> Honestly I think this is bad. We'll end up with Blink everywhere.
That could happen, but alternatively we could get Browser War III¹, in which Apple reintroduces an extremely competitive Safari for Windows in order to counteract the Blink (Chrome, Edge) hegemony. That would not be great news for Firefox, though.
It would need a good client. WebKit browsers exist on Linux, but almost nobody uses them due to their shoddy support for extensions and general lack of care put into cross-platform support. If you've got WSLG or a Linux machine laying around, go try the Epiphany browser - basically what would happen if you ported WebKit to an OS-native GUI with minimal modifications. It's pretty unusable compared to Firefox or Chrome, on every hardware/software combo I try.
I'd love to see "Cross-platform Software Dev"-era Apple throw their hat back into the ring, but putting Safari on other platforms is a big commitment if you want to take it seriously.
GNOME Web seems decent enough for me. Last time I tried using it the main issue was the lack of Widevine and similar DRM… if it weren't for that there's a good chance I'd be using it on my Linux machines because a GTK browser feels a good deal nicer on a GTK desktop than XUL and whatever the UI layer for Chromium is called.
I like the UI and overall design philosophy, but WebKit seems to be too neglected on Linux to be a reliable experience. The difference in text presentation between GTK/Cairo and WebKit itself was really jarring, and something I'd bet you'd notice on Windows too. That could be fixed with a well-made client, but it's a lot of work that I doubt Apple wants to go through.
> The difference in text presentation between GTK/Cairo and WebKit itself was really jarring, and something I'd bet you'd notice on Windows too.
When Safari for Windows was still a thing, Apple actually ported a good chunk of Cocoa along with it to support it, including text rendering. This meant that while it was still supported, Safari for Windows had some of the nicest looking text of any Windows web browser.
Based on Apple's more recent Windows releases which are built around WinUI, if they were to bring back Safari for Windows they'd probably take a more native approach, though.
I don't think they need to worry about this — traffic from Apple devices is oxygen to Google, which is why Google pays Apple $15 billion per year just to be the default web search provider.
But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup plan for many years, and they've been in the email business for longer than Google's existed. (I migrated a couple decades worth of email from Google Workspace last year, and I haven't regretted it so far.) I don't think building a YouTube competitor would be interesting for them.
> I don't think they need to worry about this — traffic from Apple devices is oxygen to Google
Which remains there when people switch to Chrome
> But Apple has been quietly working on a search backup plan for many years, and they've been in the email business for longer than Google's existed
Ah yes. They will just flip on the non-existent rumored Google-level search and the non-existent public email service to take on Google monopoly in search and email.
> Which remains there when people switch to Chrome
Fewer than 5% of iOS users will switch to Chrome as their dedicated browser. (In-app browsers will continue to be WebKit.)
> They will just flip on the non-existent rumored Google-level search…
Just like the flipped on the M1 after a long gestation period, exactly. It was 2015 when Applebot was first noticed crawling the web. A couple hundred employees with Apple's resources can do a lot in 7 years.
> …and the non-existent public email service…
iCloud Mail is Apple's public email services, and very few companies hosting email at Apple scale — iCloud has over a billion active users. If you have access to a Mac or Windows PC (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283), you can set it up today. iCloud+ adds support for custom email domains.
From the perspective of users or developers, what's bad about this? I mean, we generally take it as axiomatic that it must be bad, but the dream of anybody being able to come along and make a Web browser is long dead.
That the network effects of everything only being tested on Chrome will mean that for some sites you have to use (eg Government, e-commerce you can’t do without), you’ll no longer have a choice of browser, and that that dominant position will be maintained even if Chrome starts to really suck, or Google decide to lean in to “you need a trackable Google account to use this”.
I am not 100% convinced that the existence of Safari exclusively on Apple platforms is all that effective at preventing this -- for instance, if you don't particularly care about mobile users you're pretty much already living in this world today.
Maybe, though maybe less so for business Web apps or other boring uses.
Either way, monopoly or oligopoly can also have salutary effects. Flash was a complete blight on the Web and all it took was Apple saying “no, we aren’t going to support that” and it disappeared practically overnight. Chrome’s been similarly effective in pushing forward some basic security measures. Hard to imagine this happening in a world of 50 different browsers with roughly equal market share.
I don't think anyone's talking about another elephant in the room: Facebook could very easily make their own framework for embedded web browsing and get all of their tracking ability back.
It doesn't matter that they can, and want, to invest as much as they do today in the browser space. Microsoft's IE was also the most competitive until it killed off the competition, then they decreased quality.
Back then the decrease in quality was by way of not developing new features, or developing them in a quirky way, that was all well form them because they didn't want web applications to displace native Windows applications.
The decrease in quality you may see from Google may come in privacy, they'll be able to tighten the surveillance as much as they want once no website you care about works outside of Chrome and you can't switch.
Yes and it was incredibly difficult to displace the monopoly of a vendor that had incentives to make their product, ultimately, unattractive in every regard.
Imagine now the network effects and a browser that actually keeps up to date, they'll just have won, period.
