For developers, Safari is crap and outdated

I'm kind of taking the bait in your message. but just saying things like:

> let's be honest, web devs are among the least educated, least sophisticated, most entitled

is just plain wrong and unnecessarily outrageous.

There is a huge pool of front-end web developers when compared to other "specializations" and many person coming to it from other professions, so I guess you could easily have a poor experience with some if you're unlucky, yet I both work with JS-people and C++-people and I cannot really say that one is less "educated" or even less "sophisticated" (whatever that means) than the other.

For sure, front-end devs are often less interested by the lower level technical details of a platform but they know how to code a maintainable and readable application with a complex state and a complex often-changing business logic and are even for the most part not afraid to learn another language, e.g. for personal projects: in my close colleagues some worked with elixir, another switched to go, I enjoy C++ and Rust... At least in the bigger companies I worked with, JS and C++ devs also went to the same schools, they just had different interests in programming.

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As for the "this plays directly into Google's interests" part, sure, I agree with that sentence.

But even considering this, I and most people I know would agree that launching a web application leads to much less friction than running a native app: nothing to install/uninstall, easy interoperability with other websites, easy to share a given page with others, easy to copy/paste anything, automatic plugin support and it's also easier to modify and update features through user scripts...

I know this is not the more popular opinion here but I personally am happy for this continued push towards the web platform, even if does not come from pure intentions.

I say this every time a post like this comes up...

Google is the web. Chrome is the web. It shouldn't be true, but it is.... almost.

Safari, or more specifically Apple's requirement that all web rendering on iOS be done using WebKit, is THE ONLY thing standing in the way of Chrome's market share being functionally 100%.

If you care about the web, and one would presume that web developers would care deeply about the web, Safari ought to be your best friend, regardless of which of Google's "standards" it doesn't implement.

I don't buy Mozilla's/Apple's concerns for those APIs.

Sure if seems sketch to access USB from the web, but as a user if I'm trying to achieve something and I can't do it on the web, I'll end up installing a native app which has way more access to my system.

As a developer I would much rather be able to just deploy cool things on the web instead of having to package up native apps for every platform just to do things like read/write NFC tags, or send notifications to users who want them.

I think there are a few reasons for this:

(1) Web dev is easier and more productive to learn incrementally than just about anything else - I personally learned how to do HTML and CSS long before I learned any other programming. That was the gateway that eventually led me into the CS field. A lot of others follow that path, but perhaps don't take it as far.

(2) Web dev is so ubiquitous and in such high demand that companies are willing to hire anyone who "knows enough to be dangerous" with this tech. That's actually a *good thing* IMO since it means a lot of people are getting good jobs with the chance to learn and grow into a career, instead of being stuck in worse jobs. But it does reinforce point 1 and lead to web devs skewing towards junior devs and away from formal CS education.

(3) Hackers are heroes in our culture. The agile, lean startup, MVP, indie hacker, low-code, etc. trends are all movements celebrating people who can just hack shit together that works right now as being fundamentally superior to artful engineering that builds elegant things at high cost and requiring much more time.

(4) General cultural trend toward "influence" as a career driver. There's almost nothing that opens doors for people today like having a popular blog or YouTube channel does, and peddling simple angry click-bait rants to the masses is an easier path to build a following than careful and considerate thought leadership.

All of these combine to create the mass of "whiny web devs" that you're complaining about.

Finally, to be fair, web dev is such a vast field encompassing so many people, I think you'd be surprised how many people working in web development (including myself, for example), share your exhaustion with the hipster-script-kiddies who think that building things just for Chrome is fine, that framework churn is exciting, that electron is just as better than native, etc. So I think your criticism is on point and justified, just be mindful that you're painting with a very broad brush and there are loads of web developers who aren't on this whiny "chrome is the only computing platform" bandwagon.

> Whatever Medium's needs are for putting images and the written word on the screen were satisfied a decade+ ago. The fact that that Medium article doesn't work is a consequence of how web developers have normalized the practice of passing the blame for their failures and lack of competence on to the browsers and browser makers by extension.

The problem of displaying images and text on the web was solved in the first [EDIT: an early] HTML spec in the mid 90s. Yet web sites still manage to screw it up and make it unnecessarily dependent on JavaScript. I always thought the web would be a lot more pleasant if web "developers" would just stop programming for a bit and learn a little HTML.