Intel becomes the first to offer full AV1 support with its new Arc GPUs

The short version is that Apple overly focused on monetising their app store and doing everything conceivable they could get away with to push people towards it.

If you wanted to release an app for iOS users you needed to purchase Apple hardware, and a yearly subscription just to start developing an app. Then to release the app you had to follow Apple's rules which allowed them to take a 30% cut of all profits generated with your app. If Apple really liked your app, they could just make their own version and kick yours off the app store without recourse so they could keep the other 70% of the profits.

Meanwhile, users and developers could skirt around the app store by using Safari. This represented a direct threat to the largest revenue generating model that Apple had ever created. Apple needed to make sure that their ad campaign: "There's an app for that" always held true.

So Apple did what it could to indirectly reduce the effectiveness of Safari, keeping it behind what other browsers could do. They even made it impossible for other browsers to be installed on their devices by adding rules to the app store that mandated that all web apps had to be powered by Safari's web view. In essence, all "web browsers" on iOS are just reskins of Safari, warts and all.

Eventually this culminated in an article that basically became a lightning rod for developer's dealing with Apple's anti-competitive behaviour: https://nolanlawson.com/2015/06/30/safari-is-the-new-ie/

The title of the article turned into a common saying amongst web developers, an accurate and concise summary of what was (and mostly still is) seen as a cancer on the industry: "Safari is the new IE".

Apple consistently kept their browser years behind competing browsers, either holding back features, bringing out features that didn't address problems developers needed fixed, or bringing out features that were "broken as intended".

This continued until their anticompetitive behaviour ended up the subject of several lawsuits. Apple's lawyers were traditionally able to bat away the many smaller claims levied against them until Epic could pay for enough lawyer's against Apple to try and make a dent.

Regardless of the legal outcome of the lawsuit, it wound up shining a spotlight for several governments to pay more attention to their fair competition laws.

You can see some recent news about this here: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/25/eu-provisionally-agrees...

Now Apple is worried about losing their App Store monopoly on their own devices and has put a renewed focus on their web browser to try and keep people using their own products.

Until about 2 years ago, Apple had been content to keep Safari consistently years behind competing browsers. Since then they have accelerated their development, trying to catch up with their betters.