This is a wild statement. For an individual user, what is the point of browser diversity if you are locked into your browser by OS? A weird number of people here are okay with this particular example of anti-consumer behavior simply because it offsets the chrome monopoly. That's not a healthy web, that's competing layers of dysfunction.
There's no reason for Safari to have a sub-par experience except for the laziness of some web developers.
How about a browser with a captive userbase that has less incentive to stay up to date with web standards?
Your argument is that we should expect developers to target/test their app on many different browsers where any random CSS property behaves differently. They will have to buy a device just for this purpose. Because it is obviously developers who should have to pick up the slack here, not Apple.
Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.
> Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.
It has supported them since iOS 16.4. The issue is they made enabling them so high friction for users that you're better off publishing a WebView wrapper to the App Store instead. More work for app devs, worse experience for users, but great for Apple because it's still on the App Store.
Though an interesting consequence is that allowing iOS users to install firefox but not chrome would be a strict improvement over the current situation.
If diversity fails to occur naturally, some amount of forced diversity helps to keep the ecosystem healthy.
However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.
To me, chromium is the kernel and the browsers are the distro. We do like that there is a shared kernel in linux, yes?
I acknowledge that this is reductionist, as there exists another lack of diversity for consumer operating systems, in there really only being Windows and Mac / iOS and Android.
And the Linux kernel isn't a good analogy because the web is a standard, not an implementation. In that sense it's more akin to UNIX, or IP-based networking.
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/chromium/contri...
Still, there is a difference between contribution and control, which I hope and dream can and will change.
https://www.learninternetgrow.com/who-controls-chromium/
I will add that I appreciate your response, generally, but especially the missing hyperbole. This civil discourse is very preferable.
Linux is GPLv2, it has many outside contributors, it was built from scratch, and it has Linus as a neutral party as the final decider in terms of the direction of the project and what gets included.
Chromium is a mix of LGPL, BSD, and other licenses depending on the component. Chromium was originally forked from WebKit; it isn’t a from scratch project. Google decides what changes get merged to Chromium.