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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I'm well aware that there's no "Safari" financial division. And, yes, Apple will be just fine without Google's $18 billion, but that's because Apple can and will be incentivized to focus their investments on their own proprietary platforms.

Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?" the answer is really clear: "Google pays us $18 billion annually."

After that money is cut off, an executive at Apple has to ask the question: "Why should we keep investing in Safari, instead of SwiftUI and Xcode?"

I'm sure we'd all love the answer to be, "We have plenty of money, so we should invest heavily in both," but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.

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but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple works. Nobody is debating whether they should keep working on Xcode or Safari; it’s both.

WebKit is one of the most important frameworks Apple makes; many of their own apps rely on it like Mail and the App Store.

And many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) rely on WebKit to render web content on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and tvOS.

Does losing $18 billion mean some adjustments? Of course, but it’s probably something else that’s not mission critical, not something like Safari/WebKit that’s on over 2 billion devices.

I'm not sure the fact that a web view component exists means it gets priority.

Facebook, Twitter etc have no choice but to use what iOS provides.

It's not like they'd stop publishing iOS apps I'd apple decided to never update the WebView componemt again.

And the audience is captive, if they get a bad rendering in mail they won't think "bad apple" but "bad email sender", same way we all bend around Outlook's rendering.

Just to clarify that many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) are forced to* rely on WebKit

Apple has considered that same question for most other apps. Garage Band, for example, and Apple Mail.

I don't think you should listen to anyone's ideas about why Apple does what it does. But if you want to hear my unfounded speculation: Apple wants to control the out-of-the-box experience for its shiny hardware and therefore includes a variety of apps that >x% of the customers are presumed to use on the first day they have their new shiny hardware, where x is some number and "day" may mean "week" or… well, really, this is unfounded speculation, it doesn't have to be precise.

> Right now, if an Apple executive asks, "How does Apple make money working on Safari?"

It doesn’t need to make money. A good web browser is a standard part of an operating system these days. Apple can’t ship without one. You might as well ask how they monetise Finder or Notes.

Perhaps - but they could just do what Microsoft did: bundle a version of Chromium.

As I’ve mentioned previously, WebKit is a mission critical framework that many thousands of apps use, including Apple’s.

Strategically it makes no sense to not own something that important.

Remember: Safari was created when Apple’s 5-year deal with Microsoft that made Internet Explorer the default browser for MacOS X expired in 2003.

10 years later. Google forked WebKit to create Chrome.

Apple never fully owned WebKit in the first place - most certainly not back in 2003. There was an extremely public and messy divorce period with the KDE codebase[0], and to this day there's still KHTML/KJS-derived code in WebKit that has to be sublicensed under GPLv2 for redistribution purposes.

If we're going to split hairs over the whole "Blink is an inferior WebKit fork" brouhaha, we shouldn't forget who Apple sherlocked to get there. After all, turnabout is fair play.

[0] https://blogs.kde.org/2005/04/29/bitter-failure-named-safari...

Finder and Notes are artificially and arbitrarily designed to hook into iCloud first and refuse any convenient synchronization with other cloud platforms. It is pretty easily argued that these apps are designed like this to upsell Apple iCloud subscriptions, not because it's easier or smarter to do that way.

Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so many other places where Apple dragged their feet and refused a featureset that would enable competition with native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers the same way they did on Mac.

A browser that is just good enough for people not to notice that web apps work better on a $50 android then on their $1000 iPhone is a standard part of an operating system these days.

Seems clear they have not been investing much of that 18B on Safari. Wow, can you imagine what Safari would be if Apple had invested a large fraction of that income on Safari?

Yeah, it's a funny argument because while Apple has certainly put a lot of money into WebKit and JavaScriptCore over the years in absolute terms, they already don't prioritize Safari or treat web technologies as an alternative to native app development.

From the outside it looks to me like Apple started reinvesting in Safari in 2023 (starting with adding support for notifications for PWAs) when the EU started getting serious about regulating the App Store monopoly, and they see investment into Safari as fodder for negotiation with governments about "people can always use the web if they don't like the App Store"

At WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a "sweet solution" for developers who wanted to program the iPhone: web apps in Mobile Safari!

Developers, who wanted a real, native SDK, were greatly disappointed (to put it mildly), and in 2008 Apple introduced not only a native iPhone app SDK with developer tooling but an entire app store.

But Jobs wasn't entirely off base. Gmail had replaced dedicated email apps. Apple had implemented native-like widgets in Mobile Safari as well as touch input, javascript canvas support, and audio support. Today you can implement a video streaming client (Netflix), game streaming client (Amazon Luna), groupware client (Discord, Slack, Teams), or even a whole office suite (Office 365) in Safari. Even many "native" mobile apps are basically just shells on web apps.

I think you are probably right for other reasons

Safari has long lagged on other browsers, Apple would rather it didn't exist but have to keep it ticking over

With less competition they will likely be happy to lag behind even further again

Perhaps you haven’t noticed but Safari has shipped about 20 updates in the last 3.5 years.

If you check the Interop 2025 numbers, you’ll see Safari is neck and neck with the other browsers and has implemented the latest CSS features [1].

The WebKit team was first to crack the code on how to implement :has() that eluded browser teams for 20 years and was the first to ship it [2].

As for wishing that they didn’t have to maintain Safari, it’s a mission critical framework on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS… it’s the only thing saving the web from the monoculture of Chrome-based browsers; unfortunately Firefox is in the low single-digits as far as market share goes. Safari on iOS has about 25% market share.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/16458/announcing-interop-2025/

[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/

> Safari has long lagged on other browsers

Apart from not implementing a handful of Google’s sneaky draft fingerprinting proposals (WebUSB, WebMIDI, etc), what is Safari actually lagging on?

I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't the end of antitrust. The EU has already forced Apple to allow Chrome on iOS. They might force them to support PWAs on a similar level to native apps next. Chromium will be open source for the foreseeable future, no matter who buys the Chrome branding and userbase. This could be the very beginning of a much more competitive app landscape.

Or it could all go to shit. Hard to say.

What would you do? Would you keep the status quo or find a 3rd way?

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