Apple is no underdog anymore, if their browser couldn‘t compete on its own merit I won’t be crying a river over it.
Firefox, while mired with its own problems, is another story; but I don’t see Mozilla losing from this decision.
Why ? Seriously - this competition argument gets brought up and I see 0 benefit. There is almost no innovation in the low level aspects and the foundations are opensource with several tech giants contributing.
The only thing "competition" adds at this point is fragmentation, compatibility issues and slower feature adoption.
This idea that competition beats cooperation is silly - innovation in browser rendering and JS engines is mostly done - the only real innovative effort was Servo and that died - modern variants are there just for political/commercial reasons.
If every browser out there converted to Blink/V8 and development resources were focused the web would be better.
In the current situation a ton of websites are already bailing out and shoving mobile apps to their users instead of actually addressing Safari.
For instance parking payment apps, mobile ticket apps etc. that you download when in vacation and could 100% be web only, or a PWA if Apple was onboard with it, instead of their “light app” thing.
Or I had some of the government services apps not exposing text labels as selectable, which is a pain if you need to search for it. Same thing when you want to print/save the screen, you end up with a single screen png instead of potentially a fully scrolled and text including pdf. All these features could be coded in the app, but realistically devs don’t give a damn as it doesn’t bring much praise or money.
Should just be a payment terminal instead of an app. Beyond that, there's App Clips for one time use, and accessibility is worse on the web than on the iPhone (can't speak for Android). For printing and sharing, might be right, but it's broken on websites often enough, too. There are lots of developers (or their management) not caring about UX at all on both sides..
You need an interface on your phone for remote payment. Most of them have a workable mobile web site, but notifications for instance aren’t available in that case. Yes App Clips cover that case, but it doesn’t look to me that it got much traction.
> accessibility is worse on the web than on the iPhone (can't speak for Android). For printing and sharing, might be right, but it's broken on websites often enough, too.
I see this as the main point for having other browser engines. Mobile Safari is horrible to select text and on many basic features. I took these limitations for granted until I moved to android and the browsers work so much better (not flawless, but pretty close). Basically in this day and age, there’s no reason why a mobile browser should be weaker than its desktop counterpart.
In a nutshell, I’m not sure Mozilla can still bring relevant change to the landscape, even if its handicap goes away.
As a firefox user, I feel it truely suffered from both Safari locking it out the the emerging mobile web where it had the biggest chance to shine (I actually like firefox mobile even with its current pretty severe limitations), and from Chrome pushing it down from the heavy desktop applications for reasons that aren’t only performance.
So it sits in a tough position, but Mozilla also appears to be shooting itself in the foot time after time, and I wonder if the people that made the magic happen haven’t abandoned the ship long ago.
I'm genuinely not sure if this is satire or not.
I do not understand what you are saying.
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Ah, I think I get it. You're saying that Chrome would beat Safari if they were both available?
You’re capable of more, we’re capable of more, this entire thread of yours is beneath us all.
This is obviously a complex topic with a lot of strongly held views. For me personally it's a rare case where I haven't yet developed firm views of my own.
FWIW, I'm not particularly happy with the way this sub-thread has gone, but I found it stimulating at least. YMMV.
Okay. Granted. So what? IE died.
> Safari is the only viable competition.
Is it? It seems to me that it's not competing with Chrome if you can't run Chrome on your iPhone.