> it's extra work to decouple the browser with the OS.

It is expected of a company which boasts about security and privacy of its users as a premium selling point, although it is questionable now[1]. Besides, MacOS has been receiving Safari updates separately.

Also android has been decoupling several system services with every iteration now, soon crucial system services would be updated from PlayStore and so even if the manufacturer doesn't ship OS updates, important services would stay updated.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/apple...

> Besides, MacOS has been receiving Safari updates separately.

Sure, but the company is doing extra work to provide this. It might be a worthwhile decision to make but it’s certainly not a free gain.

> Another reason is that it's extra work to decouple the browser with the OS.

I thought that argument was rejected already in 2001[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

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(edited to fix link formatting)

There is a bit of nuance here. IE today still isn’t decoupled from Windows. MS has been shoving it into an ever smaller corner of Windows but IE is the OS provided webview for a lot of old crusty applications that needed to render HTML.

What they’re talking about is IE the OS component didn’t mean that IE the user-facing general-purpose browser had to be the default.

Microsoft was in a far different market position than Apple.

Doesn't the Swift Playgrounds app let you download, compile, and run Swift code?

It does, and it has special entitlements to let it do so.

>Another reason is that it's extra work to decouple the browser with the OS.

MS made the exact same argument 15 years ago.

And it’s still true 15 years later. They still haven’t been able to decouple IE for all the random crap that uses it. They’ve shoved the user facing interface into a dark corner hoping everyone forgets about it but it’s still there.