Apple’s Safari browser now has more than 1B users | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s Safari browser now has more than 1B users

9to5mac.com

14 pointscarlycue16 comments

Not surprising with a supposed 1.8B active iOS devices and no way to run another browser engine. I haven't daily driven macOS in a few years... from when I last used Safari it was too minimalistic and the browser features lagged behind longer than I needed as a frontend dev.

On my personal MacBook I use Safari as a daily driver. It's mostly good, maybe once a week I use an exotic web app that I have to switch over to Firefox for, though for nontrivial web development I still use FF or Chromium because their tools are better

I'd rather use Safari than other browsers in my MacBook, but I can't use uBlock Origin so I use Firefox.

PS: I read the title as Safari now having more than 18 users and I thought it was a joke. :|

The desktop browser market share of Safari is 9.6%

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/03/microsoft-edge-surpasses-safa...

I've been getting a ton of use out of Safari 15 tab groups feature in the past year or so. It's quite powerful for wrangling the gargantuan numbers of windows and tabs that come with having myriad projects and curiosities running in parallel. Really great for adding a space for tabs that are too ephemeral to incur more bookmark management overhead but can't closed right away either.

For managing all my windows, tabs, and browsing journeys, I can't live without Session Buddy (chrome extension). Clean and simply UI, and nice features like search, merging sessions, export/import plain text or json, auto-saving sessions, etc. It's honestly one of my biggest barriers to switching to Firefox or Safari

I am mostly happy about iOS but damn, I really really want to run a real Firefox Nightly and all the lovely addons on my iPhone and iPad.

Unsurprising as to why Safari is second place. There is no way that Apple would allow another browser other than WebKit to drain the user's battery and instead force them to use only WebKit.

Also not surprising to see Firefox usage declining so gradually that even Samsung Internet is about to over take it.

Looks like these users are migrating to Chrome or Chrome-based browsers like Brave or Edge anyway.

They allow maps other than Apple Maps and chat apps other than iMessage to drain the user's battery, and those apps could be written in React Native, Flutter, or any other battery-draining non-native framework. That justification is specious.

At the time the argument was pretty sound as it relates to all apps using web views, not just browsers. Imagine how much worse the iOS experience would be if most developers used an off-the-shelf shoddy HTML rendering engine because it supported a single edge case feature they needed in their app.

>iOS experience would be if most developers used an off-the-shelf shoddy HTML rendering engine

That's exactly what we have now. Developers are forced by anti-competitive rules to use by far the most buggy browser available.

I've yet to talk to anyone who actually relies on Safari to deliver rich UIs not run into significant problems.

On average, things like map apps aren't used anywhere near as frequently as web browsers, especially if you include webviews in apps. The browser eating your battery for lunch has the potential of being device-ruining levels of bad.

For M-series Macs, this is somewhat mitigated by the sheer size of the batteries those have – even if Chrome docks your battery life by a few hours you're still looking at a full work day without having to plug in. That's a lot less true for phones, especially for smaller models like the iPhone SE and iPhone Mini, which can be taken from manageable to untenable by a frequently used battery hog.

A browser is more than just an app, it’s an application runtime that executes arbitrary code downloaded from the internet. It’s the closest thing iOS has to an unregulated open App Store, that happens to only run apps written in JavaScript. With native apps Apple has the opportunity to inspect and profile them before they hit the phone, and pull them if necessary, but not with web apps.

As such the only way Apple has to manage the power and compute consumption of such apps is through control of their runtime environment - the browser.

I’m not saying their policy is right or wrong, but that’s the argument.

You've hit the nail on the head. So many jailbreak exploits have been done because of Webkit exploits. Allowing other engines on the phone would make them lose control over their walled garden.

To mount a believable defense against third-party browser engines, Apple would need to demonstrate that their browser is more secure than rival browsers. In order to persuasively argue a need to ban all rivals, Apple would need to prove that iOS Safari ships and delivers security patches faster, has significantly better security, and that the harm to users from allowing rival browsers is significantly worse than the harm caused by lack of competition. They would need to prove this for each individual browser / browser engine.

The evidence points that Safari's security is in fact worse than either Chrome/Edge or Firefox's so that's going to be a hard sell to even prove they are equivalent.

Intentional jailbreaking is a problem for Apple, not for Apple's users.

The scary part is that just over 10% of Safari in use are outdated versions that the user can't upgrade since Safari isn't evergreen and updates are tied to the OS (and the user likely has a device that no longer gets updates). So much for privacy and security concerns.

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