> Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and functions as a pressure release valve that enables standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain relevance.

This is a strange rant about Apple specifically, because Apple, Google (the author's former employer), and Microsoft (the author's current employer) collectively monopolize both web browser market share and consumer OS market share on desktop and mobile. There is no competition, there are no web standards anymore except what the monopolistic browser vendors decide, and indeed the WHATWG successfully executed a coup d'état against the W3C standards body. Worldwide, Android has higher market share than iOS, Windows higher than macOS. I'm not trying to defend Apple, but I do think the author neglects to mention the essential role of his employers in this monopoly, destruction of competition, and assault on standards.

The author calls WebKit a "sham" of an open source project, not mentioning that Google used to participate in WebKit but then abandoned it, forking into a Google-controlled browser engine. Google's dominance of the web is so complete that even Microsoft was forced to abandon its own browser engine and adopt Google's. And we've seen the results of that: websites that only work in Chromium—thereby forcing browser vendors to adopt Chromium, furthering Google's monopolization—and worse, the debilitation of web browser extensions via the deprecation of Manifest V2. And if Apple doesn't happen to implement whatever Google decides, the author complains about it; why doesn't the author complain about how Google is driving all of the so-called "standards"? Why is the author not complaining about the lack of diversity in web browser engines? And even Firefox is ultimately beholden to Google, ironically arguing in court to preserve Google's monopoly so that Firefox can continue to receive Google money, Mozilla's main source of financing, even while Google continues to monopolize and force browser engines other than its own into obscurity. Firefox is a shell of its former self.

Again, this is not a defense of Apple. But Google and Microsoft are equally bad. Apple is at worst a duopolist, so how about talking about the other side of the duopoly?

The author seems to think that Apple is specifically targeting the web, trying to undermine it, but as a Mac user and developer for almost 2 decades, I don't think this is specific to the web or Safari. Whether it's malice or incompetence, Apple has been undermining the Mac too. Their software quality overall is now atrocious. And their UI is becoming atrocious too with "Liquid Glass", on all of Apple's platforms. If you focus only on Safari and WebKit, you're missing the forest for the trees.