Safari is today's Internet Explorer.
Chrome is today’s Internet Explorer both in terms of market share, and use of non standard features to push a companies dominance.
Safari is today’s Internet explorer in terms of being bundled with systems as a requirement.
Ultimately, these analogies trivialize the actual state of the browser ecosystem in the 90s and early 2000s, because the computing landscape was so different.
It’s always been about server and infrastructure access. But beyond that, the Prism leaks mostly applied to telecoms.
A lot of conspiracy minded folks failed to see the forest for the trees because they failed to grok the entire infrastructure between the device in their homes and the greater world.
It’s much easier to think the device in your hand is betraying oneself than to think about the immense number of other components like telecoms, servers, MitM etc that comprise modern communication.
But those are parlor tricks. Yes, the United States forces Apple and Microsoft to turn over data on a regular basis; everyone from India to Brazil demands the same thing. It's non-unique. The United States and it's FIVE-EYES partners clearly have more capabilities on the table; they literally control these businesses, up to a certain point. If you're unwilling to acquit telecoms and server providers for installing backdoors, then it's a no-brainer to implicate Microsoft, Google and Apple for knowledgeably shipping compromised client software too.
Even though other options exist “technically”, users on the two (3?) popular mobile and desktop OS experience a great deal of platform friction when opting to make their own choice (if at all possible like on iOS).
Which, imho isn’t any more optimal than WebKit or Blink.
Granted, perhaps if the duopoly didn’t exist, it could get more resources. After all they did once dethrone IE6, but I think that was as much Microsoft’s blunder as it was Mozilla’s success. I’m not sure Apple or Google are making the same blunders today.
We've crystalized around a specific role for each browser (e.g. Chromium brings in whatever webstandards it needs to pretend to be an OS, Safari tries to keep up while also sneaking Apple ecosystem facilities, Firefox... keeping up?) and there is no real innovation. Of course, we have better ways to not-block-ads, scrape user telemetry, or ai-whatever-that's-good-for... but nothing substantial towards improvements for the people using browsers.
The browser space is stagnating.
I'm sure it's wrong to "hold the web back", but I'm also afraid of when Google finally takes over the internet. Because those "don't be evil"-days are in the past.
Food for thought:
Have you ever considered that the demand for this functionality in the browser only exists because it is forbidden natively? I've got no use for cross-platform 3D APIs, game streaming functionality or even WebRTC in my browser when it comes down to it; but it makes plain sense that people want to push this functionality to the browser because Apple resists it natively. That's just supply/demand at work.
I’m talking specifically about having access to the bluetooth stack, having access to the device’s vibrations, etc.
Chrome's reckless and indifferent approach of including every API under the sun is being used by advertisers today to track users through comprehensive browser fingerprinting.