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This would surrender web standards as a whole to Google, who in my opinion, cannot be trusted to equitably shepherd this forward; given their propensity to push their own browser heavily, push non-standards forward and so adversely affect their own sites on rival browsers who do not use their extensions to the specifications.
Chrome is taking over due to inertia and many websites targeting it as the one and only legal implementation of web standards, regardless of the actual spec. "Please use Chrome to continue".
For example, despite Edge woes, the Trident-based version was markedly better looking, and better performing as long as the tabs count didn't get massive. It used native system APIs for input integration, rendering, scroll and memory management, making it much faster and efficient especially on low power devices. It's JS engine had issues, true, but despite that, it was a decent browser outperforming Chrome on many critical aspects of user experience. Safari is in the same vein but even better and without any issues mentioned before. It has power-efficient AdBlocking API, it uses correct HW for rendering content and it is more memory-friendly.
Again, and I can't stress this enough, Chrome and Chromium are developed by a company which main source of revenue is AdTech.
Compared to Chrome it’s anecdotally faster, objectively more power-efficient, and on par with Firefox for privacy.
I don’t know why you think Apple’s uninterested in making a “competitive” browser. It’s been years since Safari didn’t support something I needed it to do, and I’d consider myself a power user.
That being said, Apple has clearly upped the focus on the browser in the last two years, and they are shipping a ton more features and fixes in each update, so kudos to them for refocusing as of late.
I think it was objectively true that Safari was lagging 3 years ago, but in the last two years in terms of standards, Safari is equal or better. Safari feels much faster in practice for quite a while.
I think this data is somewhat tainted by how many things have been developed and tested thoroughly against Chrome only, resulting in subpar performance or nonfunctionality in other browsers. Rather than users downloading Chrome because that's what they prefer, I suspect a great many do it because that's the most surefire way to avoid bugs and sluggishness in the many front end codebases that are tuned almost exclusively for Chrome.
It's similar to how Netscape suffered because developers increasingly developed against IE only in the 90s. People want the web to "just work".
on the other hand, apple crippling webapps with a half-assed browser so that they can sell apps and rent-seek also sucks.
i'm glad safari exists, but for the wrong reasons. it's such a tragedy that there are not more for-profit browser companies.
Of course apple isn't crippling them.
On top of that you have the world's most popular OS with none of the perceived crippling, and we've yet to see a single amazing web app on that OS.
They just released new Wake Lock API, but it only works in browser Safari. It is broken in PWA...
QA cannot be that bad they do not test PWAs for new features.
Of course it isn't. Unless you can come up with a non-random list of things of what constitutes a PWA. Everytime someone screams about Apple not doing something in PWAs, that list is different.
Meanwhile, as I said above, there's an OS that holds about 70% of the world's marketshare that has none of this "crippling" as you put it. And yet, there are literally none of these amazing PWAs there that Apple supposedly cripples on their OS.
Something tells me, the problem doesn't lie with Apple.
Talk is cheap. And yet in all these discussions no one ever says "ho, look, over there in this amazing OS with no restrictions that has 70% of the world's market there are these amazing PWAs, just look at them!"
It's always complaining about some absolutely random API that absolutely must be there on iOS for the PWA to finally happen (even if it exists on that other OS).
There are other opinions also.
I know it is hard to accept it.
But sure, do tell me how it's "just my opinion".
These sites never make their own native app because they cannot afford to maintain those apps.
Websites and PWAs are great and cheap compared to apps.
But it is not hard to google?
The question about hard-not-hard to google.
Always in discussions about Safari you will find someone complaining about "Apple crippling PWAs" and coming up with yet another random APIs that they absoluely need to finally make a great PWA.
Always in these discussions I hint that Android is 70% worldwide market share, and has none of the perceived restrictions on PWAs. Surely these amazing PWAs that Apple doesn't allow should exist there. Right? Right?!
And invariably there are crickets.
Even your "example" are literally "we made our site not suck and open faster, this increased conversions, yay! It's all because of PWAs".
Of course it's not. Correlation is not causation. If your page load went from 3s to 0.9s (Washington Post) or is now 4x faster (BMW), it's not really PWA who's responsible for people staying on your website. Oh, you pushed your bloated abomination of a website into offline storage on users' phones and now the site opens faster? Yay (not)!
And then there are egregiously bad takes like "Thanks to PWA Telegram's platform cna be accessed from different devices". Newsflash: Telegram's native apps are available across different platforms
It's like people switched from Firefox to Chrome a while back and never came back to see how great it is
That is exactly what happened
It was a good browser two years ago, and it still is a good browser.
Pushing every Chrome-only non-standard API does not a good browser make.
Correct. Chrome has already won. No contest. Undisputed. [0][1][2]
The moment Apple opens up the competition to other browsers, Chrome dominance will essentially be further entrenched. The digital markets act will just guarantee this further.
Google might as well make Chromium a independent standard organization maintaining a standard browser engine.
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
[1] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268254/market-share-of-i...
In all honesty, they are already doing that. They are shipping 400 new APIs a year. Imagine how many of them are standard.
Never gonna happen.