Not everyone thinks it is desirable to have "big tech" companies. I see their existence as a failure to balance the market. Heck, as a swede I find Spotify too big, but they are a bunny compared to the big US tech companies.

It's analogous to the Twitter (RIP) vs Mastodon debate. Lots of people declaring that "Mastodon will never be the next Twitter" as if that was something to be desired.

Difference in worldview I suppose.

Had a similar experience with GCP. I don’t remember the exactly how, but somehow we ended up with a $0.01 bill. This bill was apparently too small for Google to deduct, instead all our api services were disabled :/

How weird, we get charged 0.01 all the time, and I laugh thinking that it cost them more to charge us a penny than it would've been to just roll it over.

> I laugh thinking that it cost them more to charge us a penny than it would've been to just roll it over

In the long run it's not them covering those costs but you and other customers.

Perhaps, but certainly not from me. For the past 2 years it has been a penny a month bill. My statement was mostly that their processing fees are pennies and they could have just waited a bit.

Huh, my Swiss telco operator does not even bill anything less than 3 bucks...

He is an Ex-Googler as well

Actually before that he worked at Google. He has made it his life mission to get chromium everywhere.

Before that he made the Dojo JavaScript library (jQuery precursor / competitor).

Alex Russell’s position has always been that web developers (especially library authors) need as many browser features as possible to help them build the most flexible / capable web applications possible. He has consistently pushed for browsers to ship new features ASAP, with the idea that developers can paper over the differences or work around a buggy API, but can’t turn nothing into something. My impression is that he joined Google because he thought that was the best way to further that pre-established goal; it’s not fair to say that he’s just promoting this because he thinks it is in Google/Microsoft/Chrome’s interest.

By contrast, Safari developers’ position has long been that new browser features should be carefully evaluated and then implemented at leisure, because this is a long game and we don’t need rush jobs. Their focus is more on client-side resource use (it’s shocking how far behind Chrome is on this one), correctness of the features they do decide to implement, performance, and user privacy (Google’s whole business model is ubiquitous surveillance).

These two positions are both defensible, but are at odds with each-other. For Safari developers, Chrome trying to ram big piles of half-baked new features down every browser’s throat ASAP is just a recipe for churn, and getting developers to adopt them right away so that users then come complain that “Safari is broken” is endlessly annoying. For Chrome developers (or web developers who want to build on new shiny features right away instead of waiting 2+ years for cross-browser adoption), Safari lagging behind is “holding back the web”.

> correctness of the features they do decide to implement, performance,

If this was the case, I would hate Safari significantly less. If the only issue with Safari was that they didn't implement certain features, that would be fine. I could check the compatibility matrices and just avoid features that aren't implemented. The problem is that every now and then they support something, and it _appears_ to work, but then there's some weird interaction that breaks some interaction and it takes forever to debug.

Sometimes it's reproducible in Epiphany(webkit issue), but other times it isn't. Safari updates their webkit version pretty infrequently so bugs that are fixed in webkit are not fixed in Safari. So the only way to know if it works in Safari is to test in Safari, which requires OSX.

Safari is the new IE. IE had better client-side resource use for a long time compared to firefox/netscape. IE didn't implement new features and they had IE only features just like Safari (you can select text in images in Safari). IE only worked on windows and made linux/osx developers suffer just like Safari makes linux/windows developers suffer today.

> IE only worked on windows and made linux/osx developers suffer just like Safari makes linux/windows developers suffer today.

Safari is worse than IE.

With IE, Microsoft at least provided a VM I could test with.

With Safari, Apple expects me to buy their hardware. And both a phone and laptop, since iOS/Safari supports even less stuff than desktop Safari.

No thanks.

Windows builds of WebKit exist, though "better than nothing" would be very generous.

https://build.webkit.org/#/builders/67 (give it a sec)

They require "Apple Application Support", which is installed with iTunes; you can crack open the installer and only install the support library.

Hackintosh VMs are readily available (admittedly not provided by Apple, but that’s hardly a significant hurdle).

License prohibits running macOS on non-Apple hardware.

I'm not sure if EULA is legally binding in EU (and if it can prevent you from using a product), but I think companies would rather avoid this if possible.

I'm going to commit crimes to make sure Apple customers get the best experience?

Isn't that breaking Apple's ToS, so basically a non-starter for work?

When you develop in Chrome of course you’ll feel like bugs only exist in other engines.

Developing on Safari it feels like the opposite.

A few years ago I’d have agreed somewhat, but Safari has accelerated considerably and improved wrt standards. In fact better than Chrome as of late, if you follow the Interop project, and it feels as much.

I primarily use Firefox, but I usually have 3 browsers open: Chrome/Firefox/Epiphany to try and make sure stuff works correctly across all 3 major engines. Unfortunately stuff still slips through into Safari land.

I am not a language specification lawyer. If I hit a difference in behavior, I don't open up the spec to try and figure out who is right and wrong. It's entirely possible that Safari is in the right. But when Chrome/Firefox/Latest webkit agree, and Safari doesn't, I'm fairly confident it's Safari's fault at that point.

But even if it was Safari's fault and I could test that on Linux/Android, that would be fine. The biggest annoyance is that you can't possibly know if what you're doing would work without buying Apple hardware.

> I am not a language specification lawyer. If I hit a difference in behavior, I don't open up the spec to try and figure out who is right and wrong. It's entirely possible that Safari is in the right. But when Chrome/Firefox/Latest webkit agree, and Safari doesn't, I'm fairly confident it's Safari's fault at that point.

This is weird to me. Say if I’m working with Swift, JavaScript, and Java. And only Swift built-in mergesort is the right implementation (say it’s the common case where it correctly implements the mid logic not shown in textbooks). That’s not Swift’s fault, that’s Javascript & Java’s fault for implementing a bad Mergesort.

Safari / WebKit used to be the engine driving the web forward.

Apple had no problem rushing things when they were at the brink of death and had to compete with IE and Mozilla by making a better browser.

Only when they could kill the competition by simply saying so they switched to a leisurely mode of development.

Not to mention they are also very leisurely about fixing bugs.

Spin that one to make it look good for Apple, please.

The only consistent position that Apple has is: what's good for our business.

When they had to compete, they were forced to compete.

Now that they don't have to, they don't and instead pay a few PR people to spin it as good for customers for this or that reason.

With a generous free help from folks like you, also telling us how Safari is really superior browser.

All we ask Apple is to put that theory to test: let Chrome and Mozilla compete and we'll see what actual users prefer.

Personally I find Chrome to be utterly unusable for my browsing habits (hundreds of browser tabs open at once). It glitches, spins up my laptop’s fans like there’s no tomorrow and burns through battery, eats all the RAM it can find, and easily crashes. And that’s without even getting to the privacy discussion.

The existence of a Chrome-based iOS browser would quickly lead web developers to drop Safari and Firefox support (“just install Chrome bro!”) so I for one am thankful that Apple is not budging here.

Their browser is, for me, strictly superior. And their political decisions are the last defense of a multi-browser web.

> The existence of a Chrome-based iOS browser would quickly lead web developers to drop Safari and Firefox support (“just install Chrome bro!”)

Yeah, that would totally happen because websites that force people to install some massively resource hungry and sluggish browser first will obviously out-compete those that don't.

Joe Random web developer doesn’t necessarily care whether the browser he personally develops against is disrespectful of someone else’s client-side resources. He just wants to make his website with as little busywork as possible, and testing every website feature for cross-browser compatibility is busywork. If he can avoid the trouble by telling visitors to switch browsers, he will be happy to do so.

This is not hypothetical: developers have been putting up “this site works best (or only works) in X browser” warnings for decades by now.

No, what would happen is that Apple would actually have to spend resources on competing with other browser engines, instead of holding the web back via monopoly. They certainly have the money to do so.

Actually, if Apple wanted to compete in the browser space, they could do that without allowing other browsers on iOS. Bring Safari to Windows, Linux and Android. Safari for Windows did exist many years ago and I did like it. Apple really gave up on browsers a long time ago and Safari is the new IE.

And yet their monopolist behaviour is the only thing countering Google's monopolist behaviour with Chrome.

I fear witnessing the incoming manifest v3 apocalypse, when Google will nerf adblockers and plenty of other extensions. And all Chromium based browsers will most probably also be affected. So no capable adblockers in Edge/Vivaldi/Opera/etc. either, probably.

Performance wise Safari web assembly can't possibly compare to chrome enabled simd web assembly. For anything complex safari's performance is a setback

I do a lot of numerical work in Javascript, and I typically find Safari to be the fastest JavaScript engine on my machine for the code I try (sometimes about the same or sometimes several times faster). Safari’s Javascript performance is pretty impressive.

Web Assembly is a new and rapidly changing feature. SIMD support in Web Assembly is even newer. Neither one has yet been adopted by most websites / web applications.

In a few years I would expect more developers to start adopting these technologies and Safari to have finally gotten around to a SIMD implementation.

Personally I hope the browsers all figure out how to get double-precision FMA operations (fused multiply-add) in wasm.

How does that explain the enormous number of major bugs?

If Apple cases about privacy then they could deny Chrome in the Store for the specific reason but allow say Chromium or Firefox (or sure they can find some specific reason why Firefox or Chromium have less privacy and why the iOS users are incapable for deciding for themselves to use Firefox).

This isn't true! I've encountered many bugs in safari (fullscreen pointer lock not working on most html elements comes to mind), and they certainly do not value quality.

Made-up problem? Maybe if you use your laptop as a desktop and never take it anywhere. I don’t want to plug in a dozen cables whenever I come home or go to work, or after each and every meeting.