For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

It can be both. Caring about the user experience is obviously going to increase their profit. But then they can also try to push people towards their store.

> Don’t get me wrong, Safari is very good web browser, delivering fast performance and solid privacy features.

OP indicates Safari prioritizes speed and privacy. Speed and privacy are often in conflict with the proliferation of features and web APIs that you see in chrome (web MIDI fingerprinting anyone?). I'm not sure it's fair to equate this difference in focus to 'the new internet explorer'

Apple is telling developers to make an app, because then Apple gets to steal the customer relationship and take 30%.

They prevent other browser engines and run times to yield total platform control. They shut down any attempt to gain a foothold or alternative.

Let me tell you an anecdote from history,

Microsoft attempted to control the entire web platform. They embedded their browser into Windows, rapidly introduced non-standard features, had authorship tools (FrontPage), publishing (IIS), and were trying to force ActiveX and other tendrils to gain a complete dominance.

They might not get in on every customer interaction or payment (who would have dared to dream?), but they would own 90% of the platform and exercise their control to profit massively.

But they were distracted, shut down by the DOJ, and ultimately failed. Today we celebrate this.

Apple dreamed a different dream. Instead of getting every smart phone customer, they'd enforce total commercial control of their platform and then gradually increase the size of their pie.

Apps, subscriptions, movies, music, Apple Pay, Apple login, no outside payment, no runtimes, no alternative distribution...

It worked like a charm.

Apple has an ecosystem that plays well together, services that are compelling, and people love it. Half of Americans use an iPhone, and many use it as their only device.

The unfortunate problem is that by growing their pie so big, Apple crowds out the entire computing industry that gave rise to their capabilities. Half of everything we do now has an Apple tax.

Apple was crafty and played nice just long enough to build a wall around their customers. And now you'll never reach them without being taxed. And they have so many customers...

Apple customers. The most locked in of all, and Zuckerberg is steaming with jealousy.

Apple owns computing. Half of it, anyway. And they won't dare let it out of the box.

The DOJ breaking this regime is our only hope. That, or a new tech cycle that might (but probably won't) upset the incumbents.

Speaking about Safari bugs I got concerned with lately: you cannot use Content-Security-Policy if you use web sockets with Safari: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201591

I don’t understand why this doesn’t get more attention.

It is just infuriating if you can’t use a security feature, just because some browser doesn’t follow the specs correctly. Oh well, time repeats itself just like with IE.

And just for a moment we thought we are behind all of this.

The general hatred of stability speaks volumes about the attitude of web developers (or perhaps the strength of Google's propaganda) --- what in $deity's name is wrong with software not changing?

Look at something like a C64, which has remained basically unchanged for a few decades and the original is long out of production; and yet people are still writing new software for it. Bugs and limitations become features to be exploited for new avenues of creativity and awe.

Then you have the Google-ified vision of the web, also known as the "modern[1] web", where it churns the "standards" and its browser frequently (often to the detriment of user control), new frameworks spring up by the dozens every week, and websites become overly bloated and stop working in anything but the latest version of Chrome because some trendchasing hipster decided to use $trendy_new_framework that executes a bunch of totally unnecessary code and crashes on attempting to use some new feature, nevermind the fact that the site itself doesn't even require it and could've been written in simple HTML to be perfectly functional down to IE5 or even Lynx.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313

I'm not an Apple fan, but in this case I'm on their side in attempting to hold back the insanity the "modern web" has become: "an enemy of an enemy is a friend".

[1] I increasingly find the presence of that adjective to be a reliable indicator of a bad experience.