How does that change the basic facts from the end users' perspective?

It doesn't, but the sentence referred to wasn't really aimed at them. I mean, Mozilla could ditch its engine and adopt chromium in order to really focus on advertising, and then it would also support said features from an end users perspective! Somehow I have a feeling that won't earn Mozilla praise.

For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When its gone, there will basically be only one left.

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alwillis 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

> For all its flaws, Mozilla is actually the ONLY other company building a browser engine. When it's gone, there will basically be only one left.

Safari's iOS/iPadOS global marketshare is about 33%; it's on 2+ billion devices. Definitely not going anywhere [1].

[1]: https://mycodelesswebsite.com/safari-statistics/

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KingMob 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

> Definitely not going anywhere

Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps. They have every interest in getting that App Store cut, and none in extending the web with open, competing technologies. (* Maybe the recent app store legal rulings ill change things, we'll see.)

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alwillis 7 months ago | parent [-]

> Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps.

Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish?

There's no evidence of WebKit languishing. If anything, the WebKit team has shipped important web platform features more quickly than it ever has before.

WebKit is arguably the most important framework for the App Store; many thousands of apps rely on it, including many of Apple's first party apps.

* first to ship <search> in Safari 17, September 2023

* first to ship :has in Safari 15.4, March 2022 [1]

* first to ship wide gamut color support [2]

* the only browser shipping support for JPEG XL

* so many new features shipped in Safari 18.4 it took 8,000 words to describe it all [3]

[1]: https://www.webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/

[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...

[3]: https://webkit.org/blog/16574/webkit-features-in-safari-18-4...

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KingMob 7 months ago | parent [-]

> Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish?

Because they can make more money on apps. Like I said in the parent comment you're choosing to ignore.

> There's no evidence of WebKit languishing.

It's pretty well-documented that Safari has been a laggard when it comes to web standards, cherry-picked links aside.

	▲	alwillis 6 months ago \| parent [-]
		> It's pretty well-documented that Safari has been a laggard when it comes to web standards A few years ago, Safari being behind was a persistent narrative, which started because Safari didn’t support Chrome’s (often) nonstandard features. These days, any important web features arrive simultaneously on Safari and Chrome (like CSS Grid) or within a month or two of each other… although it took 5 months for Chrome to ship :has in 2022.

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airbreather 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

what about things like the browser object in Qt/PyQt?

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fuzztester 7 months ago | parent | prev | next [-]

what happened to opera?

i used it a good amount earlier, when it was relatively new, but then some issues happened, which I don't remember clearly, then i stopped tracking it.

	▲	Arrowmaster 7 months ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you want old Opera look into Vivaldi. It's run by old staff from Opera pre sale. Current Opera is owned by a Chinese company with ties to pay day loans and other shady behaviors.
	▲	lawrencejgd 7 months ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's owned by a chinese company and uses Chromium
	▲	fuzztester 7 months ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		thanks, guys. i googled: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)

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kstrauser 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you forgotten Apple and WebKit?

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cptskippy 7 months ago | parent [-]

Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML?

	▲	alwillis 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		> Isn't Chromium a fork of Webkit which is a fork of KHTML? Yes… 12 years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/googl... They are quite different now.

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maigret 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

For users it’s called “putting all your eggs in one basket”