Honestly I think this is bad. We'll end up with Blink everywhere.
That could happen, but alternatively we could get Browser War III¹, in which Apple reintroduces an extremely competitive Safari for Windows in order to counteract the Blink (Chrome, Edge) hegemony. That would not be great news for Firefox, though.
I'd love to see "Cross-platform Software Dev"-era Apple throw their hat back into the ring, but putting Safari on other platforms is a big commitment if you want to take it seriously.
When Safari for Windows was still a thing, Apple actually ported a good chunk of Cocoa along with it to support it, including text rendering. This meant that while it was still supported, Safari for Windows had some of the nicest looking text of any Windows web browser.
Based on Apple's more recent Windows releases which are built around WinUI, if they were to bring back Safari for Windows they'd probably take a more native approach, though.
And they are going to compete against Google's search, gmail, youtube (and their respective apps forcing chrome) exactly how?
But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup plan for many years, and they've been in the email business for longer than Google's existed. (I migrated a couple decades worth of email from Google Workspace last year, and I haven't regretted it so far.) I don't think building a YouTube competitor would be interesting for them.
Which remains there when people switch to Chrome
> But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup plan for many years, and they've been in the email business for longer than Google's existed
Ah yes. They will just flip on the non-existent rumored Google-level search and the non-existent public email service to take on Google monopoly in search and email.
Fewer than 5% of iOS users will switch to Chrome as their dedicated browser. (In-app browsers will continue to be WebKit.)
> They will just flip on the non-existent rumored Google-level search…
Just like the flipped on the M1 after a long gestation period, exactly. It was 2015 when Applebot was first noticed crawling the web. A couple hundred employees with Apple's resources can do a lot in 7 years.
> …and the non-existent public email service…
iCloud Mail is Apple's public email services, and very few companies hosting email at Apple scale — iCloud has over a billion active users. If you have access to a Mac or Windows PC (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283), you can set it up today. iCloud+ adds support for custom email domains.
Google releases Chrome in order to show you ads.
I think this is a small share
Either way, monopoly or oligopoly can also have salutary effects. Flash was a complete blight on the Web and all it took was Apple saying “no, we aren’t going to support that” and it disappeared practically overnight. Chrome’s been similarly effective in pushing forward some basic security measures. Hard to imagine this happening in a world of 50 different browsers with roughly equal market share.
Back then the decrease in quality was by way of not developing new features, or developing them in a quirky way, that was all well form them because they didn't want web applications to displace native Windows applications.
The decrease in quality you may see from Google may come in privacy, they'll be able to tighten the surveillance as much as they want once no website you care about works outside of Chrome and you can't switch.
Imagine now the network effects and a browser that actually keeps up to date, they'll just have won, period.