And I am eternally grateful to them for it.

Many of those features can be used to comprehensively fingerprint your device allowing advertisers to track you across sites even without cookies. Forget about any laws or privacy efforts it would all be moot. And many of us value privacy far too much.

Apple even implemented the "do not track" API and advertisers completely ignored it.

Luckily they don't :) In my opinion Chromium/Chrome is the new IE and not Safari

I'm sorry - but this is just not a realistic take.

Call me when I can install Safari on linux (or any platform other than macOS/iOS).

Until then - the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their control and revenue from the App store.

It's there because "they have to have a browser" not because they're doing anything novel or clever. And many of the things they refuse to implement aren't related to ads or Google's control at all - they're things that would have narrowed the gap between what a website can do on iOS, and what the App store apps could do.

Again - Apple is acting EXACTLY like microsoft here. Underinvesting in the browser because they see it as a fundamental risk to their best revenue stream - much like how MS ignored IE when the focus was all on local apps (the king of which was still MS office).

> the ugly truth is that Apple intentionally underfunds and underdevelops the browser

That's not a truth that's an opinion. And one I would definitely disagree with.

When it comes to speed, privacy and battery life I am always choosing Safari over Chrome. And many of us care about those three things over new features that often just make the web worse.

Same here. Safari is my preferred browser for content consumption but not for development work

KDE's Konqueror is a webkit browser, and there are others. Safari is not available on Linux, but it doesn't need to be.

I disagree that Apple is underinvesting: their slower, more deliberate pace can be an advantage: you can see the pitfalls of implementations in other browsers. I am not disagreeing that Apple has had their own share of bugs, though.

They have every incentive to NOT implement things to force devs to create apps. If they wanted to create an actual browser vs. bare bones browser, they'd still offer it on other operating systems.

Please. I've been using the Web since '95, and working on the Web nearly as long. Safari's where I do almost all my browsing, work and personal. It's a fine browser. If I could use it on Windows and Linux, I wouldn't hesitate to choose it over Firefox and Chrome and their derivatives.

That doesn't change their incentives. They might make a nice browser, for you. On every other OS, Apple's software is so slow as to be borderline useless. Watching iTunes struggle to download album art is almost as entertaining as listening to the music.

I do use a MBP daily, and the software there is amazing. But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all.

> But seeing that their software barely works outside of their platform, it's a miracle they have any customers at all.

I don't think very many of their customers run any of their software anywhere other than on Macs and iDevices, so I expect that doesn't have much effect. Aside from the apple TV app on Roku and various TV operating systems and such. And still, none of this makes Safari not an "actual browser".

I think by their decision not to implement so many APIs we can say it is /not/ an “actual browser” and more of “check the box” browser.

Maybe. I think implementing APIs like WebUSB, WebHID API, Web Serial API, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI API etc. is not a big issue. Missing Filesystem Access API and Push API, WebGPU API would be nice to have. But the latter two would need to implement in a way to protect privacy of the user.

Can you explain you explain what I'm looking at in your link? I only sort of understand, but I'm not confident I'm understanding it correctly. (sorry, this is probably a stupid question)

It is a website that compares which features are available in which browsers. On the linked page it's comparing the availability of web APIs in the latest versions of chrome and safari to demonstrate that safari has not implemented many of the web APIs chrome has implemented.

These APIs are one of the big areas where chrome/google have tried to expand the remit of what's possible with web apps, for example the file system api can be used by a web app to access files directly on a users machine.

And Firefox also doesn't follow suit (to some extent). But Apple is the only organization with any influence because of their captive market.