Safari adds back Shared Workers support
developer.apple.comI appreciate that they seem to be taking some publicly visible steps towards no longer being the worlds most hated browser by developers everywhere but they still have a long way to go.
While there are a few things I don’t appreciate about Safari, for the most part I enjoy using it and have set it as my default browser a bit over a year ago. Is it a nightmare to support (as far as web dev is concerned)?
Safari has been fairly aggressive in not support spam tech, which is apparently critical to many developers, followed closely by developers who take the view that "whatever chrome does is correct by definition"
Safari has been pretty aggressive in saying that the only areas they are lacking are as a result of privacy concerns which is actively wrong on multiple levels (the feature gap is huge across many areas that have absolutely zero to do with anything even remotely related to privacy but just to be clear they make those exact same capabilities available on their own platform but without any transparency that would allow users to know they are being tracked in the same way and with less options to do anything about it).
The real reason is about protecting app store profits ($64 Billion in 2020 alone of which they take a 30% cut) and not wanting to compete with the web so they are intentionally making it more difficult for developers to just pick the web as a platform for a whole range of applications.
The only reason they seem to be making any changes right now is that they are staring down the barrel of multiple things that could easily become antitrust actions in their biggest markets (US, EU, UK and AU all come to mind right now).
I frankly don't care as much about their motivations for making changes, I am just glad to see them happen but even still I don't expect them to do anything beyond the bare minimum to avoid legal action. Their strategy is fundamentally flawed and I don't know what their long term vision is but I think they along with some other current giants like Facebook are in for an actively rough time over the next 10 years.