Comment by bargainbin 4 days ago
It does make you wonder, Safari recently had a burst in features where they modernised and even overtook Chromium/FF in some features, and then in the past year or so it’s languishing again.
I do wonder if the metrics show the average person downloads Chrome straight away so they’re just not investing heavily in it? I mean anyway, who browses traditional websites any more, right…?
> They've purposefully underinvested in Safari to force developers to create native apps for their platforms where Apple makes a sizeable cut
Can't speak to how accurate this is, but for WebXR, this hits the nail on the head. Purposeful stagnation on supporting it and thus indirectly bringing down the whole point of the standard, pushing of their own AppStore bound ARKit, and when they released Apple Vision Pro it's magically supported again, because I guess they needed content that badly.
They've purposefully underinvested in Safari to force developers to create native apps for their platforms where Apple makes a sizeable cut of all sales and subscriptions rather than allowing developers to create a web-app that could have done the same thing where the developers reap all the rewards for their work.
The only reason they had that burst of activity is that they needed to quickly catch up and save face in an attempt to prove to EU regulators that they weren't hampering developers.
The EU didn't buy it and forced Apple to open up their devices to allow alternate app stores and browsers on their devices in the EU.