing that makes it less relevant is that Safari is using WebKit and at this point its just a WebKit derivative. Part of the value that Firefox provides for better or worse is alternate components that force things to actually try and meet standards.

That's because there hasn't been a Safari for Windows in over a decade :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)

Those things don't matter. Just by existing Safari is making sure web developers can't solely focus on Chromium. If we disregard mobile, Safari still has more marketshare on desktop than Firefox.

> Apple's offering, Safari, currently holds 18.34% of the internet browser market, with an estimated 844 million people using it in 2021. Safari also makes up 23.78% of all mobile device browsers worldwide, which is high considering Apple holds 26.35% of the mobile vendor market. https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share

Those numbers seem relevant to me.

A lot of people use it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Installed_base

I mean nobody super exciting, but Steam uses it for their software, Adobe CSS uses some of it, etc.

It's more than an Apple thing.

[Edit]: Sorry, nobody outside Apple uses Safari, but a lot of people outside of Apple use WebKit, Safari's engine.

Steam uses CEF aka *Chromium* Embedded Framework. If the current version is still WebKit then its only because they haven't updated to Blink yet.

It is also primarily there to render Steam and steampowered.com so not very relevant to keeping web standards in check.

I've never seen Safari on an Android or Windows device. I would imagine this is on the list of things that is technically possible, but not a real world use case.

So that's why.

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