I don’t think this speaks to intention, the investments that have been made and are still being made bring with them a cost, both in a monetary sense and in other ways. Regardless of the separate question with regards to them having been able to catch up with the competition.
A generous interpretation, with the presupposed premise that they haven’t been able to catch up, could say that it warrants a more favorable interpretation of their intentions if they were willing to invest after having lagged behind for so long, because the required investment would be greater and the pay off less clear.
> (bringing them to a level still behind competitors)
Let’s be honest here. When people say something like this, they’re mainly thinking of Chrome/Chromium-based browsers.
Google is known to have no qualms supporting certain things that both Mozilla and Apple are uncomfortable with, while at the same time implementing a bunch of stuff that isn’t standardized.
On the whole, Safari/WebKit has roughly met Mozilla’s level of support for frameworks and APIs and even surpassed Mozilla on certain things (especially desktop). Of course if the benchmark is just Chromium, then none of it will ever be enough, then again, Mozilla doesn’t seem to catch a lot of flack for drawing a line in the sand in terms of support.
Other than that, Safari seems to be doing great on test suites/benchmarks that focus on progress such as the annual Interop. Consistently[0] keeping up[1] over the years[2], and sometimes coming out on top[3].
> has a lot more to do with staving off legal threats to their 30% cut on native apps (e.g. the Epic lawsuit) than any benevolence towards the web platform.
I tend to stay clear with attributing maleficence or less than generous intentions without something substantial to back it up. Especially when behavior seems to contradict such attributions.
For example, if that where the main motivator then I’d expect a bare minimum approach and Apple dragging their feet, like we see with DMA implementations (e.g., only allowing what must be allowed in the EU instead of globally), instead we not only see improvement of PWA support, in part beyond what Mozilla supports, but also direct contributions of standards that PWAs rely on in the form of improvements..
0: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021?stable
1: https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023?stable