It definitely is, I was also there, just like everyone was doing IE only sites, not only plenty of people do the same with ChromeOS vision of the Web, they ship Chrome alongside Electron crap.
Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.
Safari is the last man standing before a ChromeOS world.
Except it isn't. Maybe I'm being slightly obtuse here, but the world is not "Chrome Vs Safari". It's "Chrome Vs Safari Vs native apps". If Safari dies we'll be in a world of "Chrome Vs native apps", and that is what Apple wants. Browsers represent a way to deliver software to users that's outside of Apple's revenue mechanisms.
Apple have every incentive to keep Safari being good-not-great at running web apps, so users prefer the native version (even though most of the time that'll be Electron.)
I think the only full-featured browser with a prosocial funding model is Konqueror, where what little money there is mostly comes from EU grants. Not coincidental that its code quality was so much better that everyone else based on its rendering engine.
Chrome's Manifest v3 forcing UBO into becoming UBO Lite only strengthen my original decision.
Hopefully this move by google would push more people toward Firefox. Although considering the amount of people who happily surf the web with zero adblockers (including every single of my IT colleagues), I'm not holding my breathe.
Imagine if Microsoft was able to just ban any competing browser from running on Windows. We wouldn't be here debating if Chrome is the new IE. IE would be the same old IE (and the web would be a lot worse off today).
> Apple gets away with stuff today that would have made Bill Gates blush in 1998.
The end user is always served better by native apps.
I think that this idea that Apple is making Safari deliberately shitty to stop PWAs from taking over may have been true at some point, but I think by now that battle has been lost and Apple doesn't have to defend that moat anymore. There's just a plain reality of installing native apps being a better user experience regardless of platform, even though it is more locked down and has its own significant list of disadvantages.
More recently, I have difficulty seeing what's so bad about Safari in this regard. It lets you add web apps to your home screen and works with notifications since iOS 16. Safari has features like picture-in-picture that the native YouTube app doesn't have. It also has extensions. Maybe there are some PWA features that I don't know about here that I'm missing?
Maybe this is my dumbest opinion: say what you want about Electron, every Electron app I've used has been a better experience installed as a native app than used inside a browser. Not much better, but better enough that I didn't want to keep using them in the browser (regardless of choice of browser). Slack comes to mind. I greatly dislike using Slack in a browser, and it's hard to point my finger on exactly why that is.
I know several of them, because Google doesn’t let e-commerce apps in my country sell cigarettes and other products containing tobacco. The android version of these apps guide users into installing their PWA version if they wish to order such products.
And if it is bluntness that you want, native apps should wipe both of them, lets get back to the days of Internet protocols and leave browsers for documents, nothing else.
Last man being propped up Weekend-at-Bernie's style?
I mean, imagine if DOJ forced Apple to divest Safari and treat it the same as other browsers. What would happen? Parsimonious answer: the same thing that happened everywhere else.
It's worse than that, even - IIRC the renderer that other browsers have to use is slower and more limited than the one Safari uses.
So other browsers are effectively reskinned hobbled Safari.
Browsers on iOS can't - they are required (legally, not technologically) to use (a worse version of) Safari's engine. Chrome for iOS is not the browser that the chrome team wants to distribute, it's a browser Apple made that has been customized to the extent that Apple allows it to be customized. What is that if not reskinned?