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> My 12 year old Mac laptop is dead because MacOS does not allow me to upgrade past a certain version, and the cryptography primitives do not update past that so no recent browsers support the platform

What version of macOS are you stuck on? It can’t even run Sierra? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/109.0.1/system-require...

The bigger issue for me is increasing requirements. My 2012 MacBook Air went to absolute dog when upgrading to Catalina. Terrible user experience (which, I believe, is one reason why Apple sets requirements the way they do).

It was either snow leopard or lion. Chrome and Firefox would install but be unable to visit https websites because of missing crypto things it needed. It was surprising to me too.

For the average of users they don't really mind if they're using WebKit or whatever stack underneath. My family just wants to open Safari and browse, and they don't give a shit about any of Apple's business.

>For the average of users they don't really mind

That's usually because they never used or even know the existence of something better. Same thing was being said 15 years ago for IE. The average user was fine with it until they tried Chrome (or Firefox/Opera before).

Other than being a professional programmer, which I keep pretty compartmentalized from the rest of my life, I think I'm a pretty average computer and web user.

I certainly know other browsers exist and I have even used them. I still don't care I just use what comes installed on the machine because like I said I don't care.

Hm even my non tech classmates in college knew the difference between chrome and safari. They care about speed and features they get used to (e.g. chrome password manager follows you to your phone, syncs history across devices). To be an absolute non user of such features to the point of not caring is not what I’d consider typical.

Could it be an age cohort thing?

Where did you get the idea that I don't use the features?

I'm not interested in evaluating or comparing the features, but I'll use them if they suit my needs.

You can't use them if they're not on the default application installed on your system.

Right. They only care when it starts being noticeably slow/laggy, or causing other problems, or if a button/menu item they often use has changed positions or removed altogether. "I've been clicking this spot for years and it always works, now its completely unusable!".

Take for example the iMessage feature that lets you see message timestamps. There are no visual affordances to indicate how to do it. My parents couldn’t figure it out (pull the messages left!) it’s about the same as not having the feature. Wanna install an alternate sms app? Good luck, apple won’t let you because this isn’t android.

So sure, people won’t complain — they just accept that this is life, but life could be better if apple didn’t have monopolistic behaviors.

>Is it really a feature to not be allowed to use non-webkit Chrome on my iPhone, even if it might unlock superior features?

Yes it is for many people. They do not want to risk the chance of their tool not working for some nebulous chance at a better experience. The vast majority of people are not tinkerer's at heart.

The rest of your questions can all be answered with "Yes", as long as the tool does as expected. We are literally all in the 1% of people just to begin with by even configuring software in the first place.

The example of Chrome on Windows given above seems to belie this claim. The "nebulous chance to use a better product" you refer to was apparently enough to trickle down to the non-tinkerers. Who's to say the same wouldn't be the case for eg Google Assistant vs Siri?