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Comment by mtomweb | Hacker News Reader

Safari still has around 60% on MacoS and all the normal users believe that there is browser competition now. At best it's speculation, but we can compare that to the very real harms of Apple's browser ban.

We've written about the harms in detail here: https://open-web-advocacy.org/files/OWA%20-%20Bringing%20Com...

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It may be 60% on MacOS but that’s a very tiny market. Overall Chrome is quite dominant.

Numbers I found say on desktop Chrome is at 70%. Include the 7.75% for Edge (because it’s basically Chrome) and that’s almost 80%. FF at least exists and is similar to Safari.

On mobile it’s at 65%. Safari is the only other browser above 5%.

Chrome is dangerously close to total monopoly.

MacOS is the only market Safari actually competes in and has the same advantage by being the default.

I would actually expect the most likely outcome is Apple would fight hard to build a better browser to stem any losses to other browsers. They'll have at least 2 years to do it, so they can catch up in that time with enough investment.

They definitely have the capital to make it happen. Every time I boot up Safari after a MacOS update, I'm consistently wowed by how little of their revenue actually goes in to making a comfortable, feature-complete browser. It's almost like you're using a different, nerfed internet with Safari, but maybe that's just me being angry that uBlock Origin doesn't work anymore.

There are plenty of ad blockers for Safari, not sure what nerfed experience you're referring to.

This has been debated to death, but there are no ad blockers on Safari that will work as well as uBlock Origin, because Safari doesn't have all of the APIs/hooks exposed that would be necessary to implement uBlock Origin's more advanced features.

It's the same problem that developers were talking about with Chrome's Manifest V3 -- to the point where popular adblockers for Safari like Adguard actually run outside of the browser so that they're not quite as limited as they otherwise would be by Safari's apis.

The nerfed experience of addons only specifying a significantly limited list of blocking rules, giving up being able to autonomously allow or deny each request with arbitrary parameters, surrogate scripts (replacing the original, tracking ones with privacy-friendly reimplementations) and cosmetically alter the webpage (e.g. fixing the layout with missing ads).

Partial source: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158

And which of those ad blockers are Open Source?

AdGuard

> There are plenty of ad blockers for Safari

And none of them work as well as uBlock Origin on Chrome.

Trust me, I tried. I even paid money to try a few extensions out on Safari in the hopes I would get a better experience, but even that doesn't work.

(As a safari user) I've found running a pihole to be a good solution

Also been trying out this webkit based browser for macos: https://browser.kagi.com (supports ublock origin)

Recall how Google gimped Windows Phone support on the web, presumably to advantage their own platform and web services. My fear is that they'd do the same to Safari on iOS. They could break support on iOS, to force users to Chrome, where they can better track and monetize their users.

Maybe Safari mobile would have to make a better UI with more competition, and could then keep more users.

The size of macOS market is not relevant for the point being made here. What matters is that macOS is very similar to iOS in that it is owned by Apple, Safari is available on it, and comes pre-installed. The only difference is that on macOS browser competition is not banned by Apple. Yet, Safari still has around 60% market share on macOS.

So there is a good chance that even if competition where allowed on iOS, Safari, which currently has more than 90% market share, would at the very least not fall down below 60%, preventing Chrome from becoming dominant. It is even more likely because most users on iOS actually believe they can install the real Chrome, so nothing will change in their eyes.

> The size of macOS market is not relevant for the point being made here.

I disagree. There are already plenty of sites that are broken on macOS Safari because it's a niche platform. The only saving grace is that websites still have to support iOS Safari. If vendors were able to say "we only support Chrome" on iOS as well, I think that 60% macOS Safari marketshare would drop rapidly due to necessity.

If you want website to not be broken on Safari, the solution is to give developer without a Mac the ability to test on Safari. I wouldn't be able to fix my site if it's broken on Mac Safari if I don't have a Mac.

That's a good point and probably a major strategic error on Apple's part.

However in the IE era, even though Netscape/Firefox was free for everyone to test on, many large companies made their sites for "IE Only" because it's easier and cheaper. What I worry about is that, even if Safari kept up with web standards and was mostly compatible in terms of the basics, sites would start requiring APIs that only Chrome wants to support (e.g. FLoC). This would give Google a lot of leverage to push its own technologies on users (Amp also comes to mind).

Can't upvote this enough.

I support an Open web, I test my websites on Firefox and Chrome, I even occasionally do Edge testing, and I develop my websites often primarily in Firefox. But I'm not buying an iPhone or a laptop just to test websites, so I don't test in Safari.

Every other browser has a way to emulate in Linux, I can even download free VMs from Microsoft to test IE11 in Windows (and Edge now runs in Linux). If Apple isn't willing to make its operating system available to me to test on then I don't see why I should feel obligated to test on it.

And given that there is some Mac-specific behavior for Safari/Firefox that I've run into (differences in how blur works), and I generally can't assume that all of my stuff is going to work perfectly, I'm either going to fall back on progressive enhancement or (in the case of a complicated webapp) I'm going to tell users that Safari is unsupported and they're continuing at their own risk.

I'd love to support Safari. All Apple has to do is give me a way to.

Do you test in Epiphany? That’s what the WebKit project recommends you do.

I test in Epiphany, and have resolved some Safari bugs that way.

Unfortunately that's not enough, for two reasons:

1. Safari is the only browser that is still tied to OS release versions, the WebKit version used by Epiphany is rarely the same, so results will likely differ

2. Epiphany has no mobile emulation mode. (E.g., I had to work around around an annoying input zoom bug in Safari/iOS by blindly applying the least stupid solution I found searching the net)

Apple provides Linux builds of WebKit.

=> https://WebKit.org/downloads

Using that logic of Edge being counted as Chrome, why dont we consider 100% of the iOS browser market to be Safari?

Chrome was forked from WebKit but had been it’s own engine for a very long time at this point. They share ancestry but are pretty different.

Edge is literally built off a relatively recent version of Chromium. It’s not a separate engine.

Every iOS browser today runs on Apple Webkit. No exceptions. Thats an apple rule.

Sorry. I didn’t notice you were talking about iOS only.

I would hope mobile browser share numbers already take this into account, though I don’t know.

I think they pretty clearly dont since iOS is definitely more than 5% of the mobile market.

> Safari still has around 60% on MacoS

It's preinstalled on MacOS and you can't uninstall it, just choose not to use it.

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