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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

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And MacOS.

And I hope Apple doesn't manipulate the "power usage" data that always claims Safari is the lowest-power best-battery-saver browser on their platform.

I run Safari on MacOS for only that reason, that it allegedly gives me an extra hour or so out of my laptop vs. Chrome or Firefox. Of course, I should actually benchmark myself and find out.

In my experience it depends somewhat on the sites/web apps one uses (some are not well optimized for WebKit), but Safari definitely tends to be easier on the battery. It seems to try harder to get to an idle state and keep CPU usage down where Chrome and Firefox are happy to keep the CPU spun up, perhaps due to a “speed and bells and whistles at all costs” mentality in development (traditionally browsers have been marketed on speed and features rather than efficiency).

Until people find they can’t get to lunch without having to charge their phones.

Fixing weird bugs like not loading cookies for a ~minute whenever the app needs to launch (as opposed to restore from background) would be a win too [1]

I switched to Safari on iPhone because I was always logged out of stuff on first load, super annoying. I miss the syncing, but not that much.

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-ios/issues/11994

No, that's not going to happen. Chrome replacing IE could happen only because of MSFT's strategical abandonment of their browser for sabotaging the web in favor of the Windows platform. Apple actually is well aware of this mistake and began to invest into Safari when it's clear that they cannot prevent 3rd party rendering engines forever.

Crazy thing is that I know a few Linux users that would love to have safari on our Linux machines for syncing.

Firefox on iOS is a horrible experience. My desktop I have switched to Vivaldi so I can easily sync tabs between desktop and phone. I don’t love Vivaldi but the overall experience is superior to Firefox on both.

Would prefer safari on my Linux desktop and use it on my phone

I'd rather have proper Firefox on iOS than Safari on Linux.

What's "only" about it? Smartphones gave everybody convenient internet access and thus increased the customer/user base enormously for everybody who publishes online. It's perfectly natural that the frontrunner in smartphones will have a huge chunk of the browser market.

If iOS allowed other browsers on the device (and I mean allow other browsers to run their own engines and not have to use Safari's engine under the hood - be first class citizens, just like Safari) then I doubt Safari would have such high numbers.

Maybe, maybe not. But there's nothing "only" about creating a massively popular way to browse the web. That Safari chunk will still be an iOS chunk. Device matters much more than browser for making web interfaces.

> If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone

Chrome and Firefox are already on iOS – if they're allowed to swap out their rendering engine, is this something customers will actually care about?

Hopefully it will force Apple to compete again and improve Safari.

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