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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: do you think Apple is holding back the web?

Apple is holding ChromeOS back, which is what the Web will turn into if Google has free reign.

Nope. Not at all. I think they’re doing great. Most of the stuff I see complain about here on HN are features I’m not sure should exist (web push notifications, hardware access), uBlock (there are other options), and some PWA stuff they’re doing but I do t think there is anywhere near the call for from users some developers think.

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.

The mention of “the new WebDogCam4 “standard” Google pushed out 2 days ago.” didn’t register as sarcasm with you, huh?

Chrome is not "the web."

To a ton of people (including developers), it is. Therefore anything that’s not Chrome or 100% compatible is “breaking the web”.

No one is forcing a Chrome hegemony on us. Developers are choosing it.

Those developers will always, ALWAYS cater it iOS - where the money is.

... and they'll do this by having their mobile team create an app, and making their website refuse to work on iOS by user-agent string.

This is something that lots of people complain about but somehow I never experience. Not to doubt it—I’ve seen the complaint enough that I believe it—mostly I’m just confused as to how I’ve managed to dodge the problem.

Firefox and mobile Safari, so I guess I should experience it…

Hmm, many google web features not-so-subtly nudge you to install Chrome. Some outright block usage of anything other than Chrome. This has been going on for well more than a decade.

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'.

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