![]() ![]() This is also a strategy that worked for Google: Chromebook sales were helped by the popularity of the Chrome browser, which itself only made Chrome more popular.Īpple has also been more willing in recent years to bring its services and applications to other platforms, even in just a limited fashion. Keeping Safari exclusive to macOS might encourage some of those people to buy a Mac, but Safari on Windows (and other platforms) could also act as a loss leader that encourages future Apple hardware purchases - much like the original iTunes for Windows nearly two decades ago. There are millions of people that use an iPhone or iPad, but use Windows PCs instead of Mac computers. There are reasons beyond the health of the open web for Apple to port Safari to more platforms. ![]() Playwright WebKit on Windows (Credit: Christian Schaefer) However, these minimal builds of WebKit are only intended for site testing, and don't have common browser features like sync, tabs, or extensions. Newer versions even dropped the iTunes-based monster of a compatibility layer, in favor of the cross-platform Cairo graphics library. Apple bringing Safari to more platforms could pull back some market share from Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers.Ĭhristian Schaefer pointed out in a blog post last year that Apple still supports the WebKit engine on Windows, mostly for embedded applications and Microsoft's Playright testing platform. Safari still uses WebKit, and while much of Safari's popularity comes from it being the only real browser allowed on iOS and iPadOS, it has also become a proper competitor to Chrome in recent years. Firefox uses its own Gecko engine, which has seen significant performance improvements in recent years. The web needs a balance of powers to remain an open platform, but there are now only two major web browsers not based on Chromium: Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. The web needs a balance of powers to remain an open platform One example was Kiwi Browser for Android, which was stuck on Chrome 77 for over a year. That makes development more burdensome, and more crucially, it can lead to security patches in Chromium taking a long time to show up in some browsers. Each step away from Google's upstream code makes adopting new changes to Chromium more time-consuming, though. Web browsers based on Chromium have the ability to make changes to the browser interface and engine, so Google doesn't have complete control over how they work. However, Google now has significant influence over the course of web browsers - Opera and Microsoft dropped development of their own rendering engines to use the same Google's Chromium engine, while newer contenders like Brave and Vivaldi used Chromium from the start. Web apps are more capable than ever before, mostly thanks to the accelerated development of new APIs in Google Chrome. ![]() Fast forward to 2022, and the web ecosystem is better in many ways, but also far from perfect. ![]()
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