Out of the big 3 (with edge being basically chrome at this point), safari is waaay behind firefox and chrome in terms of number of implemented standards and they still have plenty of market share — as if market share would at most correlate slightly with technical merit. And I don’t think that firefox would have gaping holes in terms of standard-compliance.
Safari is A) only available on two operating systems, both owned by Apple, B) is mandated on one of those OSes (iOS), which C) just happens to be their most popular OS.
I don't think it's very surprising that share of Safari for browsers across all OSes closely matches the share of iOS. Safari on macOS is only about 1/3rd of an OS that has 6 or 7% of the market, so you're only going to get about 2 points there. Firefox on macOS mirrors the rest of the market.
Chrome is #1 on all platforms except iOS, where it just literally does not exist. Safari's relative popularity over Firefox is due to lack of choice on iOS. So no, I don't think you can make that claim that technical merit does not matter.
If Apple were forced to allow other vendors distrubte their browsers on iOS (and they should be forced to), you would not see any uptick in Firefox's numbers, but a relatively big uptick in Chrome's numbers. I'm guessing like 10 points.
Exactly. It appears the market share of a browser is more linked to marketing, publicity, promotion, monopoly, rather than the coverage of web standards, as you pointed out. I bet if we give Firefox to Google and give Chrome to Mozilla tomorrow, Firefox will still end up having 60% market share. How much resource you have determines how big the territory you can enclose.
