Oh man, not sure where to begin with responding to this.
I'm not saying Google is incredible (my opinion is quite the contrary actually). However, I am saying Apple is holding the web back, in a fairly annoying way, for developers.
The fact that they are a rich corporate does not mean they always will be, or that they're conducting their business in the best way possible. There are plenty of examples of rich tech businesses that lost their market share very quickly. We don't even need to look that far into the past for an example: BlackBerry sticks out in my mind. I believe their stubbornness and resistance to change caused their downfall. I feel it may be a similar fate for Apple, and for similar reasons, unless they change their attitude towards the web.
"Holding the web back" lol. What the web is today, is coming straight out of Google's playbook, with WHATWG just a miniscule puppet organization consisting of Chrome devs promoting whatever Chrome does as standard. It's a scam to subvert what once was the web into a monopolistic tracking network and a 20 year project to morph a document viewer into the most absurd, power-inefficient, and clunky app platform imaginable that still can't do most anything that you'd want a smartphone to do, such as phoning. The narrative that big brother Google protects us from evil proprietary vendors somewhere lost its credibility; today, we need protection from Google more than anything else. Almost all new HTML5 APIs and even CSS can and will be used for fingerprinting so need to be rolled back or switched off anyway.
Nope, Apple is taking care of it's customers and protecting them from Google's ad exploitation.
"I feel it may be a similar fate for Apple, and for similar reasons, unless they change their attitude towards the web"
On the contrary, if Apple allowed this web Wild West that Google is advocating, then the users would have incentive to switch. This move from Apple actually ensures that things run smoothly on Apple devices.
It is not about "power for web developers", it is web developers being lazy to self-educate and learn other stacks.
There is skill called "desktop development" and it does not entail Electron.
Luckily Apple is not gonna let that happen with the mobile apps and the PWA.
>Nope, Apple is taking care of it's customers and protecting them from Google's ad exploitation.
Apple is "protecting" its customers by restricting and patronising them like little children. Privacy by default is good, but many of their restrictions are clearly aimed at rent seeking.
Where customers really need protection, Apple is stabbing them in the back by aiding and abetting human rights abuses with their pointless side-loading ban and their willingness to let dictators run their own iCloud service.
> I'm not saying Google is incredible (my opinion is quite the contrary actually). However, I am saying Apple is holding the web back, in a fairly annoying way, for developers.
Right. Because Google, who dominates the entire web standards spectrum, is known for creating well thought-out, well-designed APIs that take into consideration concerns and criticism, and thinking long-term of the web as a whole.
Oh wait, they don't. Up to and including the point where both Mozilla and Safari are saying they won't implement certain functionality because of glaring holes in the design, and Chrome not only shipping the features, but making them GA.
Oh, and yes. Most of the "Safari is holding back web developers" talk is bullshit, of course. It actually should read "Chrome releases APIs at neck breaking speed with zero concerns for the future of the web." See web API counts in major browsers: https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
> Up to and including the point where both Mozilla and Safari are saying they won't implement certain functionality because of glaring holes in the design, and Chrome not only shipping the features, but making them GA.
I feel this is being dismissed by many people, but there's a lot of truth in this statement. Here's an example of this at play:
Chrome devrels and cheerleaders pile on Safari and Firefox all the time for not adhering to Chrome's agenda and frame it as "holding the web back." But the true thing that holds the web back is a browser monoculture.
Why, then, did it take safari so long to implement ServiceWorkers? I believe they were the last of major browsers to implement it. And they landed the feature more than 2 years after Firefox!
Also, why was Safari's IndexedDB feature released nearly 4 years after the other major browsers? And when released it, why was it full of bugs that simple test cases would have caught?
I don't want to fuel conspiracies, but the pattern is fairly obvious. Apple appears to resist progress in Web APIs.
Do you have numbers from elsewhere to back up that claim?
Btw, I'm not saying Google are right to power through with poorly designed APIs either, but when there is a standard in place, why Safari takes sooo long to implement it is perplexing (or perhaps just a rather obvious strategy).
> Is Safari's team smaller than Firefox's as well?
Unknown
> but when there is a standard in place, why Safari takes sooo long to implement it is perplexing
Some standards are so bad, even Chrome ends up deprecating them (see Custom Elements v0).
Or they just go out of favor (see HTML Imports).
Or they are so poorly specified that even years after "becoming a standard" they have things like "this section is not specified yet" in their texts. And the status of these "standards" is often not above "Candidate Recommendation" (that is it is gathering implementation experience, and yes, that refers to Service Workers).
So yeah, I don't know what to say. Safari isn't chasing every API under the sun? Good for them. Web Devs assuming that whatever's in Chrome is the be all end all standards on the web? Bad for the web and for the devs. Apple possibly not prioritising Safari? Bad for the web as well.
I'm not saying Google is incredible (my opinion is quite the contrary actually). However, I am saying Apple is holding the web back, in a fairly annoying way, for developers.
The fact that they are a rich corporate does not mean they always will be, or that they're conducting their business in the best way possible. There are plenty of examples of rich tech businesses that lost their market share very quickly. We don't even need to look that far into the past for an example: BlackBerry sticks out in my mind. I believe their stubbornness and resistance to change caused their downfall. I feel it may be a similar fate for Apple, and for similar reasons, unless they change their attitude towards the web.