Comment by llmslave2
1 day ago
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.
Jim once again you are jumping in to defend Apple no matter what the topic is. It’s a really strange behaviour yet again.
Since you seemed to be in such a rush to offer a defence it seems you misread what the chart was… like every other time this topic comes up over the past few years.
That chart is *the official web platform standards* and shows which tests ONLY FAIL IN A SINGLE BROWSER
So this idea of “oh no it’s just evil Google doing their own thing doesn’t actually apply here because that’s literally already accounted for by the fact that it’s how many of the official web standards only fail in one browser.
I don’t know why you keep glossing over this no matter how many times it has been politely pointed out to you.
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