> because you can't reliably use features until the last two major versions of a browser support those feature
Maybe a bit of a nitpick but this particular comparison is exactly the same with any other browser.
Sure, Safari is locked to iOS version, but iOS adoption rates are insanely fast, about as fast as browser updates. We are talking 90% current major version adoption within 5 months. Here's a source with some historical info: https://worldmetrics.org/ios-version-statistics/
So really, at worse you're looking at being one year behind to cover 95%+ marketshare in iOS.
The latest version of Safari runs on the two previous versions of macOS, so it's even less of a problem on macOS.
> So you could spend 6 months working on a project, release your product, then get inundated with bad reviews because it didn't work for half the population with iPhones.
That could happen to you if you don't test your software on popular platforms.
Let's not forget, Safari and Chrome have the exact same open source core with proprietary commercial applciation development model. Safari has about 1/4 of the user base as Chrome. But here we are expecting the open source community around Webkit to fix bugs just as fast as Chrome?
You could have fixed the indexDB bug yourself if you wanted to. I would say that what you are framing as "Apple lying" about capabilities can be more generously interpreted as "Apple has 1/4 of the community developer resources to find and squash bugs in Webkit compared to Chromium." Really, it's far less less considering that essentially every other browser besides Mozilla uses the Chromium engine. Microsoft is of course another huge company also contributing to Chromium, and once you put Google and Microsoft together Apple doesn't look like such a behemoth anymore. The only thing that makes Apple "bigger" is the fact that they sell a lot of high margin hardware. In reality, the software businesses at Google and Microsoft are far larger and more complex than Apple (e.g., Apple has no enterprise cloud computing business, and essentially no enterprise software business at all).
Apple purposefully does not support immersive WebXR in Mobile Safari. If it did 8th Wall wouldn't exist.
Mobile Safari would regularly break WASM. Like iOS 10.1 and 10.2 just broke it for no good reason. It had a broken WebGL 2 implementation for a long time. This hobbled Unity games.
The compressed textures support for WebGL was also broken for a long time.
The lowest latency WebRTC codecs that Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming used were also purposefully not enabled by default. Google had to smuggle in an obscure WebRTC feature for low latency via libwebrtc that Apple just didn't know about.
I have no idea why you guys are going out and defending this stuff. Android Chrome has much better support for web standards that Mobile Safari does, even in situations where the codebase was shared like libwebrtc, because of strategic Apple decisions.
I wouldn't say I'm defending Apple so much as I'm defending the idea that it might not just be making these technical decisions/iterations entirely based on the most cynical possible interpretation of the situation.
For all we know WebXR immersive just isn't ready yet, just like WebXR wasn't ready for VisionOS 1 and shipped in VisionOS 2, which also makes sense considering that Apple's VR/AR business is years behind its competitors.
Broken stuff can just be bugs and regressions.
And I think it's also contextual to point out that Google really badly needs you to prefer Chrome and have the browser with the most features a lot more than Apple needs Safari to be anything more than a functional basic web browser. Examples like Stadia or even Unity in the web browser are essentially features that nobody asked for and that have worked better as native applications for decades. In other words, Google depends on the web browser being "the only application" as much as Apple depends on their users turning to the App Store first.
I totally get where Apple has a vested interest in boxing out competitors in the way you describe, but at the same time some of the complaints end up sounding a lot like bugs or just being generally behind in development velocity.
Maybe a bit of a nitpick but this particular comparison is exactly the same with any other browser.
Sure, Safari is locked to iOS version, but iOS adoption rates are insanely fast, about as fast as browser updates. We are talking 90% current major version adoption within 5 months. Here's a source with some historical info: https://worldmetrics.org/ios-version-statistics/
So really, at worse you're looking at being one year behind to cover 95%+ marketshare in iOS.
The latest version of Safari runs on the two previous versions of macOS, so it's even less of a problem on macOS.
> So you could spend 6 months working on a project, release your product, then get inundated with bad reviews because it didn't work for half the population with iPhones.
That could happen to you if you don't test your software on popular platforms.
Let's not forget, Safari and Chrome have the exact same open source core with proprietary commercial applciation development model. Safari has about 1/4 of the user base as Chrome. But here we are expecting the open source community around Webkit to fix bugs just as fast as Chrome?
You could have fixed the indexDB bug yourself if you wanted to. I would say that what you are framing as "Apple lying" about capabilities can be more generously interpreted as "Apple has 1/4 of the community developer resources to find and squash bugs in Webkit compared to Chromium." Really, it's far less less considering that essentially every other browser besides Mozilla uses the Chromium engine. Microsoft is of course another huge company also contributing to Chromium, and once you put Google and Microsoft together Apple doesn't look like such a behemoth anymore. The only thing that makes Apple "bigger" is the fact that they sell a lot of high margin hardware. In reality, the software businesses at Google and Microsoft are far larger and more complex than Apple (e.g., Apple has no enterprise cloud computing business, and essentially no enterprise software business at all).