Its disingenuous they list other browsers, but those browsers are only skins for Safari.

After years of Android, I genuinely gave Iphone a shot for a few months. But not having native Firefox + ublock origin was a deal breaker.

I’m curious why you care about “native Firefox”: does the engine really make that much of a difference in usability?

callahad

It makes a huge difference in support for web standards. There are many nice things that Firefox supports which Webkit does not. It also means that we have to lobby Apple to support standards, since we're not allowed to compete on merit (at least for engine-dependant features).

codezero

What's an example of a standard Firefox supports that Safari/webkit doesn't?

I work with cross-platform client-side JS libraries, though admittedly sticking to pretty vanilla/backwards compatible functionality, and the main thing I've seen that's wonky with Safari is the postMessage API. A few years ago, Firefox finally added the innerText API that many others had already adopted.

What other examples are there (this isn't a challenge, I am sure there are issues, just curious for my own knowledge!)

callahad

I should really write a script to generate this from MDN's browser compatibility data (https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data), but many APIs aimed at making browsers more competitive with native apps tend to lag behind or not get implemented at all in Webkit.

We only got working IndexedDB as of Safari 10 and Service Workers in Safari 11, both multiple years after support landed in stable Firefox. There's no support for WebXR, Web Push, or WebAuthn. Safari still can't display WebP images, show WebM (VP8/9) movies, or play Opus-formatted sound. Safari doesn't understand the current version of referrer-policy headers. Safari doesn't implement the String.prototype.matchAll() method. There's no support for getDisplayMedia(). Depending on how you count, we've been waiting seven years for getUserMedia() in Safari, and it's still not fully functional. Safari can't animate changes to CSS grid template rows/columns, or use overflow-inline / overflow-block media queries.

...it's a big weird grab bag of features, but a broad surface area nevertheless. And you have to wonder if some fringe APIs wouldn't be more popular if we could actually compete on bringing the full Web platform to iOS devices in a timely manner.