OP posited: “Apple's been taking a number of steps over the last few months to show that they take Safari/WebKit development seriously. Back in the day all developers used FF and its dev tools too, for similar reasons.ĭownvoter here: I downvoted early on because you're making an argument that seems to me both not particularly good and off-topic to the post you replied to. What Lol? Safari's engine is what Chrome has been based on, and for most of its life it has been one and the same codebase.ĭevelopers just don't prefer Safari's developer tools compared to Chrome's - and of course Chrome is more popular (and cross platform), so it makes sense to use what most users use. > Lol? I know very few (none?) web developers who uses Safari as their primary target browser.
That's not what you do when you want to cripple mobile apps - which few users care about anyway, the money (for developers) and the convenience (for users) are at native apps.ĭo you see "mobile apps" thriving in Android or MS Phone compared to native apps? Because I do not. Second, Apple has consistently made the best mobile web browser for many years - Android had the horrible crippled Android Browser which was not even competing, before Chrome became competitive there. Their app store profits are negligible compared to all else. That's a classic tinfoil theory, but with absolutely no substance.įirst, Apple sells hardware, first and foremost, not apps (it's the inverse with Microsoft). > Safari is holding back the mobile web the exact same way IE held back the desktop web for the exact same reason: native apps. IE9 was years behind Safari at the time you talk about (6 years ago) -and really first version of IE that started to really compete at all for the modern web-, while Safari was, and still is (the preview) at the top of the heap regarding ES6 compliance, etc.Īnd while much smaller in userbase, Safari grew along with the modern web, introducing major new features that IE hasn't done since 2000 or so (Canvas, CSS animations, etc), being the basis for Chrome, and getting the JIT treatment right along the 2 other modern browsers (Chrome, FF).Īs for the mobile space, Safari has been lagging in some features (compared to desktop browsers), but was always ahead of the pack in lots of areas, to the point one cannot say mobile Chrome is that better.
They mean whether Safari is as backwards and holding the web back as IE6 was for ages. When people say that phrase they don't mean their both trying (or having tried) developer previews. That (Safari adopting "developer previews" now) doesn't mean much regarding whether Safari is the new IE. IE executed a "developer preview" strategy leading up to IE9 6 years ago.