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Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome

293 pointsposted 3 days ago

568 Comments

geuis

3 days ago

I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched. It was amazing. It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember back then to artisnaly get IE to behave like a moderately modern (for then) browser.

Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking. Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution.

Now these days the only thing keeping me tied to chrome is finger muscle memory. The death of manifest v2 is the 2nd to last nail.

midtake

2 days ago

As I remember it, Chrome was way faster than Firefox, but I was in high school and probably stupid. Firefox wouldn't catch up to Chrome until Quantum, which was amazing when it first dropped, but now Firefox is slow again.

da_chicken

2 days ago

No, Chrome was way faster than Firefox. You were not wrong. It grew right alongside HTML5, and Chrome put a lot of effort into V8. Firefox was definitely better than IE or Safari, but Chrome could do everything that Firefox did without the memory usage that Firefox had. It's funny how memory usage is now abysmal on Chrome, too.

pjjpo

2 days ago

> Firefox is slow again

Currently I am feeling this too but only for one site, GitHub. Which is where is spend most time during the day...

Quite sad, I don't know if it's GitHub's fault or not but Firefox needs to figure out what's going wrong here soon or people like me may be literally forced to Chromium.

Yizahi

2 days ago

I've tried Chrome too on that wave of hype, including on some pretty slow machines. Like the Eee PC, and for a few months, not few hours btw. It wasn't perceptibly faster than Firefox, at it had its own slowdowns, just a bit differently. For example as I remember, Chrome often rendered a page visibly faster than FF, but it was actually unusable and frozen static "image" of sorts for a few brief moments, and only then it become active. FF had a slower time rendering, but at all times it was not frozen statically, just some elements were loading. Things like that. In the end, I returned to FF not because Google had some bad rep back then, but purely because Firefox was better and more pleasant to use. I'm still baffled how that "FF - slow!" campaign worked out eventually.

roryirvine

2 days ago

Yes, they were both much of a muchness when taken as a whole, though some people definitely did find that one or the other was notably faster for their typical workloads.

But Chrome won the vast bulk of its market share not because it was technically better in every way, but because they spent much more on marketing at the exact time IE entered terminal decline.

mmcgaha

2 days ago

I hope you are talking about Opera?

adithyassekhar

2 days ago

Opera peaked at 12. I had it installed even till 2016? The later versions completely lost the plot for what a browser is.

Also had safari 5(?) on windows because I liked seeing a progress bar for page load. Which opera 12 also had.

Maybe I just like progress bars.

Yizahi

2 days ago

Both of them, Firefox and Opera were like that for years.

ImJamal

2 days ago

My high school blocked websites with a proxy set in IE. To bypass this we would install Firefox on a flash drive and run Firefox from it. When Chrome came out everybody switched instantly because it worked so much better for our use case. Maybe a regularly installed Firefox could have been competitive, but my first use of Chrome was a night and day difference compared with Firefox.

jdub

3 days ago

klustregrif

3 days ago

Back when Phoenix launched it was not a reliable alternative to IE or Opera, it was more like a sign of protest. You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.

I remember developing web pages with the purpose of ensuring they would work in both, so Phoenix was my main driver, but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE, it was always a monumental effort. Sites with buttons for “go here for pheonix/go here for ie” where common. My friends who worked in the windows ecosystem mostly saw Phoenix as some “crazy hipster trend” and didn’t have a care as to if anything they made worked in it or not.

wodenokoto

2 days ago

There was half a decade between the Mozilla Browser stopped being called Phoenix and the launch of Chrome. Firefox usage peaked at some 30% of desktops the year after Chrome was released.

It's not like Firefox wasn't a "viable" browser at the time. It was quite mainstream.

yoz-y

2 days ago

Moving from IE to Firefox was a much more memorable experience than going from Firefox to Chrome. But yeah, first Chrome was fast. I’m quite sure any of the today’s browsers would be fast if running in the pre-react world though.

2 days ago

> due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.

Yes, but unless you wanted to exclude >90% of users, you could still not ignore it...

bryanrasmussen

2 days ago

I never said one should ignore them, I just implied the post seemed to slam Firefox ("Phoenix") for a situation that was IE's fault.

Gud

3 days ago

3 days ago

Google Chrome launch comic for nostalgia: https://scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

Also good context for why the launch of Chrome was such a big deal.

sjamaan

2 days ago

Obligatory updated comic link: https://contrachrome.com/

A good context for why the market dominance of Chrome is such a big deal.

rob74

2 days ago

> Node.js was direct outcome of that revolution

And things went downhill from there...

pjmlp

2 days ago

Yeah, this is one area where I look forward to Rewrite in Go and Rewrite in Rust keep doubling down, unfortunely Rewrite in Java or Rewrite in C# are grandpa technologies and not fashionable.

rienbdj

2 days ago

It’s a shame.

Rust compile times are an issue for agent throughput.

C# can approach Rust speeds with some effort, but generally has faster compile times and is less verbose.

weezing

2 days ago

>I'm old enough to have been in the industry when Chrome launched.

So basically not very old. Also Firefox existed long before and had pretty significant marketshare. In some countries it was well above 50%.

dv_dt

2 days ago

I went back to Firefox on desktop and phones when it was clear Chrome was going the way of IE in terms of being too large a market share for it's own good or the good of users and developers. These days its much better than when Chrome first came out, but I also toy with librewolf or other even more user oriented alternate browsers.

boxed

3 days ago

> Chrome was fast, did the basic job of correctly rendering pages, and its js runtime was groundbreaking

I think you're misremembering or you didn't try Safari at the time. The first version of Chrome was not very different from Safari which it was just a shell of anyway.

reichstein

2 days ago

The first Chrome did use a fork of WebCore, the HTML part of WebKit, as its rendering engine, but added its own V8 JavaScript engine. The speed of JavaScript was the main differentiator. And _that_ was very different from Safari, and every other existing browser ... The quote is correct.

V8 kept getting even faster, including adding faster RegExps, which pushed the other browsers to speed up their JS too. Firefox is now using that RegExp implementation too, even if they're not using V8.

WebKit was itself a fork of the KHTML browser engine. And just like WebKit diverged from KHTML, Chrome diverged from WebKit.

kalleboo

2 days ago

My memory as a Mac user switching to Chrome when it came out was that the performance was basically the same as Safari. I'm sure V8 was faster than JavaScriptCore, but the web wasn't nearly as JavaScript-heavy as it is today so it wasn't something you noticed in normal use. Maybe if you were a heavy gmail-in-the-browser user.

The main reason I stuck with Chrome was the tab isolation. WebKit was super crashy back then, with Safari crashing several times a day just browsing the web. In Chrome only one tab would crash instead of the whole browser. This was one of the original selling points in addition to performance.

I switched back to Safari when I got my first Retina MacBook Pro, since Chrome had terrible performance in HiDPI for the first two years of retina Macs.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

Melatonic

a day ago

You sure you were still using IE when Chrome launched and not some other browser ?

voshond

2 days ago

I hope ladybird will take be the same type of successor to chrome, but this time not in the hands of a corporate organisation.

yareally

3 days ago

3 days ago

Either way welcome to the resistance!

procone

3 days ago

> Honestly Opus 5.5 had gotten good enough I've been considering a project to have it build a new browser based on the open source Chrome and keeps the v2 in place. Just customize it specifically for my preferences and call it done. No more unexpected breaking updates. Just a browser that does its job and nothing else.

I mean, helium exists. https://github.com/imputnet/helium

azuanrb

3 days ago

Kinda bugs me when people who are against Safari/Apple are also the same people pushing Chrome/Google. Sometimes it feels like web developers these days are basically Chrome developers.

2 days ago

Apple already announced it, but the work to port stuff like Chrome’s UI shell simply hasn’t been done.

Look at the developer blogs: https://blogs.igalia.com/gyuyoung/2024/08/08/chrome-ios-brow...

You can also compile your own, with ‘use_blink = true’ ‘in your .setup-gn file’: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...

leptons

3 days ago

>As soon as Apple is forced to allow Chrome on iOS, I won’t even have that opt-out available to me.

Those are quite the mental gymnastics you're doing here. You know, you could just choose not to install Chrome, right?

>If you want to use Google, they have a whole mobile OS you can use.

If someone bought an i-device, they don't get to choose, Safari is forced on them.

>Why take away my choice as a consumer that prefers Safari?

Calm down, nobody is taking away your choice by allowing Chrome to run its own browser engine on iOS. You're totally delusional and making shit up that would never happen.

Apple is the only one that's forcing you to do anything. They are the ones that took away your ability to choose. You seriously sound totally brainwashed.

amazingman

3 days ago

The implication was that website makers won't be forced to support Safari because they'll just decide to require Chrome.

soraminazuki

2 days ago

It's not even implied, it's very explicitly stated in the second sentence but GP chose to attack a straw man anyways.

leptons

2 days ago

If Safari weren't a piece of intentionally hobbled crap, maybe it could compete.

Maybe Apple shouldn't hold back web standards to force people to install native apps where Apple can extract 30% of all purchases from the apps.

azuanrb

2 days ago

Hold back Chrome standards, you mean? Features that work in Chrome but not in other browsers. There are even features that work better in Safari than Firefox. Not everything Chrome pushes should automatically become the standard.

Personally, I don’t care about most of those Chrome specific features. I use Safari because it’s fast and battery efficient. The fact that it’s not made by a company whose main business is advertising is a nice bonus.

Sure, Apple has an advertising business too, but it’s nowhere near the scale of Google’s.

leptons

2 days ago

This is how it actually works:

Browser vendors come up with improvements.

The W3C board (which Apple and Google are a part of) gets to vote on the implementations and suggest changes.

The new feature either becomes a standard or not.

Apple wields their power here to block any new feature that could make a web browser compete with native apps where Apple can extract 30% of all purchases made through apps.

Apple isn't making suggestions for any changes to the proposals, they just block any new feature that might let browsers become as functional as native apps, purely out of greed.

soraminazuki

a day ago

And just in case this isn't enough, let's just hide the install option even deeper than before. On iOS the path is now something along the lines of

1. Tap site's domain name 2. Meatballs menu 3. Share 4. More (Meatballs again) 5. Scroll until you find "Add to Home Screen" 6. Leave "Open as Web App" switched on 7. Add (upper right corner)

There is no obvious install prompt, and no clear browser level affordance. Nothing in the flow even tells you if PWA functionality is supported by the website. You might end up with just a weird shortcut that opens a URL full screen.

desolate_muffin

2 days ago

Thanks I hate it

thegiogi

2 days ago

Im not sure, but I regularly add apps to dock or Home Screen. Not sure it’s the same.

cyanydeez

2 days ago

yeah, that might just be urls masquerading on the PWA to shade Apples complicity in hating a web standard.

pjmlp

2 days ago

They are, we are one step away to rename Web as the ChromeOS Platform.

Additional note those are also the same people pushing Electron garbage, Chrome in a box.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

tcfhgj

3 days ago

I push Firefox not chrome though

TheDong

3 days ago

First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk.

Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.

Google Chromebooks come with Chrome as the only default browser, but you can still run Firefox on Chromebooks just fine (even in two different ways, the supported android app version, and the semi-supported linux terminal + launching firefox that way).

Heck, iOS's monopolistic behavior is so bad that multiple regions (the EU + Japan) have already ruled against their behavior, though in reality Apple has complied in a way that makes it impossible to actually make a second browser engine for iOS still (going against the spirit of the law, but the courts haven't caught up to them yet).

Safari is also an awful browser in that it requires someone to buy an expensive machine to see if their site works on it.

I can run a windows trial copy in a VM to see if my site works in IE, I can run Chrome or Firefox on linux to verify if my site works in them. I can install a free android emulator on any common OS to see that my site renders right in those.

But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.

And even worse, Safari is the browser with the largest number of rendering bugs and quirks currently, while also having a huge number of users (since iOS users can't install another browser), so any web developers are basically forced to shell out for apple hardware.

simondotau

3 days ago

The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice. As the only major platform that hasn’t been functionally taken over by Chrome/chromium, iOS represents the last real defensive line against Google owning the web.

Remember, you are a web developer, not a chrome platform developer. Don’t be complicit in Google’s slow-moving coup.

The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform. Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.

ryandrake

3 days ago

> Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.

Wild how low the bar has gotten. The web would be so much better if there were ~10 browsers, each with around 10% market share. Web sites would have to suck it up and put some effort into browser testing and compatibility. And stop relying on features of a single browser. I remember writing software that had to work on over a dozen platforms. But developers today can’t manage to support more than one browser?

Gigachad

3 days ago

It's been a long time since I've encountered an issue with a particular browser. After IE was gone, unless you were using bleeding edge features everything that works in one browser works everywhere else.

If your website doesn't work on one browser, you probably need to raise a bug report for that browser rather than change your site.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

doginasuit

3 days ago

> 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.

ryandrake

3 days ago

Developers should develop for the web, not one particular browser. There are desktop and native mobile applications that manage to work across multiple operating systems and cpu architectures, and you’re telling me web developers can’t test their shit on a handful of browsers and configurations?

Rohansi

3 days ago

You're correct but it's not always this simple. Apple drags their feet with the implementation of some standards and sometimes there is nothing to fall back on. Many of those standards are just bringing functionality available in native apps to the web so we can only speculate that they do it to keep apps on the App Store. One good example is push notifications: they took a long time to support it, and the "Add to Home Screen" requirement makes it almost worthless.

simondotau

2 days ago

That’s not a good example, that’s literally the worst example you could have possibly chosen. Push notifications are an anti-feature. It is a disgusting embarrassment that they were ever considered part of the web platform, and I admire Apple for rightfully resisting it.

Safari is a better browser because it doesn’t support them.

Rohansi

2 days ago

I see that reaction a lot but it doesn't make sense to me. Yes, there are apps that abuse them, but that is why it requires your permission. Exactly like how native apps require your permission to send you push notifications. So why are push notifications only acceptable in native apps?

> 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.

crab_galaxy

3 days ago

100vh, PWAs, and full screen support that isn’t absolute garbage aren’t exactly bleeding edge features

simondotau

3 days ago

Being able to block trackers and not use ridiculous amounts of RAM aren't exactly bleeding edge features either

philwelch

3 days ago

The user could have bought an Android phone instead.

However, if Apple allowed different browser engines, eventually no one would be able to choose anything but Chrome regardless of what phone they bought.

verdverm

3 days ago

One analogy I think of every time this comes up on HN is the kernel and linux. Why do we not speak of a similar lack of diversity?

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.

simondotau

3 days ago

The Linux kernel isn't a good comparison because kernel development is not led by a corporation with its own distinct commercial interests. Sure Linux a monoculture, but it's a uniquely healthy one.

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.

verdverm

3 days ago

I do share your thoughts and sentiments at other times (and peer commenter too). The contrarian in me likes to offer up this analogy, though I interpret it much more loosely than the HN critiques I earn each time. To me there is an argument I feel can made that a shared "browser" kernel has some advantage in, for example, security. More eyes, more contributors, which number more organizations than Google these days

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.

TheTon

3 days ago

Linux isn’t a good analogy to Chromium due to the differences in history, licensing, and project governance.

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.

TheCoelacanth

2 days ago

It's a balancing act.

Lack of browser diversity is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of the only browser vendor.

Lack of browser choice is bad because it puts too much control in the hands of whatever browser vendor they use.

We need both for a healthy web.

simondotau

a day ago

2 days ago

Reynard exists for those who can sideload or jailbreak iOS:

https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser

Real Gecko on iOS

themanualstates

2 days ago

simondotau

3 days ago

[flagged]

leptons

3 days ago

>I reject your assertion because it promulgates the lie of "browser choice".

The only lie being told in all of this is the one Apple tells when you install Firefox on an iOS device. It's not Firefox you're installing, it's Safari. Every browser on iOS is Safari - you have no choice at all.

>The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.

Then put your money where your mouth is. If Safari can compete then let other browser engines on iOS. If it can't then it deserves to die. Artificially inflating it by forcing on iOS isn't the utopia you think it is.

>A bit of forced diversity is wildly preferable over another collapse towards monoculture.

Apple iOS is a monocoulture - every browser is Safari whether you want it or not.

There's no argument you can make to escape the fact that Apple is helping nobody but Apple by forcing Safari on iOS.

bigyabai

3 days ago

> The health of the web as an open platform is defined by browser diversity, not browser choice.

Says who? I certainly don't agree with that statement, the "web as an open platform" was unrecognizable when proprietary clients were the norm.

simondotau

3 days ago

3 days ago

This (incredibly lame) campaign is only referring to macOS, not iOS. The grandparent asserted that "iOS lost."

On macOS, Google plays with a lot of dark patterns to get people to install Chrome. I can't count the number of times I've visited my sister or parents and seen Chrome on their Mac, and their explanation is "because Google told me I needed it."

That's not choice either.

bigyabai

3 days ago

Sure it's choice. I use Firefox on Linux; I have to forego a handful of websites, but nothing is a dealbreaker. YouTube works, Gmail works, my life isn't interrupted without Chrome installed.

It sounds like your family is using Chrome because it's more convenient. It's 2026, we can't blame anyone given what Safari spent the past decade doing. Apple does not provide convenient Safari sync for Windows and Android devices, which comprise the majority of smart devices sold. They don't support the normie extensions that people use on Firefox and Chrome. Safari lags behind Chrome in features, WebKit lags behind Blink in cross-platform support, and Apple doesn't allow Safari forks to boost their market share. Apple draws very clear and arbitrary lines in the sand, and then redrafts them once they finally change their mind about PWAs or notification support. By the time it reaches Safari, your parents have been using the feature in Chrome for 8 months.

We may have to agree to disagree. Apple's incessant marketing for their own inferior, ad-ridden packin software is part of why I left macOS to begin with. It's infantilizing to be told that I can't be trusted to make a smart decision, when Apple's own suggestion is a half baked, self-serving alternative. I empathize with Mac users that ignore Safari because that's exactly what I did on my Mac, too. I'd have been using Chrome if Firefox wasn't an option. And I still would, because WebKit is a dog's dinner on my OS.

simondotau

3 days ago

Just because you are able to make informed choices doesn't mean everyone can. Nor should everyone be expected to.

If you think my mother or sister have the faintest idea what a web browser is, or how one might be better than another, then you haven't met my mother or sister. To suggest that they made any kind of informed choice is absurd. They were influenced by marketing, plain and simple.

Personally, I'd be fascinated to see an in-depth study showing what percentage of web users chose their browser based on true/objective criteria, as opposed to marketing, brand preference, herd mentality, or wrong assumptions. Is exposing someone to marketing really what we mean by choice?

It's worth remembering that choice isn't necessarily the pure good we intuitively believe it to be. Western consumers have an extraordinary choice of food, yet that hasn't necessarily translated into healthier diets. This is especially problematic when the choices themselves are shaped by corporations whose interests aren't well aligned with the consumer's.

bigyabai

3 days ago

99% of Mac users are installing Chrome or Firefox using Safari. They are objectively assessing it in a real-world test, and deciding that Safari lost. You're lucky there's no convenient way to uninstall Safari from the OS, the user telemetry would be a bloodbath.

Apple is a corporation too, and they have their own (quite sizable) financial interest in gimping the web as an alternative to native app distribution. Apple used to recognize this, and prioritized interoperability with OpenGL and OpenCL as a hedge against the web becoming the only cross-platform API that the Mac supported. The Apple of today has abandoned those interests and lost all pretenses of humility. They are equally as mask-off as Google or Microsoft is, pushing Metal and WebKit just as shamelessly as Microsoft crams the corpse of DirectX into things. This isn't a charity project, it is another way for Apple to control iOS software distribution, their primary service cash cow, Tim Cook's pride and joy. Apple is happy to give Google money for their Apple Intelligence integration, this isn't a grudge that they take seriously.

Apple could have supported KHTML upstream, and killed Blink in the cradle. They could have made Safari a billion-dollar cross-platform product, and won. They made this horrible bed, and now they want to users to moralize Google's victory. Why would anyone, knowledgeable or naive, insult themselves by standing with Apple here?

vrganj

2 days ago

This is why the EU forces the Browser Choice Dialog: https://developer.apple.com/support/browser-choice-screen/

themanualstates

leptons

3 days ago

>The only people who complain about Safari are lazy web developers who fail to appreciate what it means for the web to be an open platform

Maybe you don't understand that I have to spend several hundred dollars for the privilege to debug Safari's shitty bugs. That's FUCKED UP. It isn't "being lazy". I shouldn't have to spend money so I can cater to a shitty browser. And Apple does some weird-ass things with their browser that make it wonky, and you can't debug some things without an apple device. Touch events are one particular iffy thing Apple does differently, because "think different" apparently means "we do whatever the fuck we want so pay us to debug things that shouldn't need debugging".

>Testing your website on two browser engines (and accepting that not everything is going to work perfectly in both) is literally the lowest bar expected of you.

Give me $500 to buy an Apple device and I'll fix things so it works for the shitty browser iOS users are forced to use. It has not a single fucking thing to do with "being lazy", and you're a shitty person for suggesting that's how this works.

2 days ago

No shit, shelock. Of course a real device is better. But 99% of iOS problems I've been able to solve using Browserstack (paid for by my work). It's the 1% of iOS bugs that they had to buy me an iPhone and a Macbook to fix. I don't get to use those devices to debug my own projects. That requires me to spend a lot of my own money. I've never had any problem with any touch events on android browsers - but I'm sure I would if Safari were on Android, because Apple is the only one that does crazy shit with their mobile browser because they tHiNk DiFfErEnT.

simondotau

2 days ago

My previous response stands as a perfectly adequate response to your last post.

leptons

2 days ago

No, you're just an Apple shill. "Incredibly cheap" is not cheap, it's still quite a few hundreds of dollars - I have to buy an iOS device and an Apple desktop/laptop to run the Safari debugger to debug the iOS device... so it gets expensive really quickly to debug a shit browser that is intentionally hobbled by a greedy company.

Tell me you're not a web developer without telling me you're not a web developer. And if you are, you must be new here, or really bad at it. I've been developing websites for 30+ years, so I have no doubt I've been in this game and paying attention way longer than you have. Go have a seat over there, this pointless internet interaction is OVER.

simondotau

a day ago

Remarkably, it still remains a perfectly adequate response to (the substantive parts of) your latest post. Calm down and read it again.

leptons

a day ago

>Remarkably, it still remains a perfectly adequate response to (the substantive parts of) your latest post.

Only in your dim-witted head.

Go have a seat over there, this pointless internet interaction is OVER.

waterTanuki

3 days ago

Browser diversity is merely an after-effect of Apple having complete control over iOS, if it was profitable to let Google coup the entire web, they would do it in a heartbeat.

It's obvious Apple isn't doing this to "protect the open web" because if that was true, they wouldn't have stopped developing Safari for Windows.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

srcreigh

3 days ago

Agree that it should be easier to test on safari from other platforms.

But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.

I can’t make it website owners problem that their site doesn’t work on non-Google browser. Apple can.

Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.

Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.

thunderbong

3 days ago

IMHO, that also should be addressed from the legal perspective very strongly. But forcing Safari for every Apple owner is certainly not the solution.

simondotau

3 days ago

That's ridiculous. You can't solve a monoculture with the legal system. The only solution is forced diversity, and to that end, I congratulate Apple for being the last guardian of the web as a truly open platform.

(I still remember when communities like Hacker News were screaming and howling at Apple for daring to rid the web of Adobe Flash, a corporate-owned proprietary monoculture cluster-f**k of security vulnerabilities. The virtue of Apple's influence on the web is painfully obvious in hindsight.)

jdub

I said it was a business opportunity. Not necessarily a business opportunity for you personally. But if a gap in the market did exist, it would be an opportunity for Microsoft, or Meta, or Dell, or... I hear Firefox wanted to build a phone...

Timon3

2 days ago

Okay, and now let's finish the thought: why don't Microsoft, Meta, Dell and co. invest in this space?

HumblyTossed

3 days ago

So? There are TWO platforms to choose from. T.W.O.

Your argument ... isn't one.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

Gareth321

2 days ago

3 days ago

That is a weird alternative history. Even by Firefox 1.0, it was a dramatically better browser than MSIE in every conceivable metric -- except for support for Microsoft's proprietary extensions like VBScript, ActiveX, and NTLM auth support. (It also failed to replicate some of MSIE's most outrageously terrible bugs.)

When Chrome was released, Firefox was four years old and had already gained 33% market share with momentum on its side, mostly through word of mouth. Chrome was a bit better in some respects, a bit worse in others, but it had the Google marketing juggernaut allowing its market share to skyrocket.

freecodeio

2 days ago

chrome started picking up on firefox when they released 4.0 and started doing some heavy UI updates which made it feel chonky, whereas chrome was this smooth looking browser that paid attention to webview realestate by putting the tabs in the topbar

srcreigh

3 days ago

Not if ie6 is your only option

leptons

3 days ago

>But no way is it a good idea to let other browser engines onto the OS.

And giving Apple a monopoly is a better idea?

>Safari sucks but it’s the only thing stopping Chrome from taking over everything.

Forcing users to use the Safari browser engine when they install Firefox or anything else is not the way to protect anyone from anything. It's abusive in its own way. And Apple is not going to save anyone from Google. People are still using Google services through Safari, because they are services Apple either sucks at or doesn't offer.

>Im happy if Google never has that amount of control. We don’t know how bad it could have been, we have enough privacy issues already.

So you're fine giving over all control to Apple. Apple already has way too much control. Being on the W3C board, they use their power to block any browser API that could make web browsers more capable, which would cut into their native app mafia racket where they charge 30% of any purchase done through an app. They don't offer any alternatives, or any changes - they just squash anything they see as competitive to native apps. That's how fucked up they are. They are literally holding back progress for no good reason - not security, not for privacy, it's purely for their own greed.

bloppe

3 days ago

For testing one could use any other webkit browser. Most of them have similar rendering quirks to Safari.

wongarsu

3 days ago

Anecdotally that's not enough. I've deal with multiple quirks that only happen in Safari but not in linux-based webkit browsers

floydnoel

2 days ago

I'd be super interested to hear about those!

oneplane

3 days ago

They still have webkit builds for Windows and Linux etc, and you still don't need to buy anything special to run it. I think they also have a (mostly?) headless one, and a mini-browser which is intended to test the engine (so it doesn't have things like bookmarks or profiles or anything like that, a good fit). Similar options exist for FireFox and Chromium so it's not really a Safari/Webkit special. Usually gets used when you use a standard containerised browser testing CI step.

Either way, if someone is still manually testing their website instead of using a standard automated testing system you're probably not really in a league where this matters anyway.. and if they are, you probably have a device farm already.

Not sure where the "my thing is so important, I have to test it on a real device, but I can't pay for it" niche is.

lkbm

3 days ago

> Safari has the most obscene monopoly of any browser ever. IE 6 came pre-installed on windows machines, but you could always install Mosaic or such.

Mosaic was a fair bit earlier, but yeah, I ran Netscape 4 until Mozilla M18. Never used IE as my main browser in many years of Windows use.

EDIT: I guess Netscape 4 and Mozilla M18 were both pre-IE6, too, but still Mozilla/Firefox for the IE6 era.

ch_sm

3 days ago

I‘m a long-time Safari user, and I still prefer it, but I nonetheless concur with everything you said in this post.

creatonez

2 days ago

> But Apple doesn't give me a legal way to freely run an iOS simulator nor even a macOS VM on my linux machine, I have to pay money, to buy their hardware to see if my site will work on Safari.

Try GNOME Web (Epiphany). It's webkit based, keeps up with Safari, doesn't disable access to the Safari devtools, and it sends the exact same user agent string. Should be essentially bug-for-bug compatible. It's otherwise an anemic browser, but you don't need much for testing.

Lammy

3 days ago

And lest anybody say it's not possible, I personally use a jailbreak tweak for this on my iPhone 11 / iOS 18 / Dopamine 3.0 that works flawlessly:

- https://github.com/guacforlife/ReynardDefault

- https://github.com/minh-ton/reynard-browser

robertoandred

3 days ago

chasil

3 days ago

Safari has real problems compared to Chrome on other platforms.

Primarily, incognito mode is difficult to access. Android allows a shortcut to be dropped to start in this mode.

Cut and paste is also awkward and uncomfortable in Safari compared to Android.

My first move on iOS is to install Firefox Focus, to get Safari's history under control.

hbn

3 days ago

If it's browser monopolies you're worried about, Apple beginning to allow other engines on iOS is going to instantly cement Chrome as the only browser in the game.

Apple's Safari enforcement is the only reason Chrome hasn't completely taken over.

Fun fact, the Google Chrome team was very aware of “browser chrome” as a term when they named their browser. They make that clear in the introductory comic.

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_24.html

joemi

3 days ago

iOS and iPadOS aren't the most dominant OSes, so therefore this can't be a monopoly.

foolswisdom

3 days ago

Apple isn't the most dominant business on earth, so maybe they can't do anything in violation of antitrust?

Not how it works. You define a relevant market, and the market of iPhone users (which a stable market, there are barriers to just switching to android tomorrow) can be used for evaluation.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

kyralis

3 days ago

This really is a grey area. You can't define "the market for electricians in my local town" and get any antitrust protections. Defining the market is a huge part of how politicians make this political and therefore something they can profit from.

ur-whale

3 days ago

iOS is a de-facto monopoly in the first place.

mingus88

3 days ago

Ridiculous take

Android’s global marketshare is 70% of mobile so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work

There is plenty of competition and choice to iOS, you just won’t find that on Apple hardware for reasons that have held for three decades

lxgr

3 days ago

> so you would have to declare a monopoly as “things I can run on an iPhone” as your position for that to work

Yes, that's pretty much it. A similar concern applies to Google and Android.

alt227

3 days ago

But you can install other OSes such as Graphene on Android phones, I dont think you can do that on iPhones can you?

https://grapheneos.org/

NekkoDroid

3 days ago

On a lot of Android devices you can't install ANY other custom OS because of locked down bootloaders. If you want GrapheneOS specifically that list is even narrower due to 1. official support 2. hardware security features just missing from the devices.

alt227

2 days ago

Can you install any other OS on any iPhone at all? As far as I am aware the best Android phone for installing non stock OSes on is the Google Pixel itself, Googles own 1st party phone.

floydnoel

2 days ago

I have seen Android booted on an iPhone. It was a long time ago, and I don’t think anybody continued working on it because... why do it when you could already buy an Android device?

Also, I'm curious... can you really install an OS besides Android on a Pixel, etc? AFAIK it's just different distros of Android, it's not like you could install BSD or something, right?

TheDong

18 hours ago

You can install various linux distros (not android distros) such as postmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch on a Pixel 3a

https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/sargo/

joemi

3 days ago

That's not a good analogy for the situation. A better grocery-based analogy would be if there's only a single Bob's Grocery in town (and for whatever reason more Bob's Groceries can't be opened) but there is a Sally's Groceries in town. Then Bob's Groceries isn't a monopoly. The only thing Bob's Groceries is a monopoly of is Bob's Groceries, which is a useless tautological argument.

Apple has neither a monopoly on phones nor on app marketplaces.

lxgr

2 days ago

protimewaster

3 days ago

Why would I use the global market share to determine if someone has a monopoly, though? It seems like a flawed way to determine how much choice consumers have.

For example, there's a monopoly on garbage service where I live, but he company with the monopoly has basically 0% of the world market.

snapcaster

3 days ago

How do you defend a company with 30% marketshare being a monopoly but the other company with 70% market share isn't? I can see the duopoly argument, but no idea how apple could be a monopoly by itself

bigyabai

3 days ago

Being a monopoly isn't illegal. So many discussions gloss over this fact, and people get at each other's throat over hypothetical abuses and ad-hominem scenarios.

Abusing a monopoly is illegal. Alphabet and Apple are both unquestionably monopoly businesses, and make incredible year-over-year revenue through market-damaging services like AdSense and the App Store. If they are allowed to continue, then other Fortune 500 businesses will copy their decisions, thereby destroying genuine market value that they provide in exchange for safer, more exploitative revenue streams.

In the case of AdSense and Apple's App Store both, I think that any fair FTC investigation would conclude they are shakedown services that harm the greater economy.

snapcaster

3 days ago

When nothing is stopping you from using an alternative i just don't see it

bigyabai

3 days ago

You could have said the same thing about Windows during it's antitrust case.

Fat lot of good that logic would do Microsoft when they were deliberately gimping competitors.

mithr

3 days ago

You couldn't have, though. Market share was a part of that Microsoft decision. At the time, they had 90-95% of the global market share — there were very few competitors. Apple has a higher though still in the 50s percentage-wise market share in the US, but a 20-30% share globally. Alternatives are much more viable in Apple's case, and often cheaper. You have to want an Apple device to get one, and it's very easy to get an Android instead and not lose out on any important software or functional ability.

In addition, I think Apple has so far somewhat successfully argued that they have reasons for restricting their ecosystem that aren't just a thinly veiled "because we want to crush competition". They argue that their devices are safer to use, and that allowing arbitrary software full access to the system would compromise that. Similarly, they limit third-party software from tracking you. They certainly aren't saints, and I disagree with a many of their choices (their app store cut could've decreased long ago, for one, and they're now adding ads into their own services) but they often seem like the only large corporation of their kind that even tries to have a set of beliefs and care about their users, and I think intent should matter.

I personally like that there's one popular ecosystem that has a particular perspective, and another competing popular ecosystem that has a totally different perspective. If you think all of the above is bullshit and Apple sucks, you're free to use Android and install exactly what you want on your phone. I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.

bigyabai

3 days ago

> I've never really understood why folks are so adamant that this alternative should not be allowed to exist.

Apple is responsible for market damages inflicted onto software distribution by picking-and-choosing who gets to ship, and where their money goes. It is reflected in Apple's astronomical service margins, which unfairly reward them with even higher ROI than the iPhone hardware itself (!!!), somehow. It is seen in Apple's back-room negotiations with Amazon, Netflix, Google, Epic and X, where they use their de-facto power to force unfavorable distribution terms and draw up protection fees. It's present in their entitlement system, which gives Apple the option to artificially hamstring competing services that want to integrate with iOS. It's inherent to Apple's developer program, which has been used to revoke software signing certificates when Apple simply disagrees with a competitor.

Do we really think they deserve that money and power? It's not encouraging them to make smart choices.

In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option. A factory-new iPhone could use all of Apple's offered services with a hardware-attested eFuse that says the device was never jailbroken. If a user wants to do foolish things like play Fallout: New Vegas with Proton, give Dropbox system-level integration a-la iCloud, use an updated RCS client instead of iMessage, install Fortnite or use a third-party app store, then Apple can give them that choice without endangering other people. It isn't impossible, they already do this with macOS, running the same XNU kernel, and with an architecturally indistinct ARM chip.

That would alleviate the market damages that Apple is responsible for, and create a positive pressure on iOS development to improve software-wise. Right now, Apple is being rewarded for extorting their competitors, pettily attacking consumers, blocking software features, stuffing ads[0] into first-party apps, and visually degrading iOS. They are clearly being protected from software alternatives that offer a less-invasive alternative to Apple's disgraceful OEM packins. Which is a shame, since Apple was historically not opposed to taking advantage of free software and making high-quality packin software that legitimately did compete against alternatives, like QuickTime and iTunes.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-to-ditch-unsolicited-f1-ads-n...

mithr

3 days ago

> In a fair market, I'd say that Apple can offer their services as an option

But… they do offer their services as an option. One option is to use their devices and services, and another is to use a different, equally popular company’s devices and services. Why should they be forced to make hardware that can be used in ways they don’t think it should be?

I agree that Apple could change or build many of the things you’ve described. You’d like them better if they did. Maybe I would too. I still don’t understand why they should be required to. It feels odd to say that the market would only be fair if they were forced to be more similar to their main competitor in one of the core ways in which they’re different.

bigyabai

3 days ago

> I still don’t understand why they should be required to.

3 days ago

There are entire countries where one company has 93%+ marketshare. Yes, maybe people can go to another country where the marketshare is different, but do we all seriously think that the global marketshare not resembling a monopoly definitely means that there's no one market where a monopoly exists?

I imagine trying to effectively use (or market) a competing product in a region with 93%+ marketshare is a painful experience, regardless of whether the global marketshare is more balanced.

Using global marketshare hides details like that. Apple could have 100% of the market in China and India, and Android could have 100% of the marketshare in the rest of the world. This would put, worldwide, Apple at about 35% and Android at about 65%. I would argue there are clearly monopolies in that case, though, even if the worldwide numbers are 65 and 35.

floydnoel

3 days ago

ok, so in which countries does iOS have 93%+ or 100% marketshare (as you claimed)?

yipinwong

3 days ago

lxgr

3 days ago

I guess that might have something to do with the fact that Chrome is vastly more popular than Safari, and also available on many more operating systems.

saagarjha

a day ago

You're probably going to lose your first bet.

ajross

3 days ago

No, it's definitely about control. Allowing an arbitrary browser means allowing access to platform stuff from portable (gasp!) APIs. And Apple doesn't want that. They want an iOS app to be the primary face of everything important, and the other stuff to be an expensive port.

And the problem isn't abstract. Safari lacks a ton of very useful API implementations. Like, try programming a QMK keyboard on an iPhone: it's literally the only platform in the whole world unable to run the Via web app.

zsoltkacsandi

3 days ago

> First let us install other browser engines on iOS, and then we can talk

Just checked in the App Store, I can install Firefox, Opera, Brave, and many many other browsers on my iPhone.

dylan604

3 days ago

Those are not the same underpinnings as their desktop/Android brethren. All of these iOS apps are still using WebKit.

nticompass

3 days ago

As I like to say: "Safari is the new IE."

Also, you /can/ run macOS in a VM on Linux: https://github.com/Coopydood/ultimate-macOS-kvm

I use that to test our website at work in Safari, though without a GPU (there is no virto-gpu driver for macOS and my PC's GPU doesn't support vGPU) the performance isn't great.

simondotau

3 days ago

Chrome is the new IE.

The difference is that Microsoft wanted to stall the web, while Google wants to accelerate it faster so that nobody else can keep up.

The commonality is the de-facto monoculture being sold to web developers. "Works best in Internet Explorer" was the problem twenty years ago. Now we've got lazy web developers who bemoan the absence of Chrome on their customer's phones. Right now Apple is the last thing standing between them and slapping a "Works best in Chrome" banner everywhere and abandoning support for Safari.

nticompass

2 days ago

I've seen plenty of websites with a "Works best in Chrome" banner, usually because they use some non-standard web API. Though, I've seen plenty that clearly just didn't care to test outside of Chrome, so they just assume you're using that.

My gripe about "Safari being the new IE" was more about how broken some websites can be in Safari and having no good way of knowing or testing that. At work, my boss said out website didn't look quite right on his iPhone and it took more work than I'd thought to track down the piece of CSS that Safari rendered differently for some reason.

Personally, I don't use macOS or iOS and I also use Firefox. Generally, things seem to work the same between Firefox Chrome and Safari, with Safari needing the most amount of "tweaks".

simondotau

2 days ago

When websites are broken in Safari it is, almost invariably, because the web developer was lazy and only ever attempted to make things work in Chrome. This has many risks, including an unintended (but still pathological) reliance on Chrome implementation quirks and undefined behaviours.

3 days ago

Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge.

That's the only reason I am not switching to FF 100%. I do use it though but not as a main driver.

nicce

3 days ago

They do that on purpose. To keep you using Chrome.

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783904

2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42176450

3 days ago

I've used FF for the past 20 years (Linux and Windows). I have seen thousands of youtube videos in that time without a glitch. So have many hundreds of other FF users.

If FF is not working on youtube for, it's not working for you and you alone.

driverdan

3 days ago

I've been using FF across Linux, MacOS, and Windows for years. I can't remember the last time I had an issue playing YT videos in it.

floydnoel

3 days ago

I just use Brave for YT. Adblock built in!

yipinwong

3 days ago

I used to use Brave and it had no issues on YT.

I stopped using Brave for no reason i don't remember. (no, not to do with the CEO)

throw0101c

3 days ago

> Nope. I watch a lotta youtube on a PC, FF runs vids like crap because Google changes something, and FF struggls to play well unlike Chrome or Edge.

I generally use Safari on my Apple devices (and YT works) and Firefox on any Linux machines. If something does not work on Safari I try Firefox on my Mac. In the past I've also sometimes used Chrome when no other option works.

So one option could be to use Firefox as a 'general use' browser, and switch to something else on an as-needed basis.

A bit of a hassle, but it may be the best compromise currently.

jacquesm

3 days ago

Never had a problem with that.

lightedman

3 days ago

2 days ago

Safari also tries to guess whether a page needs translation, and won't even offer you the option if it doesn't think you need it. (The menu bar item to translate the page will be disabled.) Which means you can't translate pages that are only partially in a different language, or which have enough of your preferred language for Safari to decide that translation shouldn't be offered. Sure, you can right click -> translate, but you have to do that for every piece of text, and it only displays the translation in a popover that closes once you do anything else.

Gareth321

2 days ago

Agree on both points. Translation is a very second class citizen in Safari. The selection of languages is also incredibly limited compared to Chrome. This is one of the reasons I stick with Chrome.

jillesvangurp

3 days ago

Chrome is the new internet explorer. Lots of people coming up with all sorts of arguments why they have to use it and can't switch. Internet Explorer used to be like that. MS really abused users and they still wouldn't switch. It's a form of Stockholm syndrome.

The history of Chrome is that it first displaced Firefox as a reasonable alternative (while funding that via a nice ad deal). And then they just steam rolled Internet Explorer to the point where MS gave up and rebuilt their browser around Chromium. It was that good. Fifteen years ago.

But these days you have to put up with a lot of crap from Google. Ad blocking works better on other browsers. Even some Chromium browsers (like Brave). But the thing with Chromium is that all Chromium derived browsers outsource most of the browser internals to Google. Google decides what features to implement, what PRs to merge, what features not to implement, etc. They set the standards. Safari, Firefox, and hopefully soon Ladybird are the only alternative browser engines keeping them somewhat honest on that front.

cosmic_cheese

3 days ago

Google has always aggressively promoted Chrome, too. The promotion is just invisible to most people since most people run Chrome.

If you visit a Google property using a Gecko or WebKit-based browser you'll get hit with banners nudging you to switch to Chrome and Google's iOS apps ignore the long-available default browser setting when linked are tapped, prompting you to choose between your default browser and Chrome even if you don't have Chrome installed.

And then there's the whole thing with how Chrome for Android conveniently never gained the ability to run even pared-back MV3 blocker extensions. Massive conflict of interest there.

I wish Google were called out for this stuff way more, but more often than not they're given a free pass.

bitpush

3 days ago

> Chrome is the new internet explorer.

Most people who say this didnt go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA. IE held back web development by years because either they refused to add features or they added features that only worked with Microsoft approved.

Chrome came along and accelerated web platform development since their products relied on a thriving web ecosystem. They did it using open source software, and built out consensus using web platforms.

Chrome is the new IE will only be true if other browsers are out innovating Chrome (not true), or Chrome has abandoned web platform (not true).

There's only one browser that drags their feat adding features, and that's ironically Safari. Firefox too to an extend, but that's mostly mismanagement and lack of resources. Apple has no excuses.

cosmic_cheese

3 days ago

Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture. Remember those little "Best viewed in IE" badges that used to litter the web because devs stopped testing their sites in Netscape? That's where we're headed now with Chromium/Blink and it's just as bad of a thing now as it was then.

Also worth noting that some of the discrepancies in capability are in features that Google decided to push despite opposition from other members of the consortium (like WebUSB).

Washuu

3 days ago

I remember the "Best view in Chrome" notices that I get today browsing Japanese web sites. It is already a problem and I have to spoof the browser agent for some web sites to get around Javascript blocks that only allow Chrome through.

bitpush

3 days ago

> Chrome is the new IE in that it has become an engine/frontend monoculture

That's a strange argument. I dont see HN saying this year all of us are going to buy Android, because iOS has become too popular. That sentiment is only valid is iOS is dragging their feat and if they stop innovating, effectively holding the market back.

I still havent seen an example where Chrome is holding everyone back. If anything, the complaint is the other way - they are doing way too much and we want them to stop.

And for HN crowd to be against that is very silly.

cosmic_cheese

3 days ago

The web is an open standard (nominally, at least), but ceases to be so if a single company controls it. At that point the company’s vision is instead the standard in which nobody else gets meaningful say.

It’s not just Apple. Mozilla has pushed back against Google’s proposals plenty of times too. Google doesn’t always know best and often acts more in their self-interest than in that of the web.

So the issue isn’t that Google is moving too fast or doing too much, but that they’re unilaterally deciding the future of the web, which is not something any single party should be capable of.

bitpush

3 days ago

> but ceases to be so if a single company controls it.

How does Google or any company control the web? I can launch a website fuckgoogle.com today and Google can do nothing with it. However, I cannot publish fuckapple on Mac Store or App Store.

cosmic_cheese

3 days ago

It's the direction of the web they control, with the various specs involved becoming ever more complex and more difficult to implement in new web engines (complexity as a moat) and with many of the APIs getting added being better suited for surveillance capitalism or as a project for somebody's promotion within Google than for building high quality software.

bitpush

15 hours ago

Its it a web platform committee represented by Mozilla, Apple and others? What other alternative do we have?

It is either one company 100% controlling the ecosystem (Apple with iOS) or a committee controlling the ecosystem (web platform).

Between these two, there's only one that is truly open and democratic.

hk1337

3 days ago

> Most people who say this didn't go through the pain of why IE was such a PITA.

mr_toad

3 days ago

3 days ago

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

s0ulf3re

2 days ago

3 days ago

If Safari worked in all major OSs like Chrome, Brave and Firefox, I could consider that. I own a Mac but didn't switch to Safari because I use multiple OSs for my work.

SirMaster

3 days ago

It even used to run on Windows...

martheen

3 days ago

I suspect that was a legacy from when they planned for iOS not supporting any third-party apps. If they want to force devs to target mobile Safari, the least they can do was to provide the desktop version on Windows.

Once apps dominate (which requires devs to have a Mac anyway to compile and debug) and turns out nobody use the Windows port, it's just a money sink.

leptons

3 days ago

Android provides an emulator so you can debug Android apps on MacOS. Apple should do the same, but they won't.

tkdb

3 days ago

2 days ago

Tell me more (I'm in earnest):

What do you love about safari?

jorisw

a day ago

Basically, its speed and minimal, Mac native UI. Chrome is not a Mac UI and feels bloated.

Ultimately they’re two WebKit browsers one of which feels like a real Mac app.

idbnstra

3 days ago

yeah, for one, you can't put multiple tabs in a stack/accordion group

CuriousRose

3 days ago

I like Safari. I certainly trust Apple more than Google with my data. It's faster and doesn't mine my email and web data to train models (yet).

If it gets particularly bad, I'm sure some impartial team will make another browser engine with Opus 5.5 but for now I can tolerate the minor inconveniences in Safari.

PrimalPower

3 days ago

I was building an pdf export feature for one of my projects the other day.

3. ChatGPT can open both browers, not sure if Safari plugin builder can

But if it does all those things, great. My point was more that plugins won't be a problem anymore because AI can build them.

LoganDark

3 days ago

Here are some reasons I don't use Safari in place of Chrome for certain things:

- it doesn't like to serialize the state of tabs. Chrome is pretty good at somehow snapshotting the entire state of tabs to the point where it can be reconstructed after relaunch, even offline.

- webpage loading is sort of janky. Chrome will show the webpage streaming in live, but Safari will simply freeze in place until it's done. Maybe this is due to an Apple philosophy decision, but I don't prefer it.

- similarly to how Safari doesn't seem to serialize tab states, navigating forward or back usually needs to load the page from scratch, including resubmitting forms or whatever.

- speaking of forward and back navigation, I'm kinda annoyed that each time I use the trackpad to navigate history, I have to wait for the swipe animation to finish before I can interact with the webpage. I try to always use cmd+brackets instead now, because it's much faster.

- IIRC, it seems the newer macOS 27 betas caused Safari to develop an issue where after it's been open for long enough, certain types of videos will stop being able to play at all until the browser is quit and restarted. kind of annoying, combined with the lack of tab snapshotting, because I have to manually visit each tab to load it on each launch.

I still daily drive Safari and use it as my main browser. But I keep an instance of Chrome open for tabs that I never really close. And then I have an instance of Orion for spreadsheets. (I use spreadsheets to keep track of medication usage, sleep times and finances)

t1234s

3 days ago

How many people in this thread would dump their Android for an iPhone if they: - allowed real 3rd party browser engines - let you uninstall all the apple bloatware apps

alt227

3 days ago

If you added "Allowing manual sideloading of apps" to that list I would jump to an iPhone in a heartbeat

nticompass

3 days ago

thraway3837

3 days ago

The issue is that software vendors, esp the size and scale that produce browsers, have shown repeatedly that they are terrible for the consumer. All of a sudden, you get the largest attack surface, large instability, and giving them access to the same hardware/OS access is just downright dangerous.

It is so tiring to keep hearing of this whole sideloading/let us run other engines nonsense for a decade+ now. It's like watching all the nastiness that tech companies do and then asking for all that trash on iOS. This is tantamount to wanting Adobe Flash on iOS, and quite honestly, that's exactly what allowing 3rd party browser engines is going to do. First it maybe some extension, and then all of a sudden you find that the extension has full access to photos, location, and contacts because you granted 1 website access to those things.

No thanks.

charlesabarnes

3 days ago

I would. I wish I had true choice in phone manufacturers. With the EU ruling and the Epic games court cases, I had hope that apple would be forced to open up in the US as well. I was planning my next device purchase decision around this.

I am not interested in jailbreaking or rooting my device to run my apps. I am not interested in the testflight process. I am an adult and can pick and choose what apps I want. And I would like to exercise the whole "voting with my wallet" thing when a company makes an anti-consumer decision.

3 days ago

Hot garbage bro.

Also trash video playback.

mkirsten

3 days ago

Funnily, it's not a "Switch to Safari" campaign, but a "Stay on Safari" if you look at Apple's material.

maidaman

3 days ago

I’m not going to use different browsers on different devices. I can’t use Safari on my gaming windows desktop.

bob1029

3 days ago

Safari is the ultimate way to browse HN.

For everything else, I use some chromium derivative that can traverse pirate streaming sites and ChatGPT without disintegrating under their weird JS workloads.

tippa123

2 days ago

Don’t know why I never thought about it but apparently using your competitor’s trademark. Chrome in this case, is okay for comparative advertising.

I only noticed now because recently I have been wanting to incorporate the logos of tech publications on my website that have genuinely reviewed my product but apparently doing so isn’t without risk.

reenorap

3 days ago

If you work at Apple/Safari then my free suggestion is to have a "Chrome mode" where all the buttons and doohickeys that Chrome has are all in the same location for Safari. If I'm far to used to where the buttons are for things like "reload" so trying to switch to Safari is enough friction to make me stay with Chrome.

Maybe have an Edge mode as well to convince the Edge users to come over.

KolmogorovComp

2 days ago

You don’t use keyboard shortcut for reloading??

jorisw

2 days ago

2 days ago

We need alternatives, but I fail to see why we should replace one company with another here.

Instead, we should treat browsers like water in that everyone needs access to it at all times without any top-down control or restrictions.

dbg31415

3 days ago

Gives off real "I'm a Mac, he's a PC" campaign vibes from 20 years ago.

Also... not sure all of those ads would still hold up today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYErwT-zRRI

kurtoid

3 days ago

Interesting timing, considering https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49973221 (Apple may soon track when Google promotes Chrome inside Safari), 7 days ago

hi41

2 days ago

I remember watching the presentation on V8 by the Google Swedish team I think. Everyone found it magical at that time. Chrome was very secure by introducing sandboxes for process separation. It introduced tabs when Microsoft said their customers didn’t need tabs.

How did Chrome go from being magical and aw inspiring to being viewed unfavorably by the HN community?

ivell

3 days ago

Reminds me of PC vs Mac campaign

pantulis

2 days ago

I think there are many reasons to use Safari (in fact, it's my de facto personal browser) but I feel that being faster is not one of them.

jorisw

2 days ago

How so? AFAIK performance is one of the main focuses of Safari and one of the main distinguishing factors that Apple strives for.

There's a whole chapter on it in Creative Selection (by Ken Kocienda who started the project) on how they were only allowed to release versions as fast or faster than the one before.

3 days ago

It was to Mojave, and downgrading was a whole task in itself, apple really did not want me to do it.

FireBeyond

3 days ago

Oh yes. Start of this year...

I had an M1 MBP that I needed to re-pave with Monterey. Yes, it's end-of-support, but it's also only 4 years old. And runs on that Mac.

So, first step, I make a USB installer, and run it. Great. Reboots, and says "FYI, this is an unsupported OS. You can install a newer OS instead, or run Monterey in "Reduced Security" mode." That was fine for me.

"Installation of Reduced Security mode failed." Nothing else. Eventually my understanding of this was because the machine had been upgraded previously all the way to Tahoe, that somewhere along the line some firmware or something in the EFI had been upgraded and was too new for Monterey. No thanks to Apple. No info, debug logs, anything, just "Installation failed. Reboot?"

So what then?

Hmm, more research. "Do an IPSW image restore via DFU", i.e. pave it with a largely installed image. Could work, might have the same issue, but since I'm stuck right now, with a Mac I can't install anything on, a four year old $3,000 brick, why not?

Alright, I have a Mac Studio. I get the IPSW image, and Apple Configurator. Connect the two as per Apple's instructions and the MBP does indeed show up in Configurator as being "not booted, DFU mode".

Apple's instructions, "Drag the IPSW image onto the DFU 'box' for the target Mac". No. It doesn't light up like it's accepting a drag and drop, and indeed it doesn't. Nor does it accept a "restore..." or similar from the Configurator menu options. There's nothing in Configurator that seems to allow you to image the MBP. Again: no error, no instructions, just the error "bonk" noise.

So... off to ChatGPT, Reddit, etc., I go.

Much repeating of the same. However, ChatGPT pokes a little button. Near the very end of its answer, it says "Newer versions of macOS may have limitations on the age of the image they might restore. You may need a slightly older macOS to do this. Even an Intel MBP running Ventura could work."

As fortune has it, my fiance happens to still have her old i5 MBP with touchbar, and the latest version of Ventura... let's plug it in, let it catch a little charge and boot...

Alright, I need Configurator on this laptop.

No soup for you, says the App Store, "You need macOS Sequoia to install Configurator".

Back off to Reddit, where I find someone who has helpfully zipped up an older version of Configurator that runs on Ventura, and in the end, I'm able to re-pave via IPSW.

But Apple's docs absolutely are incorrect/incomplete about Configurator, and DFU restores.

"You can use Restore... in the Configurator menu to select the software image". No, you can't, even leaving aside the "old/unsupported". It actually means restoring from a "backup" (presumably Time Machine, though it doesn't specify) and you can't select any file or image.

"Drag the image onto DFU". Doesn't work in that situation, no error, no "hey, you're doing the right thing but I can't do this", just acting like a fool trying to drag the image onto DFU only to have it bounce off.

Like I said, I didn't have DFU port issues, but Apple's docs on how to make this happen were either non-existent, or incorrect about the process, or flat out told me I couldn't do it. But mostly non-existent and overly simplistic covering the most basic scenarios only - which I get for general support, but by the time you are "connect to a second mac in DFU mode and run Configurator" in their own words, we're way beyond simplistic "you can just install a newer macOS" type "instructions".

tail_exchange

3 days ago

Ok, let me use it on Linux then.

seanclayton

3 days ago

But why would I ditch Firefox?

esskay

2 days ago

Why would i switch to a browser that only gets one update a year, and a minor one at that? They've lost the plot.

jorisw

2 days ago

[citation needed]

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...

fluidcruft

3 days ago

There's always Edge (increasingly favored by IT here). Our machines used to ship and favor Chrome, but Edge has been the new IT-gods blessed browser ever since we bumped to Windows 11. Apple seems to be the only tech-titan that is not interested in extending their browser onto other platforms. So be it.

Grimeton

3 days ago

They stopped that years ago. Safari for windows was a thing.

j45

3 days ago

On iPhone, for the longest time, every browser has been forced to be Safari's engine underneath. Firefox, Chrome, etc are all forced to run Safari underneath.

This has caused many issues because Apple controls what can run in a web browser and that web browser (safari) is in no way up to date, or worse, selectively implements standards. I'm writing this in the hopes that it will publicly improve.

Since Safari is forced at an OS level on all Apple's iOS and iPadOS users, that's a place to start when it comes to choice.

On MacOS, Safari is actually pretty interesting - it can be much more efficient with battery usage than other browsers and unsurprisingly well integrated. It's nice to use on MacOS because there is choice.

I understand there maybe concerns about security, but also will come out is likely that safari enjoys some OS level integrations that other browsers probably won't be welcome to, similar to the Internet Explorer/Edge days.

The switch to safari is likely tied to something else, given Apple's growing advertising revenue. Meaning, move away from one advertisement engine (Chrome), and move to another (Safari).

waterTanuki

3 days ago

> Apple is kicking off a new campaign today to promote Safari’s benefits over Chrome. With a new “Switch to Safari” page on its website and a pair of new YouTube videos.

The irony of using a Google platform to promote ditching another Google platform lol.

Pesthuf

2 days ago

It would certainly help other browsers keep up in performance and battery life if Apple didn’t make all the APIs that allow Safari to stay so far ahead private and undocumented.

koinedad

3 days ago

Anecdotally I see significant out of memory issues with chrome on a regular basis. I use chrome for work but safari for personal and rarely see the same issue with safari if almost never.

verdverm

3 days ago

I switched to Vivaldi for privacy, but the amount of control and customization was an unexpected surprise! Long has it been since such user choice has been made so easy

mintflow

3 days ago

On iOS platform, it's only limited to apple's browser engine, with chrome I get long time of various bookmarks saved/synced and send page to various devices(not limited to apple ecosystem), those benefits still not give strong reason to let me switch to safari

But Safari is not the solution until they make it fully (FULLY) open-source, because all Apple trying to do is replace the king of enshitification hill by their own.

firefox ftw

pcdoodle1

3 days ago

Adding WebSerial even if it's locked in a Developer tools menu would make Safari a more serious tool for me.

caycep

3 days ago

so this means they're putting more resources into the Webkit/Safari team...right?

techgnosis

3 days ago

I almost lost my Google account because of Safari. I bought some official Google USB keys https://store.google.com/us/product/titan_security_key?hl=en...

I setup two of them for my Google account but I made them both in Safari. Only one of them worked. What if both of them failed? I would have been fucked.

I re-made them on Chrome and they both worked.

tailrecursion

freakynit

2 days ago

combined with ublacklist and sponsorblock it's fairly good coverage for safari

gorhill

3 days ago

> it's missing the element zapper

Support for element zapper was added more than 18 months ago in version 2025.3.23.1241.[1]

emehex

3 days ago

I would... if it <proper> had vertical tabs

nitin7

I am like one more Microsoft / Chrome update away from switching entire company to Firefox.

The absurdity of every week another AI feature, another way for data to leak to their services, another crash report.

They are exhausting and abusing their positions of power.

latexr

3 days ago

> switching entire company to Firefox.

They just announced something which might be relevant to you.

https://www.firefox.com/enterprise/

microflash

3 days ago

Talk to me when I can set custom search engines, when developer tools become sane enough and when ‘localhost’ starts resolving.

advisedwang

3 days ago

bensyverson

3 days ago

Can you give me a concrete example? I close windows and tabs with ruthless abandon.

Unless you have a web app which is entirely local and doesn't save its state to local storage, what could you possibly be doing that requires a tab to remain in residence?

hanlec

3 days ago

> Safari is faster, uses less RAM and is more power-efficient.

I am really curious about data proving these.

I am not aware of any benchmarks proving or disproving.

bensyverson

3 days ago

People benchmark it from time to time [0]. It makes sense though—Apple has poured resources into making the Safari engine battery efficient on their phones, and the macOS version is a beneficiary.

[0]: https://tech-insider.org/safari-vs-chrome-2026/

aristofun

3 days ago

Native Macos apps (mail, safari) are awesome… by the standards of 90s (when they were probably first designed).

I doubt people developing safari and mail app are actually using them outside of work.

Apple keeps holding a “hardware company” flag, despite some occasional wins.