Are you aware that it is, in fact, Safari who holds all of the power over the direction of the web? Theyve been sandbagging it for a decade, so when it doesn't support important features, developers don't make use of them.
Chrome and Chromium browsers have around 80% of the browser market. Without Apple sticking to WebKit on the iPhone, Chrome would have a full monopoly over the browser and the direction of the web... even Microsoft caved to Google's monopoly in this space.
You can argue that this would allow things to move faster, but faster in which direction? Would ad blocking be killed once and for all? Would tracking be embedded into the core technologies so it was unavoidable? Google is first and foremost and advertising company, are those the incentives you want controlling the future of the internet?
Apple's stubbornness on the iPhone is literally the only thing stopping Google. EU regulators are trying to force that to change, which look to be some of the stories your link talks about. I find it ironic that pushing for alternatives engines on iOS is framed as browser choice, when all it will do it hand the whole internet over to Google, have developers only ever test in Chrome, and hurt the ability for any other browser to take off due to compatibility issues.
If Chrome has 95% marketshare, whatever they do is the standard, so why bother getting things approved as official standards? Why would developers bother to wait or use the standard features... just make sure it works in Chrome. That puts us back into an IE6 scenario where we all just have to hope Google plays nice, when their incentive to do so is effectively gone. Have we learned nothing from the past?
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Are you aware that it is, in fact, Safari who holds all of the power over the direction of the web? Theyve been sandbagging it for a decade, so when it doesn't support important features, developers don't make use of them.
You can learn significantly more in this tremendous blog series: https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
Chrome and Chromium browsers have around 80% of the browser market. Without Apple sticking to WebKit on the iPhone, Chrome would have a full monopoly over the browser and the direction of the web... even Microsoft caved to Google's monopoly in this space.
You can argue that this would allow things to move faster, but faster in which direction? Would ad blocking be killed once and for all? Would tracking be embedded into the core technologies so it was unavoidable? Google is first and foremost and advertising company, are those the incentives you want controlling the future of the internet?
Apple's stubbornness on the iPhone is literally the only thing stopping Google. EU regulators are trying to force that to change, which look to be some of the stories your link talks about. I find it ironic that pushing for alternatives engines on iOS is framed as browser choice, when all it will do it hand the whole internet over to Google, have developers only ever test in Chrome, and hurt the ability for any other browser to take off due to compatibility issues.
If Chrome has 95% marketshare, whatever they do is the standard, so why bother getting things approved as official standards? Why would developers bother to wait or use the standard features... just make sure it works in Chrome. That puts us back into an IE6 scenario where we all just have to hope Google plays nice, when their incentive to do so is effectively gone. Have we learned nothing from the past?