At least it's not hard wired into the OS and we're not going through another era of mega-corp hard wiring browsers into their OSes any more.
Oh wait.
IE was actually very innovative, did stuff like AJAX before everyone else and the developers adopted the ways of IE. Websites did not work well on other browsers, every website had a disclaimer at the bottom: Works best in IE.
Now I see similar situation with Chrome and gives me goosebumps. Some people say that Safari is the new IE but I think they got it wrong, I think the new IE is Google Chrome.
IE become bad when Microsoft dropped the ball and made it into a browser with a reputation to crash all the time and bring down Windows with it.
IE6 was hated by the developers because it had the largest userbase but had non-standart features, which meant that CSS and HTML and JS had to be written in a way to accommodate IE and Mozilla.
Today Chrome is very good but if Google takes something from the Microsoft playbook, we will be screwed. Some already say that Chrome is not what it used to be and Google no longer abides by the "do no evil" motto. They are even notorious to favour their own services, i.e. if you sign in into a Google website, Chrome treats that website differently than the rest, assumes that session as the browser account.
Anyway, that's not the point. IE wasn't bad because it was a shitty browser. It was bad because it had features that other browsers did not have and it was very popular because it was very innovative and it was heavily marketed. This resulted in websites being made for IE only, which resulted in a lockdown of huge userbase that even Microsoft couldn't get rid of once decided to get rid of IE.
Safari is nothing like that and there's no Safari lockdown. On the other hand, Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share, forcing web developers to make everything for Chrome. That's exactly like IE.
If anything, Apple's refusal to allow the Chrome engine into iOS is the only thing that keeps us from complete lockdown into Chrome.
Also, what matters in a browser it's the engine. If it's always WebKit and you find a issue or something else in iOS you can switch the browser but the result will always be the same since Chrome and Firefox are forced to use WebKit.
Chrome's engine it's Chromium which is open-source and used by other browsers like Microsoft Edge for example, so I don't see as much of an issue with Google Chrome, since you're not actually forced to use it.
> Chrome does have non standard features and huge market share
Even Firefox has it's own non-standard features and I don't see people complaining about it.
Maybe they never will do it but I simply don't want Google has the option to go to the next step.
I'm more concerned about Apple nowadays, they're doing everything to keep people locked down on their own ecosystem.
Apple makes a lot of money but Apple is an underdog with it's tiny market share. Apple can and does evil stuff but it's nothing compared to the potential of Google.
No thanks. Apple might be in their rights to control their own platform but I like my Web free, not wholly owned by Google or anyone else.
IE post-dates the addition of process isolation to Windows - IE never brought down Windows because it ran as a normal process. When people say IE was integrated into Windows they just mean applications like the shell used it as a component, it wasn't actually in the kernel.
Safari is now the browser that resists web standards and an open internet for its parent company's personal gain. See: PWAs, webgl, webview.
And Chrome is now the thousand pound gorilla forcing standards nobody wants, for its parent company's personal gain. See: manifest v3, cookie security.
The problem starts when you implement alternative standards and you have a market share to make people code for your standard. In this situation, your users don't suffer but everyone else suffer, that's what I call villain.
Check Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Exterminate strategy. This is the evil thing, making browser that doesn't adopt some web standards is not evil.
The only property that benefits from dragging your heels on webgl 2.0 adoption is the App Store, which could see its influence and revenue easily be cannibalized by progressive web apps using modern gpu rendering. And would you look at that, those are exactly the two web standards Safari has dragged its heels on.
We're going to have to agree to disagree because your argument you've made twice now without adaptation is a bit absurd. If Safari doesn't implement it it must not be important? I am now conscious of my original comment being inexplicably downvoted and I'm worried I might be banging my head against Apple fanboys instead of having a discussion about corporate influence over web standards. There is considerable evidence for this and I've given it in this thread.
In the IE era, if you wanted a "web application", you simply used Flash. There was a clear separation between the document and the application. It was nice. I miss it.
https://www.developer-tech.com/news/2019/apr/17/mozilla-goog...
Welcome to the most popular OS in the world, called 'Android'.
Thats not to say Safari isn’t dragging it’s heals, but it looks like Apple are finally ramping up development speed. I gather they have been expanding the Safari dev team, and the latest announcements at WWDC look really good.
I actually use Safari as my primary browser, I prefer it (as a user) to Chrome. Although for debugging Chrome dev tools are better, I probably open it 2-3 times a day to check stuff, but never leave it running.
There's only one reason Web Apps are not currently viable on mobile, and unless you're down in the trenches building these apps these issues are invisible.
This can happen again, we just need to collectively stop feeding these monopoly wannabes.
I switched back to Firefox a while ago for ideological reasons, but the majority of people are not going to switch to something that is more or less the same, just without their bookmarks, passwords and history.
- A GDPR-style mandate to make cloud apps secure by certifying all libraries and upstream authors that run your stack, down to the OS,
- Thus cloud providers providing “Debian, only for amateur purposes, PII forbidden”,
- And “Amazon Linux, certified GDPR III, all upstream identified.”
That would be the end of free software. But at the same time, it would be the only reasonable move from EU, it drives me crazy that websites all use random NPM modules, half of them written by Russians we’re at war with.