I'm also the 2.54% and have been since the phoenix days. I am beyond thankful every day for apple keeping both desktop safari and ios running to prevent the internet being even more monoculture than in the IE6 days
Don't worry, EU regulators (and other countries soon I suppose) are doing their best to fix that "bug".
Users generally don’t know about Chrome’s privacy issues or what browser engines are. Apple simply hasn’t done enough to promote Safari and keep it a strong competitor against Chrome. Relying on their monopoly over their platform is them accidentally doing something good in the wrong way. You know why Chrome attracted so many customers when it first launched in 2008 or so? Because IE, and yes Firefox, were incredibly bloated and slow. Apple hasn’t presented a similar performance jump or another compelling reason for Safari over Chrome. And in open-source land, so many hotshot alt-browsers from Arc to Brave all use Blink. Orion uses WebKit, and it’s the only one. Apple clearly doesn’t care to promote it as a Blink alternative other than for their monopolistic mandate of WebKit on iOS.
Not to mention, they killed Safari for Windows. Apple apparently doesn’t care about privacy as much as HN thinks they do, see mini-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975620
Finally, the EU change should in theory be liberating for Mozilla, who can now provide a proper mobile Firefox for iOS that uses Gecko. Instead, from what I hear that isn’t even on the roadmap, because this is the state of modern Mozilla. Here’s hoping that Zen will instead bring Gecko to iOS.
If it was 98% chrome and 2% firefox that's basically 100% chrome.
Instead safari on ios (and to a lesser extent desktop) means the web isn't 100% chrome (or chrome skins like brave)
“The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
- T.S Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
[0] iOS Application Security: The Definitive Guide for Hackers and Developers by David Thiel, pg. 8-9
"Jailed Just-in-Time Compilation on iOS" by Saagar Jha https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22401146
Check out webkit.org:
https://www.webkit.org/downloads/
Browsers for Linux are right there.
For all of Apple's contributions for WebKit, you don't exactly see them doing something like this:
"Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers" https://blog.chromium.org/2025/01/announcing-supporters-of-c...
Huh. That WebKit site links to a Mastodon account that doesn't even say anything. Maybe it's for queries.
https://www.igalia.com seems to the other major contributor. Sony is in there a little too.
https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/Companies%20and%20Organizations... too but that's 12 years out of date.
I would love to see a WebKit browser for Windows that's released, but https://docs.webkit.org/Ports/WindowsPort.html does exist too.
As for the Mastodon link, I'd ask https://front-end.social/@jensimmons