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"So maybe they would start investing some real money in Safari's development and add the features everyone is using Chrome for?" This sentence is interesting g

"So maybe they would start investing some real money in Safari's development and add the features everyone is using Chrome for?" This sentence is interesting given that Safari is faster in virtually every single usage model. Safari is lighter on memory. Safari is far more efficient from a CPU cycle perspective (ergo battery life). Particularly notable, iOS web browsing is overrepresented on the web versus marketshare. "Everyone" is using Chrome because it was the browser in the early 2000s that they used on their Windows box. Do you think Chrome has made a particularly compelling argument over the past five to ten years? It's the incumbent that has been coasting on inertia. What "features" are people using Chrome for? What do you think iOS users are being deprived of? Notifications from web apps? Yeah, no. I have serious grievances with Apple's restrictions on their platforms, and some of these walls will fall at the hands of government demands, however iOS users are being deprived little by not having a full version of Chrome.

ginko 5y ago
>What "features" are people using Chrome for? What do you think iOS users are being deprived of? I'm not a chrome user(I prefer Firefox) but viewing WEBMs for one. Proper ublock origin support as well.
- defaultname 5y ago
  Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions at all, so that kind of invalidates that. Indeed, Chrome on Android is rather a piece of shit, so it's remarkable reading a thread by someone claiming that if only they could bring this to iOS they'd be winning. As to WebM, zero users are missing the lack of WebM. WebM was Google trying to boot-stomp a codec that offered virtually no compelling story for their own reasons, while offering a worse experience for the vast majority of users (e.g. worse energy profile given that little hardware has full hardware support).
  - ginko 5y ago
    I don't care about Chrome. Firefox on Android supports extensions. >As to WebM, zero users are missing the lack of WebM. Let's just say pretty major platform I'm using daily uses webms extensively and the lack of support on iOS is a huge pain for me.
    - defaultname 5y ago
      "I don't care about Chrome" Neat. Only you replied with that refutation when I specifically asked what people are missing on iOS vis-a-vis Chrome. Neat that Firefox supports those features, but that seems to be so little of a competitive story that its usage on mobile is absolutely minuscule. Which "major platform" is causing huge pain by the lack of WebM on iOS? LOL.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    This is somewhat ahistorical. The concern was patent licensing fees and it impacted way more than just Google. H.264 is (and pretty much all MPEG standards are) a patent-encumbered format. Anyone who encodes, decodes, or otherwise uses the format needs to pay licensing fees to a confusingly-named patent pool called MPEG-LA. Google is entirely capable of paying those fees; random webmasters and Free Software hackers are not. The only reason why this didn't become as much of a problem as I'm making it out to be is because the H.264 pool had a very affordable or zero-royalty tier (can't remember which) for free Internet video distribution. At one point it looked like MPEG-LA was going to shitcan this tier, which would have basically killed every video site at the time except for YouTube. This wasn't an empty threat: previous ISO-standard formats like MPEG-4 Part 2 didn't come to an agreement on web video, so it was never used on the web. Macromedia wound up licensing On2 VP6 (WebM's predecessor) in Flash specifically because it had no known patent encumbrance. Today, we have H.265, which is a licensing nightmare even for premium video providers and hardware manufacturers that are ordinarily used to paying licensing fees. AFAIK it's something like 3 patent pools and a bunch of other companies now?
ksec 5y ago
>This sentence is interesting given that Safari is faster in virtually every single usage model. Both Chrome and Firefox made tremendous improvement. Safari 12 being the best and efficient making headlines meant Google and Firefox spend in the last 2+ years optimising. All while Safari 13 and later Safari 14 added quite a lot more Web features and made it slower. Not sure about Safari 15 yet.
- defaultname 5y ago
  I'm not sure what the conclusion of your statement is, but Safari is still head and shoulders faster than both Chrome and Firefox on macOS. Both on macOS 11.4 and Safari 14.1.1, and macOS 12 and Safari 15. Safari never got slower. Chrome got embarrassed into effectively cleaning up its act a bit and managing the catastrophic memory usage, but it's still slower and less efficient. And it's still a memory disaster compared to its contemporaries.
agust 5y ago
Chrome has the biggest market share (outside of iOS) because it has the more features (that is web APIs) and less bugs, making it the most reliable browser. It is very common to encounter websites or applications which do not work properly in Safari, and web companies and developers are encouraging users to use Chrome because of that. Here is a rather exhaustive list of all the features that Safari is lacking and which prevent the development of web applications that could compete with native ones: https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ A lot of companies are deprived access to iOS users because they don't have the financial means to develop applications specifically for iOS. A lot of companies which have the means to develop natives applications have to compromise on the features they develop because development cost is much higher. A lot of companies are losing money because they have to use the app store and give Apple 30% of their revenue while they could use web applications instead and use payment solutions taking less than 5% of commission. Because of Apple anti-competitive behaviour, iOS users are deprived of applications that just can't exist, deprived of features that companies can't afford to develop because of the high cost of iOS specific development, deprived of applications that could be of better quality if the developers behind it could focus on one codebase, and deprived of cheaper applications and in-app purchases. They are deprived of the benefit of competition, basically.
- defaultname 5y ago
  "Chrome has the biggest market share (outside of iOS) because it has the more features (that is web APIs) and less bugs, making it the most reliable browser" ROFL. Chrome has the biggest market share because it rose while IE was a pile of dogshit and Firefox was going through a massive rewrite. It became the Microsoft of browsers, and turned lazy and fat as a result. "It is very common to encounter websites or applications which do not work properly in Safari, and web companies and developers are encouraging users to use Chrome because of that." Extremely uncommon, and generally a good sign that something is trash because it has a development team following the "IE" model. Sure there is competition. Buy an Android device. But you know what's super weird? Android users leverage their browsers far less than iOS users. They're underrepresented online. Shouldn't they be enjoying that remarkable panacea afforded by such competition? You know, the competition where Chrome on Android is terrible, doesn't support extensions, etc?
fomine3 5y ago
Let's see Safari/Chrome market share on macOS.

ginko 5y ago

>What "features" are people using Chrome for? What do you think iOS users are being deprived of? I'm not a chrome user(I prefer Firefox) but viewing WEBMs for one. Proper ublock origin support as well.

defaultname 5y ago
Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions at all, so that kind of invalidates that. Indeed, Chrome on Android is rather a piece of shit, so it's remarkable reading a thread by someone claiming that if only they could bring this to iOS they'd be winning. As to WebM, zero users are missing the lack of WebM. WebM was Google trying to boot-stomp a codec that offered virtually no compelling story for their own reasons, while offering a worse experience for the vast majority of users (e.g. worse energy profile given that little hardware has full hardware support).
- ginko 5y ago
  I don't care about Chrome. Firefox on Android supports extensions. >As to WebM, zero users are missing the lack of WebM. Let's just say pretty major platform I'm using daily uses webms extensively and the lack of support on iOS is a huge pain for me.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    "I don't care about Chrome" Neat. Only you replied with that refutation when I specifically asked what people are missing on iOS vis-a-vis Chrome. Neat that Firefox supports those features, but that seems to be so little of a competitive story that its usage on mobile is absolutely minuscule. Which "major platform" is causing huge pain by the lack of WebM on iOS? LOL.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  This is somewhat ahistorical. The concern was patent licensing fees and it impacted way more than just Google. H.264 is (and pretty much all MPEG standards are) a patent-encumbered format. Anyone who encodes, decodes, or otherwise uses the format needs to pay licensing fees to a confusingly-named patent pool called MPEG-LA. Google is entirely capable of paying those fees; random webmasters and Free Software hackers are not. The only reason why this didn't become as much of a problem as I'm making it out to be is because the H.264 pool had a very affordable or zero-royalty tier (can't remember which) for free Internet video distribution. At one point it looked like MPEG-LA was going to shitcan this tier, which would have basically killed every video site at the time except for YouTube. This wasn't an empty threat: previous ISO-standard formats like MPEG-4 Part 2 didn't come to an agreement on web video, so it was never used on the web. Macromedia wound up licensing On2 VP6 (WebM's predecessor) in Flash specifically because it had no known patent encumbrance. Today, we have H.265, which is a licensing nightmare even for premium video providers and hardware manufacturers that are ordinarily used to paying licensing fees. AFAIK it's something like 3 patent pools and a bunch of other companies now?

ksec 5y ago

>This sentence is interesting given that Safari is faster in virtually every single usage model. Both Chrome and Firefox made tremendous improvement. Safari 12 being the best and efficient making headlines meant Google and Firefox spend in the last 2+ years optimising. All while Safari 13 and later Safari 14 added quite a lot more Web features and made it slower. Not sure about Safari 15 yet.

defaultname 5y ago
I'm not sure what the conclusion of your statement is, but Safari is still head and shoulders faster than both Chrome and Firefox on macOS. Both on macOS 11.4 and Safari 14.1.1, and macOS 12 and Safari 15. Safari never got slower. Chrome got embarrassed into effectively cleaning up its act a bit and managing the catastrophic memory usage, but it's still slower and less efficient. And it's still a memory disaster compared to its contemporaries.

agust 5y ago

Chrome has the biggest market share (outside of iOS) because it has the more features (that is web APIs) and less bugs, making it the most reliable browser. It is very common to encounter websites or applications which do not work properly in Safari, and web companies and developers are encouraging users to use Chrome because of that. Here is a rather exhaustive list of all the features that Safari is lacking and which prevent the development of web applications that could compete with native ones: https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/ A lot of companies are deprived access to iOS users because they don't have the financial means to develop applications specifically for iOS. A lot of companies which have the means to develop natives applications have to compromise on the features they develop because development cost is much higher. A lot of companies are losing money because they have to use the app store and give Apple 30% of their revenue while they could use web applications instead and use payment solutions taking less than 5% of commission. Because of Apple anti-competitive behaviour, iOS users are deprived of applications that just can't exist, deprived of features that companies can't afford to develop because of the high cost of iOS specific development, deprived of applications that could be of better quality if the developers behind it could focus on one codebase, and deprived of cheaper applications and in-app purchases. They are deprived of the benefit of competition, basically.

defaultname 5y ago
"Chrome has the biggest market share (outside of iOS) because it has the more features (that is web APIs) and less bugs, making it the most reliable browser" ROFL. Chrome has the biggest market share because it rose while IE was a pile of dogshit and Firefox was going through a massive rewrite. It became the Microsoft of browsers, and turned lazy and fat as a result. "It is very common to encounter websites or applications which do not work properly in Safari, and web companies and developers are encouraging users to use Chrome because of that." Extremely uncommon, and generally a good sign that something is trash because it has a development team following the "IE" model. Sure there is competition. Buy an Android device. But you know what's super weird? Android users leverage their browsers far less than iOS users. They're underrepresented online. Shouldn't they be enjoying that remarkable panacea afforded by such competition? You know, the competition where Chrome on Android is terrible, doesn't support extensions, etc?

fomine3 5y ago

Let's see Safari/Chrome market share on macOS.