Comment by brailsafe
18 hours ago
> The bashing on apple for this "to sell more apps" is nonsense, Apple originally designed and intended for HTML5 apps to beat Flash.
Whatever their apparent intention might have been ~15 years ago, it would be hard to argue that Apple puts a lot of resources into trying to protect its fiefdom. I don't think it would be all that different to suggest they (Apple) wouldn't try to control how people pay for apps by preventing app developers to offer a web-based payment option, on the basis of their past relationship with HTML5. A huge component in their success with iPhones has been control over the entire supply chain.
That said, it is a somewhat conspiratorial take that is probably better explained by laziness, bad choices, and control over proprietary UX patterns (that suck), than generalized competition, but it's not much of a reach. They also compute localStorage limits differently and have always diverged for stupid reasons
Interestingly enough Apple has put a ton of effort into Safari recently and have shot up to the top of the interop leaderboards.
https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025?stable
I don't really buy the conspiratorial takes either. I think they just had different priorities for their browser.
I think it's fair to say that Safari is no longer late. That comes with 3 caveats.
1. Safari isn't updated independently of the OS, so users who don't update or whose iPhones don't get updates anymore will be forever stuck on old Safari versions.
2. Being timely on new features does little to alleviate the pain that comes from all the old messiness.
3. Different priorities driven by economic incentives of protecting their 30% cut. Fair enough. But shutting out alternative web engines on iOS is definitely a dick move.
And what else can drive priorities for software development in a company with virtually infinite resources?
Unfortunately this is more misdirection from Apple.
When they were asking for community input as to what developers wanted to be a part of interop 2025 that then had to go for a further non-public round with the browser makers.
Apple then proceeded to veto all of the most popular suggestions and insist that then running grep over their codebase in order to fix a comparability bug [1] with chrome and Firefox version 1 was somehow a legitimate contribution precisely so they could game the interop stats that you’re citing here.
The moment you look at the real statistics (https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...) where Apple can’t game the system the story becomes much clearer and the criticism much more justified.
[1] https://web.dev/blog/interop-2025 (scroll down to the text decoration topic)
> The moment you look at the real statistics (https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&label=experimental&ali...) where Apple can’t game the system the story becomes much clearer and the criticism much more justified.
This is misleading. The “real statistics” you link to include non-standard, Blink-only APIs like Web Bluetooth and Web USB. These are not web standards. Google proposed them and both Mozilla and Apple have rejected them on security and privacy grounds. Google have not been able to convince anybody to implement them.
Web standards are not simply whatever Google unilaterally decide they want. Standards require consensus.
1 reply →