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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

That would mean it would have had a big market share to begin with.

Here is the twist: on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad), third-party browsers such as Firefox and Chrome must use Safari's faulty and outdated WebKit engine. Therefore, websites will experience the same bugs even if you use a different browser.

Suddenly you realise that Safari indeed effectively has a big market share - namely all Apple mobile devices browsing the web.

I just spent a whole day working around a very annoying iOS Webkit/Safari quirk (HTML button elements not receiving focus). I had to resort to user agent sniffing and working around from there. I haven't had to do such stuff for a long time.

Back in the Internet Explorer days, you could at least say "just use a better browser". With the Safari situation on iPhones and iPads there is no such choice. Installing Chrome just gives the browser a different skin with respect to the browser engine.

And the saddest part is that this precarious situation is basically what is saving us from an effective Blink monoculture. Firefox Market share keeps slowly going down on desktop and is almost negligible on android.

It’s a bit shocking to me how unpopular Firefox is on Android. I won’t use anything else on that platform because FF is the only way to get proper adblocking (uBlock Origin), and adblocking or lack thereof can make the difference between a low/moderate power device being usable or miserable.

Use Blokada, then all your apps including Firefox and Chrome are adblocked

> Blink monoculture

As long it's open source - I'm fine with it. World doesn't need multiple HTML parsers, that's where all the developer pain begins with.

linux is monoculture in backend world and no one bats an eye

Safari has held ~50% market share on mobile in the U.S. for half a decade.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272664/market-share-held...

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