I just ran into a real world example of Safari’s failure to implement web standards that I wanted to share with you so you can understand that web developers are not just mad about spending a few minutes testing in another browser. Because my company’s user base is not the most affluent, we have to support older versions of Safari. Some of our users are currently experiencing errors because Safari <= 12 iOS does not support a feature that became supported by every major browser in early 2020.

Because of Apple’s decision to not only delay adding support of new web standards (by months or even years), but also to lock the browser version to the OS version, the only browser I see throwing errors about this out of dozens that we get traffic from is Safari iOS. It is worth noting that I routinely see in our logs lots of Android models that were made up to 10 years ago. None of those have issues supporting this (or basically any other modern) feature.

The reason other browsers have no trouble with basic shit like this is that they get updates (usually automatically) on a regular basis. For other browsers, this is a standard part of how the web ecosystem works, even if the user has, say, a 7 year old OS version. But not Safari iOS. You have to update the entire OS or you necessarily get an outdated web experience. Users learned years ago that OS updates might render their perfectly functional device worse off than before, so those who can’t afford to buy new devices opt not to install updates. Afraid to update to iOS 17? Well you get a web experience that is at least a year old.

You have no idea how maddening it is to have to frequently debug code that should’ve worked fine 4 years ago, in a single browser because of shitty monopoly’s choice to avoid making the web “too good”. You also don’t seem to understand how frustrating it would be to be poor and unable to use a website because some random error is happening. Also, btw, these simple “feature not supported” issues are the easiest to deal with. What is even worse are things like their decision to totally hijack how html5 video works on iPhone, deviating from several completely standard ways of operating in every other browser. A video player I have to support has often had no issues in any browser except some particular version of Safari iOS, in which a weird indecipherable race condition is occurring in which some event fires at an unexpected time, which even varies from one version of Safari to the next. Trying to support that shit is so frustrating I’ve almost quit an otherwise cushy job.

None of this is “what the open web is all about”. It is entirely what “retaining profits and market dominance at the expense of an open web” is all about.