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Comment by rimliu | Hacker News Reader

How did Apple captured the web?

They created the most common device for consuming the web, which happens to work best as a read-only device, or for taking videos/photos. If we had ended up with something with a real keyboard, I suspect the web would have a lot more written content.

In a lot of ways Apple dumbed-down the web by forcing people into using app store apps on their ios and mac app store. Also safari is by far the worst web browser in existence and apple forbids anyone to use anything else at least on ios

One of the most common stats cited on HN to demonstrate that Apple has a supposed monopoly is StatCounter. StatCounter uses web browsing to measure the prevalence of given clients, in which we find that iPhone users make up more than 50% of US mobile devices.

Only in actual sales data, iPhone devices are far below 50%. It just turns out that users on iPhones browse a lot more than users on other platforms. In just about every country the representation on statcounter significantly exceeds the actual sales metrics of the device.

No, Apple doesn't "force" people into app store apps, and by actual empirical data, facilitates browsing the web even more than alternatives.

As to Safari being the "worst web browser in existence", after chuckling at what I assumed was some sort of parody, I realized some people actually believe this noise. Usually because someone, at some point, stomped their feet and had a fit because Apple didn't immediately support whatever their pet proposal was, and this got spun into a fantastic conspiracy about invented motives.

Yet in the actual real world, Safari is the most performant browser by a country mile. It's the most privacy focused. It supports everything and its brother. For all the pissing and moaning about edge conditions of standalone web applications, Safari was far and away the earliest mobile browser to actually support them! Long before Chrome on Android did.

> Safari is the most performant browser by a country mile

We all get carried away, given to hyperbole. Its neither the worst nor best. It's average.

As a web developer, I have a special hatred for it. As a person I understand its a browser for rich folk. Its faster than chrome but dusted by edge and firefox. It feels like an afterthought like IE and yet it might not be.

For some nuance: Safari is the best browser by far in terms of performance, memory, battery, and privacy, and as of late they are showing signs of change in terms of finally rolling in long needed features.

It definitely is the worst in terms of limiting all features that would make the web competitive with apps.

And if i may note, also a host of weird bugs and limitations that require you to own an apple device to debug and work around them.

Safari is the closest you'll get to IE6 for todays web designer. (although clearly not as bad, if you look over the hardware lock in)

Well of course you need to debug them on an Apple device. But by nature of you not developing with Safari you likely are highly biased to see bugs because.. you aren’t developing for it.

The IE6 claim just isn’t true at all. Safari has a few quirks but in terms of rendering bugs it’s quite close to spec on everything, with a couple CSS Grid issues. Comparing to IE6 is a ridiculous exaggeration, Chrome with the many non-spec features and codecs it throws in is more comparable. Firefox has as many quirks.

I’ve built many large sites including one right now. I develop in Chrome for the dev tools, then check in Firefox and Safari at intervals. Neither is usually broken by much. You have to polyfill a bit more for Safari (usually those features Chrome has been throwing at the wall, IE6 style), but usually fix more rendering differences for Firefox. In terms of consistency, the three have converged greatly. I used to dev for IE6/Mozilla and it was absolutely nothing like it is today.

Safari is nowhere near IE6, but it's the closest when you compare it to all other modern browsers. We could say it's new IE11. Just this month I came across the following Safari-only bugs/compat issues:

- document.hidden can be initially true even if the user is in foreground tab

- visibilitychange event was not bubbling to window until Safari 14

- ReferenceError when you have a const + hoisted function inside a block scope

Using anything newer than 2010 APIs, I always first check caniuse and MDN to see an inevitable list of Safari bugs and missing compat (and contribute myself when I find new ones).

Still nowhere near as comparable, and cherry picking doesn't really make a great case.

Safari is updated on a super-regular schedule. In accordance with specs, they aren't very weird at all, they just support a few less than others. But in terms of quirks in rendering, they are arguable ahead of FF.

IE11 was known for way behind in every aspect, that's not the case for Safari. It's maybe a little behind in specs, but way ahead in other areas. Here's an arbitrary list of things it supports that Chrome doesn't:

- better css filter() support, blur support

- font-variant-alternatives

- various font values: ui-rounded, ui-serif, etc

- improved selector list CSS

- Audio Tracks, Video Tracks, Web Share

- HTTP/3 live in big sur

- better position: sticky / display: contents

- Better web animations api support

And again, it literally feels about 2-3x faster than Chrome, battery lasts significantly longer, UI responsiveness is way ahead.

Safari feels far better than any other browser, supports a number of important features others don't, and what it does support it renders as nearly as consistently as others.

I fully agree it's dragged it's feet on a few features, but that's also partially in relation to Chrome tossing in the kitchen sink.

No, I installed Brave on my partners phone a few days ago.

iOS is a calamity nonetheless.

All browsers on iOS are just wrappers around the Safari engine/web view. This lets them add certain features at the app level but they can't modify anything about the web browsing and rendering part, apart from what they can ask Safari to do.

Apple wholly and solely decides what a web browser is and can do on iOS. Which is fine for some people.

All iOS browsers must use Safari’s engine that is already present on the device.

I am so sorry for KHTML that all its dilapidated children are a disappointment.

what engine does brave use on ios

Safari.

They killed flash for instance. Not a bad thing but shows the pure force of power Apple has and that's bad.

Apple's more prescriptive than most large companies when it comes to pulling the plug on support for legacy technologies. But Flash was on its way out; Apple just (arguably) hastened its demise by proactively dropping it on a major platform. Others are more inclined to wait until almost no one cares any longer even though something is really a boat anchor.

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