Except in every thread about iOS or Safari are a ton of people crying for real Chrome on iOS because Safari is the new IE 6 holding the web back by not implementing the new WebDogCam4 “standard” Google pushed out 2 days ago.
Many forget that Microsoft was introducing many incompatible standards, and only let IE stagnate after they won over Mozzilla.
Safari isn't the one turning the Web into ChromeOS.
The vitriolic hate it gets in many threads are completely misguided and likely the result of years-old opinions on it. In the last 3 years Safari dramatically accelerated development, leapfrogged Chrome in performance to a staggering degree, and basically became close to an ideal browser.
And nearly every so-called standard people point to to "prove" Safari is lagging behind is almost always just something Chrome pushed out without any consensus.
It's funny because I think the hate comes from Webkit being forced on iOS, but it often comes out as "Safari sucks it's the new IE" which is pretty much the opposite of true and undermines the point.
These days Safari gets better indeed (through it's still a PITA in some areas), while Chrome is clearly "the new golden-days-IE" - which long-term is probably much worse than Safari could ever be.
In that case doesn’t it seem like Google took an ideological stance by choosing a non-patent-encumbered codec instead of supporting mp3? And they could do it because of their dominance? Or is that not accurate?
Choosing non-patent-encumbered codecs for open standards is as much ideological as practical.
In practice, MP3 has had support on every platform since the mid 90s. I could probably count the number of times I’ve come across an ogg file being distributed on one hand.
Pretty much everyone who implemented HTML5 audio for a few years, while MP3 support in the browser was initially barely heard of? Mozilla, Google, Opera, KHTML, WebKit... Safari and IE were the only outliers, and had tiny minority of market share for a while (not counting versions that didn't support HTML5 audio at all). Today only mobile Safari is still an outlier.
You couldn't use MP3 without Vorbis fallback on the Web for about a decade. Whenever you played audio in the browser without using Flash on anything else than iPhone, chances that it was Vorbis were very high for a good while. YouTube used it in WebM before switching to Opus. In fact, even AAC gained reasonable support on the Web earlier than MP3 did.
In practice, although very popular, MP3 was nowhere near universally supported until just a few years ago. I know that pretty well - I have posted patches to some projects that enabled MP3 support once its patents expired myself; I've also used to maintain websites based on HTML5 audio since 2009.
This is for maintainability/security surface reasons as well as patent risks, as open/closed and standardized/bespoke axes have nothing to do with whether or not something is patent encumbered.
Most likely not for same reasons ad blockers were freaked about Chrome's Manifest v3 push - browsers are trying to optimize away the latency from a massive synchronous javascript-based list check on page load, and the privacy risk that comes from these extensions having exposure to every page (and injecting their code into every page). Conversely, the web extension authors don't see the set of limitations as feasible.
But it is odd that uBlock Origin doesn't seem to have even issued a public-facing statement of even evaluating the functionality that is there in Safari.
Apple lets plugins provide lists of elements/css/IPs/etc to block. Safari processes them and is able to block stuff based on that extremely fast and power efficiently.
There is flexibility lost. Plug-ins can’t see which rules are/aren’t hitting. You can’t filter based on the content of a request.
So there are ad blockers, and they work well. But uBlock, as it works elsewhere (I know it’s considered the best), isn’t possible due to the trade offs Apple chose.
“New IE” seems to mean “browser I don’t want to bother with”, not “browser with an iron grip over web standards”.
No one is forcing a Chrome hegemony on us. Developers are choosing it.
Firefox and mobile Safari, so I guess I should experience it…
I regularly see small/medium websites which state they only work with Chrome, but I feel they do so at their peril.
I see some of those sites push people to install a "desktop app" if you do not use Chrome, which is of course an Electron-based app.
I also regularly see services that just fail for long runs of time on non-Chrome browsers due to complete lack of regression testing, or (slightly more generously) because they aren't testing their services against current releases of Firefox/Safari. Safari is more sensitive to this, both because of a much more active development tick compared to Firefox, and because it is leveraging system frameworks rather than a relatively static compatibility layer 'buffer'.
If Safari was as bad as so many claim it would have next to no desktop market share. But despite Google pushing Chrome at every opportunity tons of people like my self prefer Safari.
Apple has different priorities for Safari than Google does for Chrome. That’s fine. My priorities match Safari far better, I’m perfectly happy with how they’re doing things.