Sure, it does have some benefits. Like lower energy consumption, I hear good things about JavaScriptCore (Safari's JS engine), that said, so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory.
The features missing thing was true years ago, but Apple significantly increased their investment in Safari about 3 years ago and it really gained ground. If you subtract all the Chrome-invented features, they aren't too far off.
And some of them, like WebGPU, are Khronos IP that Apple has no reason to object to except on an ideological and profit-maximizing basis. I wonder why Apple would deliberately avoid an API that might obsolete the requirement for games to use the App Store? Do you have any ideas?
The problem is that when Chrome came out it was heavily marketed/targeted towards developers. Developers took it up and then built websites in & for Chrome. The end result is many websites work better in Chrome than Firefox or Safari. It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency.
I'm doing my part to break the cycle by supporting the underdog by using Safari as my daily driver & developing primarily for Safari & Firefox.
Or a viscous cycle of continued development. There are definitely things that Chrome does that nobody else should copy, but there's also a lot of stuff like WebGPU and WebRTC that should be standard. Firefox doesn't drag their feet in the same way Apple does, and they certainly don't resist standardization by trying to limit what a user can do on their device.
I have no real love for Google. ChromeOS sucks, Android is only tolerable when you de-Google it, and YouTube is perpetually regressing to a shittier state. But Chromium the browser is great, and it's the only browser I install on my Mac or Linux box when I get set up at work. I want to love Firefox like I used to, but Mozilla as a business is just about as functionally inept as Google or Apple at this point. I'm done trying to be a browser ideologue, I'm embracing post-browser realism here.
Sure, it does have some benefits. Like lower energy consumption, I hear good things about JavaScriptCore (Safari's JS engine), that said, so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory.
The features missing thing was true years ago, but Apple significantly increased their investment in Safari about 3 years ago and it really gained ground. If you subtract all the Chrome-invented features, they aren't too far off.
> so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory.
Be careful when listing those features. Many of those "encroaching" are Chrome-only non-standards
And some of them, like WebGPU, are Khronos IP that Apple has no reason to object to except on an ideological and profit-maximizing basis. I wonder why Apple would deliberately avoid an API that might obsolete the requirement for games to use the App Store? Do you have any ideas?
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A fact that appears to be lost on the majority of users that have a say in what browser they use: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
The problem is that when Chrome came out it was heavily marketed/targeted towards developers. Developers took it up and then built websites in & for Chrome. The end result is many websites work better in Chrome than Firefox or Safari. It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency.
I'm doing my part to break the cycle by supporting the underdog by using Safari as my daily driver & developing primarily for Safari & Firefox.
> It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency.
Or a viscous cycle of continued development. There are definitely things that Chrome does that nobody else should copy, but there's also a lot of stuff like WebGPU and WebRTC that should be standard. Firefox doesn't drag their feet in the same way Apple does, and they certainly don't resist standardization by trying to limit what a user can do on their device.
I have no real love for Google. ChromeOS sucks, Android is only tolerable when you de-Google it, and YouTube is perpetually regressing to a shittier state. But Chromium the browser is great, and it's the only browser I install on my Mac or Linux box when I get set up at work. I want to love Firefox like I used to, but Mozilla as a business is just about as functionally inept as Google or Apple at this point. I'm done trying to be a browser ideologue, I'm embracing post-browser realism here.
6 replies →