Comment by paulstringer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulstringer | Hacker News Reader

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So this guy is saying that if other vendors were able to implement their own engine on iOS, he'd no longer have to bother ensuring the work was compatible with the massively popular default browser on iOS?

The argument doesn't stand up that Safari is holding developers back because due to it's real world levels of usage by customers you'd still be unrealistic not to support it - that is unless people are planning a 90's style 'please use Google Chrome' on Safari, nice.

Basically the guy is lazy and wants to use some latest cool bleeding edge chrome feature and is annoyed he might have to do to some other work to support Safari.

I get the feeling this guy would be far more comfortable with a Google dominated Chrome monoculture of a Web.

I think you've misunderstood the post.

Many developers are still suffering from how MS throttled back on browser development, but there's an end in sight. Users made that happen by voting with their feet.

On iOS, there's nowhere else to go, so no user vote.

Yes, we'll still have to support Safari, but if Apple's browser starts to lose users on their own OS, they'll have to compete on quality/features or continue to lose users. For developers and users, that's win-win.

> Yes, we'll still have to support Safari, but if Apple's browser starts to lose users on their own OS, they'll have to compete on quality/features or continue to lose users.

That presupposes that Apple cares if a small number of users switch to Firefox or Chrome.

Microsoft didn't care for years, but as more users switched they eventually started caring.

No that's not what I'm saying in my post. A browser choice on iOS wouldn't make Safari go away, and wouldn't mean that developers shouldn't cater for mobile Safari.

But it would give us the option to deliver experiences for other browsers, that might lead to better and more innovative experiences for our end-users. We don't know, because we don't have the choice.

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